Books on Cinema

We chose not to write a text about this book, as we think that the summary in the back cover gives, indeed, the best description of it. We would like only to give the brief note that Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about it: "This first collection by the most thoughtful, penetrating, and far-reaching of UK film critics ever remains scandalously overlooked and undervalued. Conceivably more ideas per page can be found here than in the work of any other English-language critic (...)." Summary: Raymond Durgnat here examines literally hundreds of films-- from Birth of a Nation to those of the 1960's, from Hollywood smashes to 'avant garde' obscurities, from all parts of the world-- in an effort to isolate universals of the language of films and to loft their poetics to an articulate level. Beyond what interest it may possess as a collection of different cinematic topics, this text is offered also as a basis for re-exploring an art-form which seems to pose certain a...

Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs),  The Edge of the World , a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger,  A Canterbury Tale ,  I Know Where I'm Going! , and  Going to Earth . I...

Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs), The Edge of the World , a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale , I Know Where I'm Going! , and Going to Earth . It is by the films h...