Books on Cinema

Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was an American filmmaker and one of the most important of the Golden Age of Hollywood. His career went since the silent period to the early 70s, and in it he made some of the best films in each genre, as Bringing Up Baby (comedy), Only Angels Have Wings (drama), Air Force (war movie), Rio Bravo (western), Scarface (gangster film), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (musical) and The Big Sleep ( film noir ). In his films, nothing is more important than the friendship between two men and the professionalism with which they carry their work. They are films made with great camera modesty, filmed essentially at the eye level, and with outstanding efficiency in the narrative, unified in spatial and temporal terms. None of his characters make explicit their feelings, and it is by their behaviors that the audience perceives the relationships they establish between them (e.g., when Bogart throws his  matches to Bacall in To Have and Have Not ). If Hawks invested ...

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist. Known for his writings and practice of montage applied on his films, his filmic work shows an artist with total dominion of the plastic aspect of the cinema, causing a singular psychological effect through the collision of shots with carefully thought-out compositions. For the aesthetic avant-gardism of his works and contribution to the cinematographic technique, he is now regarded as one of the highest exponents in the history of cinema. He was a lover of Kabuki theater and classic literature, who influenced his way of thinking about films. A student of architecture, he joined the Bolshevik revolution, collaborating as a painter, decorator and director in the Proletcult Theatre (1920-1924), the aesthetic instrument of the new regime. Then he made the highly acclaimed  Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), whose unusual camera angles and dynamic use of cinematography and montage m...

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) is one of the most remembered and beloved filmmakers. Films like The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1973) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) have acquired the classic status and influenced generations of directors, being widely regarded as some of the greatest achievements in cinema.  Born in Stockholm, Bergman was the son of a Lutheran pastor who provided him a rigid upbringing. One of his greatest passions was the theater, especially the plays written by Strindberg, which influenced his writing style. Eventually, Bergman became director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. His theatrical interest can be seen in his films, through its incisive dialogues that try to understand the human passions and essence. His body of work (with around 60 films, including TV movies and shorts) is complex and show a sensitive and eloquent artist. It reflects a series of existentialist questions and metaphy...

Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was an American film critic for The New Yorker . A personality of great influence in American cinema, she became known for her persuasive writing style and keen opinions, often in countercurrent with those of her contemporaries [such as her negative reviews of La Notte (1961) and West Side Story (1961)], using a personal style unable to fit into any dogma. She was one of the most striking opponents of the auteur theory as defended by Andrew Sarris, having written the article Circles and Squares that exposes, in a severe way, the frailties and the risks of this concept. This opposition also led to the creation of Raising Kane , a book where Kael defended Herman J. Mankiewicz as the sole author of the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941). She was also a strong impulse for New Hollywood, through her long essay defending Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Over the years she created compilations of her film reviews and essays, where one can notice a constant sociolog...

If the Nouvelle Vague became also famous for the transition of a group of film critics to the filmmaking activity, the same cannot be said of the New Hollywood, the American equivalent of the French cinematographic movement. If we look for names in the United States that, in the 60s and 70s, had similar paths to those of Godard or Truffaut, we come across essentially with two results: Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich. A former writer for  Esquire magazine, Bogdanovich became latter known for the elegiac film The Last Picture Show (1971), a farewell to a generation and, in a certain way, to the classic cinema it loved, through the history of a group of adolescents in the city of Texas during the time of the Korean War. Even though he was part of a generation that re-invented American cinema, the cinephilia in Bogdanovich's early films pays beautiful homages to his masters: John Ford on The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon and Howard Hawks in What's Up, Doc? Of the...

Raymond Bellour (1939-) is a French film critic and theorist. Member of the CNRS, professor at Sorbonne, he created with Serge Daney, in 1991, Traffic magazine. The Analysis of Film is a collection of some of Bellour’s most classic essays. Influenced by Christian Metz, Bellour applies the concepts of structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis that revolutionized film criticism in the 1970s. What is most remarkable in his essays about Hitchcock's films as Marnie , Psycho and, above all, North by Northwest, is the detailed individual analysis of each shot in a sequence and how each camera position is reused throughout it, studying the gaze of the characters, symbologies that relate to psychoanalytic concepts and studies of symmetry and asymmetry. Always accompanied by stills and schemes that guide the reader, The Analysis of Film is a very curious and academic way of watching the cinema that will certainly make the viewer's eye be more attentive to filmic details in cin...

David Thomson is a British film historian and critic. Regarded by some as the greatest living writer on film, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is his most famous work. Voted in 2010, by the British Film Institute, as the best film book, and defended by respected film critic Andrew Sarris as the fifth most important on film criticism, its various editions over the years have proved to be important reference books. As the title points out, it consists on the organization of a series of personalities related to cinema, accompanied by a brief biography, built entirely on Thomson's subjectivity, whose writing may prove laudatory or destructive, long or short, not always eloquent. In our view, what he writes about Strange Days ("one of the loudest bad films ever made", as he puts) is poorly developed and shockingly reduced, since he completely disdains to refer the incredible work of long and subjective takes or the dystopian and almost prophetic vision that th...