The author provides vivid descriptions of classic pictures such as The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Sunrise, The Covered Wagon, and Greed, and lucidly discusses their technical and artistic merits and weaknesses. He pays tribute to acknowledged masters like D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Lillian and Dorothy Gish, but he also gives ample attention to previously neglected yet equally gifted actors and directors. In addition, the book covers individual genres, such as the comedy, western gangster, and spectacle, and explores such essential but little-understood subjects as art direction, production design, lighting and camera techniques, and the art of the subtitle. Intended for all scholars, students, and lovers of film, this fascinating book, which features over 150 film stills, provides a rich and comprehensive overview of this unforgettable era in film history.

    

    

    Now you can read the whole story of the spectacular and complex undertaking in this first-hand report by a writer who was there(from the back cover of the US edition)

    

    

    

    -New York Times Book Review It stands as the definitive work on the gifted, haunted actor. -L

    

    A screenplay.

    Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement.Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial–often Hollywood–cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order.Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior–as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies.As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life–there, to provoke new adventures."Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." —Sight & Sound"Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." —John Conomos, Senses of CinemaPaul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of Miró, Breton which was published by City Lights.

    He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Updating the paperback edition of 1977, Dudley Andrew has written a completely new introduction and provided an additional essay by Jean-Charles Tacchella."

    

    

    Illustrates and provides synopses of the best British films imported to the United States from 1933 to 1971, including The Lavender Hill Mob, Women in Love, Tom Jones and A Night to Remember

    

    This edition is expanded to include essays which explore "neo-noir", postmodernism and other trends.

    Since all journalists and writers were barred from the shooting of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, actor Bob Balaban's diary is a rare on-the-spot account of the making of Steven Spielberg's classic sci-fi film.

    More than 400 alphabetical film entries are included.