Best of
Film

1975

Notes on the Cinematographer


Robert Bresson - 1975
    Robert Bresson makes some quite radical distinctions between what he terms "cinematography" and something quite different: "cinema"—which is for him nothing but an attempt to photograph theater and use it for the screen.Director of The Trial of Joan of Arc, Pickpocket, A Prisoner Escapes, Diary of a Country Priest, Money, and many other classic films, Robert Bresson is, quite simply, one of the most brilliant cinematographers in the history of film.

The Jaws Log


Carl Gottlieb - 1975
    Long out of print, a new, expanded paperback edition was published in 2000 to mark the movie's 25th Anniversary, featuring a 22-page behind-the-scenes photo album, a new afterword by Gottlieb updating readers on the fates of thefilmmakers, and an introduction by Peter Benchley.Now, on the occasion of the movie's 30th Anniversary, The Jaws Log is available for the first time in an affordably-priced hardcover edition with a new foreword by the author.

Bring on the Empty Horses


David Niven - 1975
    He recounts stories and anecdotes of the stars, producers, directors, tycoons and oddballs, many of whom were his friends.

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated


David Thomson - 1975
    In addition to the new “musts,” Thomson has added key figures from film history–lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more. Here is a great, rare book, one that encompasses the chaos of art, entertainment, money, vulgarity, and nonsense that we call the movies. Personal, opinionated, funny, daring, provocative, and passionate, it is the one book that every filmmaker and film buff must own. Time Out named it one of the ten best books of the 1990s. Gavin Lambert recognized it as “a work of imagination in its own right.” Now better than ever–a masterwork by the man playwright David Hare called “the most stimulating and thoughtful film critic now writing.”

Taxi Driver


Paul Schrader - 1975
    When his tentative efforts at a relationship with elegant political campaign worker Betsy come to naught, Travis conceives of an assassination attempt upon her boss, Senator Charles Palantine. But as he cruises the streets at night, Travis encounters a hapless child prostitute, Iris, and her sinister pimp, sport. Travis's mounting psychosis acquires a new focus, and violence erupts . . .One of the key films of the 1970s and winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Taxi Driver was the first of several potent collaborations between Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese. Inspired by Ford's The Searchers, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, the diaries of real-life gunman Arthur Bremer, and an especially tormented period in Schrader's own life, Taxi Driver remains a devastating portrait of a man in urban purgatory.

The Silent Clowns


Walter Kerr - 1975
    It covers such characters as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy.

The Films in My Life


François Truffaut - 1975
    Equally fascinating is the very large body of film criticism Truffaut wrote over many years for Cahiers du Cinema and other leading film journals. Wonderfully varied, personal, and informal, these reviews all communicate unabashed love for and an enormous excitement about the movies. The Films in My Life is Truffaut's own selection of more than one hundred essays that range widely over the history of film and pay tribute to Truffaut's particular heroes, among them Hitchcock, Welles, Chaplin, Renoir, Cocteau, Bergman, and Buñuel.

Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On


Alan Ormsby - 1975
    . .It's a whole fangtastic creep of monster tips, straight from a Master of horrifying monster movies!

The Making of King Kong: The Story Behind a Film Classic


Orville Goldner - 1975
    

Life Goes to the Movies


David E. Scherman - 1975
    

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career


Joseph McBride - 1975
    But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conve

The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and William A. Wellman


Richard Schickel - 1975
    The directors are Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh. Speaking with them, Mr. Schickel found in these men a special quality: "They felt in their bones the character and quality of a vanished America." There was something valuable to be learned from them, not merely about the cinema but about the conduct of life. Each of these directors created a canon of work that even today sustains critical analysis without sacrificing popular appeal. Each maintained his artistic integrity while working in an atmosphere generally credited with ruining rather than nurturing talent. Their attitudes, Mr. Schickel writes in his introduction, were "composed of a toughness that was never harsh, a pride in achievement that was never boastful, a self-reliance and an acceptance of the difficulties under which they had labored which contained neither self-pity nor a desire to blame others for the things that had gone wrong." Rich in behind-the-scenes stories about such modern classics as It Happened One Night, Dawn Patrol, The Champ, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, and Shadow of a Doubt, as well as in anecdotes about the men and women of Hollywood, this book is an enduring tribute to the men who made the movies. With 33 black-and-white photographs. "Immensely readable and richly informative...it provides a real education in just how movies are made.... One of the best introductions to the cinema that one could ask for."-Library Journal.

The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan


Don Carpenter - 1975
    

Basil Rathbone: His Life and His Films


Michael B. Druxman - 1975
    

Four Stories: The Touch / Cries and Whispers / The Hour of the Wolf / The Passion of Anna


Ingmar Bergman - 1975
    

The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History


Diana Serra Cary - 1975
    A handful of discarded horsemen, however, stumbled upon an entirely new frontier-Hollywood. In a rare insider’s view, Diana Serra Cary tells the story of these cowboys, who survived for another fifty years as riders, stuntmen, and doubles for the stars. Filled with humorous anecdotes, The Hollywood Posse reveals the full story of the cowboys’ long and bitter feud with autocratic director Cecil B. De Mille; their relationships with the great Western stars-from the flamboyant Tom Mix to the durable John Wayne; and above all, their touching loyalty, code of honor, and devotion to each other.

Voices From the Japanese Cinema


Joan Mellen - 1975
    What emerges from this one is in fact the first inside view of Japanese films, directors, and artists published in English. Among the great directors whose views are presented here are Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Koayashi, and the great master, Akira Kurosawa.Also included, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Nagisa Oshima, Susumu Hani, Shuji Terayama, and others.

The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock


André Bazin - 1975
    

Ronald Colman, A Very Private Person


Juliet Benita Colman - 1975
    Juliet Colman's warm and wonderful biography of her father will appeal to that enormous public who look to Ronald Colman's movies in the golden age of the medium as part of entertainment history.

Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films


Lotte Reiniger - 1975
    

Films of the Forties


Tony Thomas - 1975
    

Cover to Cover


Michael Snow - 1975
    Snow, who remains quietly composed throughout, is depicted in various ordinary scenarios made ethereal by artful gestures in composition and lighting. Bookended by two closed doors on front and back cover, Snow makes obvious his intent to focus not on beginning or end, but the transitional space between.

A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films


Jeff Rovin - 1975
    

The Third Meaning


Roland Barthes - 1975
    

Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers


Leo Rosten - 1975
    

The Milos Forman stories


Antonín J Liehm - 1975
    

Film and Revolution


James Roy MacBean - 1975
    

Ingmar Bergman; Essays in Criticism


Stuart M. Kaminsky - 1975
    Bergman, more than any other film-maker, made cinema a respectable study, a field for scholars and intellectuals as well as reviewers. The foremost director of the art film, Bergman has suddenly, since Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage, become a film-maker whose work appeals to a broader audience as well. Why are Bergman;s films so compelling? Why are they more talked and written about than any other film-maker's? Approaching Bergman's life and work from a host of analytical perspectives rather than from the narrow focus of a single scholar or critic, Ingmar Bergman presents articles by psychiatrists, clergymen, academics, and film-makers. The twenty-five authors are from England, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States. Contributors such as Robin Wood, Susan Sontag, and Penelope Gilliatt discuss every film, from Bergman's earliest work through Scenes from a Marriage. Bergman himself is represented by his own famous essay "each Film Is My Last," as well as through a major interview with Charles Thomas Samuels. The emphasis is on non-evaluative criticism - criticism that is neither positive nor negative but illuminating. The result is an invaluable aid to understanding and appreciating existing Bergman's films - as well as those to come.