Not to be Missed: Fifty-four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film


Kenneth Turan - 2008
    Kenneth Turan’s fifty-four favorite films embrace a century of the world’s most satisfying romances and funniest comedies, the most heart-stopping dramas and chilling thrillers.Turan discovered film as a child left undisturbed to watch Million Dollar Movie on WOR-TV Channel 9 in New York, a daily showcase for older Hollywood features. It was then that he developed a love of cinema that never left him and honed his eye for the most acute details and the grandest of scenes.Not to be Missed blends cultural criticism, historical anecdote, and inside-Hollywood controversy. Turan’s selection of favorites ranges across all genres. From All About Eve to Seven Samurai to Sherlock Jr., these are all timeless films—classic and contemporary, familiar and obscure, with big budgets and small—each underscoring the truth of director Ingmar Bergman’s observation that “no form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings


Pauline Kael - 2011
    Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an era-among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville-along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film


Maya Deren - 2004
    Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film contains all of Deren's essays on her own films as well as more general essays on film theory, the relation of film to dance, various technical aspects of film production, the distinction between amateur and professional filmmaking, and the famous 1946 chapbook titled "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film," which has been reset here for the first time. There are hard-to-find articles written for magazines and art journals, as well as lectures, Q&A sessions, program notes, and manifestoes. This book will be particularly welcomed by the large audience that saw Martina Kudlacek's documentary, "In the Mirror of Maya Deren," during its theatrical release in the U.S. and Europe in 2002. The importance of Maya Deren's films and writings is further evidenced by the American Film Institute having named its highest award for independent filmmaking the "Maya Deren."

A History of the French New Wave Cinema


Richard Neupert - 2002
    A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.

Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression


Jack Sargeant - 1995
    Including: -- Interviews with key transgressive film-makers, including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, plus collaborators Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman and David Wojnarowicz-- Studies of more recent film-makers including Jeri Cain Rossie, Richard Baylor, Todd Phillips.-- A brief history of underground/trash cinema: Any Warhol, Jack Smith, George & Mike Kuchar, John Waters.-- Notes and essays on the philosophy and aesthetics of transgression; extensive film analysis; index and bibliography.Heavily illustrated with rare and often disturbing photographs, Deathtripping is a unique document, the definitive guide to the roots, philosophy and development of a style of film-making whose influence and impact can no longer be ignored.

Infographic Guide to the Movies


Karen Krizanovich - 2013
    Mixing cinematic fact with legend, it features infamous and often ludicrous tales of Hollywood, Bollywood, European cinema, underground and indie film making.More than just a book of words with graphs, Venn diagrams and charts included, this book is packed with over 100 original artworks and illustrations, at-a-glance facts to amaze and astound readers, graphics on every major movie genre, and every major movie market around the world.With surprising and enlightening secrets of the industry, Infographics Guide to the Movies has global scope, universal appeal and is visually impressive.

Image - Music - Text


Roland Barthes - 1977
    His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as ‘the best... introduction so far to Barthes’ career as the slayer of contemporary myths’. (John Sturrock, New Statesman)

Film as Art


Rudolf Arnheim - 1932
    Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional depth.

Film Form: Essays In Film Theory


Sergei Eisenstein - 1949
    From Sergei Eisenstein, a legendary pioneer in filmmaking and director of Battleship Potemkin, Film Form collects twelve essays written between 1928 and 1945 that demonstrate key points in the development of his film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium."By turns savagely polemical and whimsically humorous...Eisenstein's last book, like all his writings, is on fire with imagination...Jay Leyda, well-known authority on Eisenstein's work, has done an excellently thorough job of editing and translating."??—??Saturday Review

War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception


Paul Virilio - 1986
    Hiroshima marked one conclusion of this process in the nuclear ‘flash’ which penetrated the city’s darkest recesses, etching the images of its victims on the walls.Since the disappearance of direct vision in battle and the replacement of one-to-one combat by the remote and murderous son et lumiere of trench warfare, military strategy has been dominated by the struggle between visibility and invisibility, surveillance and camouflage. Perception and destruction have now become coterminous.Paul Virilio, one of the most radical French critics of contemporary culture, explores these conjunctions from a range of perspectives. He gives a detailed technical jistory of weaponry, photography and cinematography, illuminating it with accounts of films and military campaigns. He examines in parallel the ideas of strategists and directors, along with views on war and cinema of writers from Apollinaire to William Burrroughs. And he finds further fruitful sources of reflection in the history of cinema architecture or the wartime popularity of striptease and pin-up.The result is a rich and suggestive analysis for military ‘ways of seeing’, and a disturbing account of how these have now permeated our culture: ‘Warsaw, Beirut, Belfast ... the streets themselves have become a permanent film-set for army cameras or the tourist reporters of global civil war.’

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism


Fredric Jameson - 1991
    Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000


P. Adams Sitney - 1974
    This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in1974. Now P. Adams Sitney has once again revised and updated this classic work, restoring a chapter on the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos and bringing his discussion of the principal genres and major filmmakers up to the year 2000.

Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 1970s


Charles Taylor - 2017
    . . but the riches found in the overlooked B movies of the time, rolled out wherever they might find an audience, unexpectedly tell an eye-opening story about post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America. Revisiting the films that don't make the Academy Award montages, Charles Taylor finds a treasury many of us have forgotten, movies that in fact “unlock the secrets of the times.”Celebrated film critic Taylor pays homage to the trucker vigilantes, meat magnate pimps, blaxploitation “angel avengers,” and taciturn factory workers of grungy, unartful B films such as Prime Cut, Foxy Brown, and Eyes of Laura Mars. He creates a compelling argument for what matters in moviemaking and brings a pivotal American era vividly to life in all its gritty, melancholy complexity.

Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings


Leo Braudy - 1974
    Extensively revised and updated, this sixth edition highlights both classic texts and cutting edge essays from more than a century of thought and writing about the movies. Editors Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen have reformulated the book's sections and their introductions in order to lead students into a rich understanding of what the movies have accomplished, both as individual works and as contributions to what has been called "the art form of the twentieth [and now twenty-first] century." Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the contexts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and to explore issues of gender and race. The sixth edition features several new essays that discuss the impact of digital technology on the traditional conceptions of what films do and how they manage to do it. Additional selections from the important works of Gilles Deleuze round out sections dealing with the theories of such writers as Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, and Christian Metz, among others. New essays also strengthen sections dealing with the idea of "excess" in film, film spectatorship, the horror genre, and feminist criticism. Film Theory and Criticism, 6/e, is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in film theory and criticism."

The Wes Anderson Collection


Matt Zoller Seitz - 2013
    A true auteur, Anderson is known for the visual artistry, inimitable tone, and idiosyncratic characterizations that make each of his films—Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom—instantly recognizable as “Andersonian.”The Wes Anderson Collection is the first in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The interview and images are woven together in a meticulously designed book that captures the spirit of his films: melancholy and playful, wise and childish—and thoroughly original.