VHS Video Cover Art: 1980s to Early 1990s


Thomas Hodge - 2015
    The art explodes with a succulent, indulgent blend of design, illustration, typography, and hilarious copywriting. Written and curated by Tom “The Dude Designs” Hodge, poster artist extraordinaire and VHS obsessive, with a foreword by Mondo’s Justin Ishmael, this collection contains over 240 full-scale, complete video sleeves in the genres of action, comedy, horror, kids, sci-fi, and thriller films. It’s a world of mustached, muscled men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns, and nightmare-inducing monsters. From the sublime to the ridiculous, some are incredible works of art, some are insane, and some capture the tone of the films better than the films themselves. All are amazing and inspiring works of art that captivate the imagination. It’s like stepping back in time into your local video store!

On Film Editing


Edward Dmytryk - 1984
    Written in an informal "how-to-do-it" style, renowned director Edward Dmytyrk shares his expertise and experience in film editing in an anecdotal and philosophical way. In On Film Editing, Dmytryk contends that many technicians and professionals on the film crew-- from the cameraman and his assistants to the producer and director-- must understand film editing to produce a truly polished work. In this book he explains in layman's terms the principles of film editing, using examples and anecdotes from almost five decades in the film industry.

Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman, King of the B-Movie


Chris Nashawaty - 2013
    As told by Corman himself and graduates of “The Corman Film School,” including Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese, this comprehensive oral history takes readers behind the scenes of more than six decades of American cinema, as now-legendary directors and actors candidly unspool recollections of working with Corman, continually one-upping one another with tales of the years before their big breaks.Crab Monsters is supplemented with dozens of full-color reproductions of classic Corman movie posters; behind-the-scenes photographs and ephemera (many taken from Corman’s personal archive); and critical essays on Corman’s most daring films—including The Intruder, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Big Doll House— that make the case for Corman as an artist like no other. Praise for Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: “This new coffee table book, brimming with outrageous stills from many of Corman’s hundreds of films, looks at the wild career of the starmaker who was largely responsible for so much of the Hollywood we know today.” —New York Post “Vividly illustrated.” —People “An enthusiastic ode to colorful, seat-of-your-pants filmmaking, this one’s hard to beat.” —Booklist (starred review) “It includes in-depth aesthetic appreciations of ten of Corman’s movies, which, taken together, make a compelling case for Corman as an artist.” —Hollywood.com “Author Nashawaty deftly describes how Corman’s legacy is far more nuanced than most realize.” —American Way magazine “Outrageously entertaining . . .”  —Parade magazine “Endlessly fascinating.” —PopMatters.com “You’d think it’d be impossible for any writer to put together a Roger Corman biography that's anywhere near as fun as his movies, but Entertainment Weekly writer/critic Chris Nashawaty has done just that.”  —Complex magazine

Hitchcock's Films Revisited


Robin Wood - 1965
    When Robin Wood returned to his writings in Hitchcock's films and published Hitchcock's Films Revisited in 1989, the multidimensional essays took on a new shape―one tempered by Wood's own development as a critic.This revised edition of Hitchcock's Films Revisited includes a substantial new preface in which Wood reveals his personal history as a film scholar―including his coming out as a gay man, his views on his previows critical work, and how his writings, his love of film, and his personal life have remained deeply intertwined through the years. This revised edition includes all eighteen original essays and a new chapter on Marnie titled "You Freud, Me Hitchcock: Does Mark Cure Marnie?"

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

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)


Slavoj ŽižekAlenka Zupančič - 1988
    Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning’, the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into ‘serious’ Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies.

Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies


bell hooks - 1996
    Reel To Real collects hooks' classic essays on films such as Paris Is Burning or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, as well as newer work on Pulp Fiction, Crooklyn and Waiting To Exhale. hooks also examines the world of independent cinema. Conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's Kids, to show that cinema can function subversively as well as maintain the status quo.

David Lynch: Beautiful Dark


Greg Olson - 2008
    Lynch's films delve into the subjective consciousness of his characters to reveal both the depraved darkness and luminous spirituality of human nature. From his experimental shorts of the 1960s to feature films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch has pushed the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. In David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, author Greg Olson explores the surreal intricacies of the director's unique visual and visceral style not only in his full-length films but also his early forays into painting and short films, as well as his television landmark, Twin Peaks. This in-depth exploration is the first full-length work to analyze the intimate symbiosis between Lynch's life experience and artistic expressions: from the small-town child to the teenage painter to the 60-year-old Internet and digital media experimenter. To fully delineate the director's life and art, Olson received unprecedented participation from Lynch, his parents, siblings, old school friends, romantic partners, children, and decades of professional colleagues, as well as on-set access to the director during the production of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Throughout this study, Olson provides thorough analyses of the filmmaker's works as Lynch conceived, crafted, and completed them. Consequently, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark is the definitive study of one of the most influential and idiosyncratic directors of the last four decades.

