Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It's a Wonderful Life, he was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker as well as a behind-the-scene force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the silent era through the illustrious names of the golden age. He directed Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and others. Reading his autobiography is like having Capra sitting in your living room, regaling you with his anecdotes. In The Name Above the Title he reveals the deeply personal story of how, despite winning six Academy Awards, he struggled throughout his life against the glamors, vagaries, and frustrations of Hollywood for the creative freedom to make some of the most memorable films of all time.

    His witty, incisive criticism later worked exacting language into an exploration of the feelings and strategies that went into low-budget and radical films as diverse as Michael Snow's Wavelength, Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Expanded with an in-depth interview and seven essays written with his wife, artist Patricia Patterson, Negative Space gathers Farber's most influential writings, making this an indispensable collection for all lovers of film.

    

    Publisher-Darien House in 1971. Over 600 illustrations

    This book looks at his work.

    

    His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.

    

    These full-length features include Cocteau's Orphee, Hitchcock's Psycho, Chabrol's Les Cousins, Ray's Johnny Guitar, and Newman's This Island Earth. His succinct synopsis of the running plot functions as an analysis of it; thus, much of the critical insight is in the form of entertaining narrative.The book is divided into four sections. The first is concerned with the union of film style and film content. The second treats the connection between the film as an entertainment and as a picture of reality, suggesting that even films that are unabashedly 'escapist' are really rooted in, and comment on, the inescapable facts of social life. The third section attempts to close the gap between the popular responses and those of 'high culture.' This is not a 'surrender to the mob and to the moguls.'The author's standards are more stringent than those of the permissive 'camp' followers and 'pop' critics. The final section produces further evidence of the existence of cinematic poetry in the commercial movie.

    It will begin with those areas of moving pictures where the gift of the maker is most easily accomplished, and move toward those areas where taking is predominant—but always with the view in my mind of encouraging giving...my sense of accomplishment being determined by the extent to which the moving picture maker can continue to give when increased technical knowledge permits him to take more and more from and of moving pictures, bless him.