Books on Cinema

Groucho Marx was one of the great comic actors of cinema and one of the most charismatic icons and entertainers of the twentieth century, both from the showbusiness and the mediatic american life. His career was always spread by the theater, cinema, radio, television and writing, reinventing himself for new generations whenever it was necessary. With his brothers he created one of the most iconic comedy groups in the cinema, characterized by an anarchic style of humor, between slapstick made with perfect sense of timing, dialogue gags and word games, which continues to work and enchanting audiences today. Proof of that are on some of the classics from the group's catalog, such as A Night at the Opera  (1935), Horse Feathers  (1932) and Duck Soup (1933), which appears among the top of several lists dedicated to the best movies ever (of the comedy genre and of all cinema ever made). The Marx brothers began their artistic journey in vaudeville, leaving for the cinema short...

New Hollywood (aka American New Wave) was a period in American film history that went from the mid-'60s to early '80s. Famous for a generation of filmmakers that had an unusual amount of creative liberty at the time (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader...) its films, widely influenced by the European arthouse cinema, were audacious for their character-driven instead of plot-driven stories, technical and stylistic innovations, ambiguous endings and non-linear narratives. It is believed that this period began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde , whose violence and liberal portrayal of sex made it a commercial and critical success. It continued with the counterculture hit Easy Rider (1969) and through the '70s with the beautifully nostalgic The Last Picture Show (1971), the paranoid drama The Conversation (1974), the psychological disturbing neo-noir Taxi Driver (1976) among many other films that are still regarded as some of the finest of th...

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) is, arguably, not only the most important living filmmaker, but also one of the greatest directors of all-time. A philosopher thinking with a camera, raising questions about cinema, society, politics and History, in innovative and non-conforming ways, his body of work has influenced filmmakers from Europe to America, from the mainstream to the avant-garde, more than any other director. He is best known for being part of the Nouvelle Vague with revolutionary movies as the cinephilic and exuberant noir À Bout de Souffle ( Breathless , 1960), the existentialist Vivre Sa Vie ( My Life to Live , 1962) or the disconsolately romantic Le Mépris ( Contempt , 1963). From the end of the '60s until mid-'70s he entered in a militant phase with Jean-Pierre Gorin and continued a controversial oeuvre with political films as Vladimir et Rosa (1971). In the '80s he returned to, in a way, more commercial pictures as Sauve Qui Peut ( La Vie ) (1980) or Prénom: Ca...

Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The controversial texts published in its first decade revolutionized the way the world thought about cinema. In this period, critics that would soon become an acclaimed group of filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, later known as part of the movement Nouvelle Vague ) wrote about la politique des auteurs (the auteur theory), that is, the director as the only author of the film, and became known for its violent attacks in the literary cinema, la tradition de qualité (quality tradition), that pleased the older generations, also called cinéma du papa (daddy's cinema). In the next years, Cahiers developed further its theories until the events of May 1968, where it became radically politicized in Maoism. These are the first 300 numbers of the film magazine. They begin in April 1951 with the iconic photography of Gloria Swanson in Suns...

Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The controversial texts published in its first decade revolutionized the way the world thought about cinema. In this period, critics that would soon become an acclaimed group of filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, later known as part of the movement Nouvelle Vague ) wrote about la politique des auteurs (the auteur theory), that is, the director as the only author of the film, and became known for its violent attacks in the literary cinema, la tradition de qualité (quality tradition), that pleased the older generations, also called cinéma du papa (daddy's cinema). In the next years, Cahiers developed further its theories until the events of May 1968, where it became radically politicized in Maoism. This anthology in four volumes reunites several texts by its most important contributors along almost three decades (1951-1978), all...

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was a Russian filmmaker and film theorist. His most famous films are Andrei Rublev (1966), a biography based on the life of the medieval Russian painter, the puzzling, poetic and highly personal The Mirror  (1975) and the introspective science fiction art dramas  Solaris  (1972) and Stalker (1979). Due to constant obstructions by the Soviet authorities, who regarded Tarkovsky as an elitist, he shot his last two films in Europe,  Nostalgia  (1983) and The Sacrifice  (1986), in Italy and Sweden, respectively. His films are characterized by beautiful imagery presented in long takes with a slow and contemplative rhythm, accompanied by dialogues that raise questions in philosophical, theological and psychological levels. On Tarkovsky, acclaimed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman wrote: "When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He...

Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) was an American film critic. He was the one who coined the term " auteur theory" (a not completely correct translation from the french politique des auteurs ), brought from Cahiers du Cinéma  to the American appreciation, mainly in his influent article Notes on the Autheur Theory . This "policy" is known for focusing criticism mainly in those directors ("authors") whose personal styles and visions of the world are consistent along their bodies of work. He wrote for  Film Culture , The Village Voice  and The New York Observer and his most famous book is  The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968 , a guide to some of the most important American film directors. Interviews with Film Directors  is a compilation of interviews organized by Sarris from several publications, where 40 classic film directors (Ford, Godard, Hawks, Lang, Renoir, Hitchcock, among others) discuss their work. Sarris introduces each film direc...

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) is, arguably, not only the most important living filmmaker, but also one of the greatest directors of all-time. A philosopher thinking with a camera, raising questions about cinema, society, politics and History, in innovative and non-conforming ways, his body of work has influenced filmmakers from Europe to America, from the mainstream to the avant-garde, more than any other director. He is best known for being part of the Nouvelle Vague with revolutionary movies as the cinephilic and exuberant noir À Bout de Souffle ( Breathless , 1960), the existentialist  Vivre Sa Vie ( My Life to Live , 1962) or the disconsolately romantic Le Mépris ( Contempt , 1963). From the end of the '60s until mid-'70s he entered in a militant phase with Jean-Pierre Gorin and continued a controversial  oeuvre with political films as Vladimir et Rosa (1971). In the '80s he returned to, in a way, more commercial pictures as Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (1980) or Prénom: ...

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) represents, as Andrew Sarris has put it, "the principle of repression in cinematic art" [1]. The filmic universe of the director of such classics as Journal d'un curé de campagne ( Diary of a Country Priest , 1951), Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ( A Man Escaped , 1956) and Pickpocket (1959) is inhabited by Dostoievskian characters that, either saints or sinners, present their faces in an expressionless way, sacrificing themselves, in a last redemptive gesture, for an apathic world. Such tales bring the inward catholicism of the french filmmaker, whose austere style, with a precise notion of timing, silence and composition, restrains musical score and abnegates theatrical performances for a filmic experience more transcendent. Notes sur le cinématographe  ( Notes on the Cinematographer aka Notes on Cinematography ), published in 1975, is the book Bresson wrote regarding his vision of the cinema, translating it in a series of aphor...

André Bazin (1918-1958) was one of the most influential film critics and theorists. A co-founder of the renowned film magazine   Cahiers du Cinéma , his writings on the superiority of deep focus and long takes against the montage, have contributed to much discussion about cinema along the decades. Bazin defended cinema as an art of realism expressed through mise en scène , and that ambiguity should be led in an image by presenting reality as a whole, so that the spectator could interpret, by himself, a scene. For such reasons he acclaimed directors like Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and William Wyler.  Most of his writings are collected in the four volumes of  Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? . Some of these were translated to an english   version, in two volumes, between 1967 and 1971  ( What is Cinema? ) that became a crucial reference in film courses. Excerpts :  "The truth of the matter is, that if you are looking for the precursor of Orson Welles, it is ...

If nowadays the english filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is regarded as one of the greatest directors off all-time, much is owed to this book. At the time, the "master of suspense" was seen more as an entertainer than a serious artist, although he was strongly supported by the french film critics of the movie magazine  Cahiers du Cinéma . It was in 1962 that one of them, the then-young filmmaker François Truffaut (1932-1984), decided to make a series of interviews, covering the whole Hitchcock's career, with the english filmmaker, that would make people "realize at last that he is the greatest film director in the world" [1].  The book that resulted from those eight days in offices at Universal Studios (with translations by Helen G. Scott) was published in 1966 and became, not only the most relevant guide to the Hitchcock's  oeuvre , but also one of the most important books on cinema. Its biographical, historical and critical aspects, showed an ar...