I Lost It At the Video Store: A Filmmakers' Oral History of a Vanished Era


Tom Roston - 2015
    They were the salons where many of today’s best directors first learned their craft. The art of discovery that video stores encouraged through the careful curation of clerks was the fertile, if sometimes fetid, soil from which today’s film world sprung. Video stores were also the financial engine without which the indie film movement wouldn’t have existed.In I Lost it at the Video Store, Tom Roston interviews the filmmakers—including John Sayles, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell and Allison Anders—who came of age during the reign of video rentals, and constructs a living, personal narrative of an era of cinema history which, though now gone, continues to shape film culture today.

Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life


Edward Burns - 2015
    The Brothers McMullen went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, and established the working-class Irish American filmmaker as a talent to watch. In the twenty years since, Burns has made ten more films (She’s the One, Sidewalks of New York, and The Fitzgerald Family Christmas), while also acting in big budget Hollywood movies (Saving Private Ryan), hit television shows (Entourage and Mob City), and pioneering a new distribution network for indie filmmakers online and with TV’s On Demand service (“why open a film in twenty art houses when you can open in twenty million homes?”).Inspired by Burns’s uncompromising success both behind and in front of the camera, students and aspiring filmmakers are always asking Burns for advice. In Independent Ed, Burns shares the story of his two remarkable decades in a fickle business where heat and box office receipts are often all that matter. He recounts stories of the lengths he has gone to to secure financing for his films, starting with The Brothers McMullen (he told his father: “Shooting was the twelve best days of my life”). How he found stars on their way up—including Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz—to work in his films, and how he’s adhered religiously to the dictum of writing what you know, working as if he was just starting out, and always “looking for the next twelve best days of my life.”Chronicling the struggles and the long hours as well as the heady moments when months of planning and writing come to fruition, Independent Ed is a must-read for movie fans, film students, and everyone who loves a gripping tale about what it takes to forge your own path in work and life.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn


Nick Pinkerton - 2021
    In this wide-ranging and elegiac essay, Nick Pinkerton reflects upon Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a modern classic haunted by the ghosts and portents of a culture in flux.

The Filmmaker's Eye: Learning (and Breaking) the Rules of Cinematic Composition


Gustavo Mercado - 2010
    This book has struck a chord worldwide and is being translated into several languagesAfter a short introduction to basic principles, a variety of shots are deconstructed in the following format:- Why It Works: an introduction to a particular type of shot- How It Works: callouts point out exactly how the shot works the way it does--the visual rules and technical aspects in action- Technical Considerations: the equipment and techniques needed to get the shot.- Breaking the Rules: examples where the rules are brilliant subverted

Dark: A Novel


Kenji Jasper - 2001
    On one side he has his job as a filing clerk for the Washington, D.C., Department of Public Works, his girlfriend Sierra, and his plans for going to college. But on the other, darker side there are his friends Snowflake and Ray Ray, men who run the neighborhood streets dodging the dangers of the criminal life and its after-effects. But that thin line disappears when Thai walks in on Sierra with another man, whom he eventually kills in a haze of jealousy and confusion. From there Thai finds himself on the run and away from the five-block stretch where he’s lived for all his life. He finds his way to Charlotte, where Enrique, his closest friend of all, has moved in search of a better life. In the course of the week that follows, Thai encounters a series of men and women who show him aspects of life he never dreamed of in his narrow ghetto existence. All of them are looking for answers, but it is Thai who must find his own path out of the dark and into the clear light of moral responsibility and repentance for his actions.In his first novel, Kenji has written a haunting portrait of his own urban generation, shadowed (and often erased) by violence, but determined to make their own mark on the world.

From Star Wars to Indiana Jones: The Best of the Lucasfilm Archives


Mark Cotta Vaz - 1995
    Thanks to Lucas's foresight and the dedication of Lucasfilm archivists, the artifacts used in the making of his films have been painstakingly preserved. "From Star Wars to Indiana Jones" presents some of the best of Lucasfilm's enduring creations, from Yoda and R2-D2 to the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. Now readers everywhere can take a tour of the marvelous world of the Lucasfilm Archives, with its incredible collection of costumes, props, puppets, models, and matte paintings used in the making of both the "Star Wars" and Indiana Jones movies. Veterans of the legendary first Industrial Light & Magic effects team that created "Star Wars" share their secrets, along with an astonishing array of behind-the-scenes production illustrations, storyboards, and prototypes--many appearing for the first time in book form--all accompanied by a lively text that tells the fascinating stories behind the art of movie-making. Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs and illustrations, this treasury captures the remarkable imagery, as well as the wonder, of the Lucasfilm universe in an essential acquisition for countless fans the world over.To the Official "Star Wars" Web SiteCheck out other Star Wars titles published by Chronicle Books!

A Moment on the Lips


J. Taylor - 2021