Books on Cinema

“His characters generally make their entrance at a moment in their lives when there is no tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have reached the end or the bottom, but they will struggle a short time longer, about ninety minutes of screen time, to discover the truth about themselves and those they love.” The words are from The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris in its entry dedicated to Josef von Sternberg, and they correctly (and quite beautifully) resume the romantic side of the films directed by the Austrian-American filmmaker.  Sternberg (born Jonas Sternberg) began to work in a millinery shop that gave him knowledge of different ornate textiles that he would embody in his mise en scène . In his films, men are attracted to mysterious women in exotic and sometimes turbulent settings (revolutionary China, Imperial Russia, Word War I Austria) in which love, lust, humiliation, sado-masochistic jealousy and sacrifice are all displayed in pictorial compositions with strong g...

Thomas Schatz is the director of undergraduate courses in the radio, TV and film University of Texas (Austin) and author of Hollywood genres. A member of the American Film Institute, he is also a regular contributor to the of American TV PBS and specialized magazines like Wide Angle , Cineaste and Premiere . The Genius of the System depicts the greatness of Classic Hollywood era, not through the talent of its directors (Hitchcock, Hawks, or Lang), but of the commercial vision and executive talent of the producers of the great studios (Selznick, Zanuck, Mayer, the Warner brothers and Irving Thalberg). By interweaving the histories of Warner Bros., MGM, Universal and Selznick International Pictures, by telling the production stories of such classics as Greed , Frankenstein , Rebecca or Grand Hotel , by looking at the cinema through a business perspective, Schatz diminishes the romanticism of directorial authorship created by critics and historians in the 60s and 70s, studying ...

Robin Wood (1931-2009) was a critic and founder of the film magazine  CineAction , a journal also dedicated to a radical political agenda of socialism, feminism, Marxism, and gay rights. Author of several monographs around filmmakers such as Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman, his literary work emphasizes the consistent and individual vision that each director puts on his films. His critical career began with the publication of the article  Psychanalyse de «Psycho»   for  Cahiers du Cinéma . His texts show an authorial approach similar to that of the French film magazine, but later on, they focused on semiotic and poststructuralist theories.  Hitchcock’s Films was one of the first books (and the first full-length study in English) on filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. Originally published in the 60s, under the influence of auteurist criticism, Wood later returned to it in the 80s to make Hitchcock’s Films Revisited , with new essays that reflected his development...