Books on Cinema

Victor Francis Perkins (1936 – 2016) was a British film critic, teacher and co-founder of Movie magazine. He became known for his approach to the critical analysis of film without jargon. Film as Film (1972) is perhaps his most famous work, a seminal book on film studies that makes an accessible introduction to film theory and some of its history, while discussing mise en scène aspects (e.g.,   color changes, lighting techniques, camera movements), the fusion of form and content, the how and what, in Preminger, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, among other classic filmmakers. He also discusses the role of the filmmaker as an author, even in a commercial system with its financial and logistic restrictions. Excerpts: “Consider this sequence from Carmen Jones (…). The soldier hero, Joe, is driving a jeep down a country road. Beside him sites his prisoner Carmen, whom he has been ordered to deliver to the civilian authorities in a near-by town. As the jeep speeds along, Carmen mak...

James Agee (1909-1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. He wrote A Death in the Family (1957), which won him a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. With photographer Walker Evans, he documented the lives of sharecroppers in Alabama during the Great Depression, which later resulted in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). He was also a screenwriter, having contributed to two of the most admired films from the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). He died from a heart attack in a New York taxi at the age of 45, in 1955. Agee was the most important American film critic in the 40s. He wrote for Time and The Nation , and was a great enthusiast of Charles Chaplin [Agee was possibly the critic who most defended Monsieur Verdoux (1947) in America at a time when it was receiving a poor reception], John Huston, and an admirer of Laurence Olivier’s filmic adaptations of Shakespeare and the horror / fantasy...

Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a painter and film critic, regularly contributing to publications such as The New Republic, The Nation, Artforum, Film Culture, and others. He was distinguished by its inventive, iconoclastic writing, and for being a defender of action– Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann – and underground filmmakers, like Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. One of his most remembered essays is "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art", in which he writes about the virtues of "termite art", the excesses of "white elephant art", by championing the first, “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it”, against the second, that treats “every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity” and lacks the economy of expression of “termite art”. Negative Space...