Books on Cinema

Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a theorist, screenwriter (he co-wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger ), film critic (in addition to Screen magazine, where he developed his film theories, he wrote for the New Left Review under the pseudonym Lee Russell) and filmmaker. His most famous films were co-signed with his wife Laura Mulvey. His most remembered work is the seminal book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema , which discussed, in a captivating and accessible way, the semiotic and structuralist approach in the cinematographic context.  The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the theoretical and filmic work of Eisenstein. The second, about the auteur theory, investigates the recurrence of themes and images in some directors' careers, namely Hawks and Ford. And the third one develops how a film should be seen as a system of signs and codes, a bearer of a personal language to which the viewer has to adapt himself, referencing also the aesthetic innovations of Jean-Luc Godar...

Jean Renoir, son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in film history, a master in the use of depth of field (that would inspire Orson Welles, though he would use it in a more egocentric perspective and by establishing different hierarchies of power between his characters, unlike Renoir who used it to concentrate various actions on small individual stages), the search for both a sonic and visual realism, and whose work is particularly marked by the humanism and life that inhabits his characters. The most well-known phrase of his filmic career is spoken by himself, playing the character Octave in La Règle du Jeu (1939), "You see, in this world, there is an awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons." , leaving explicit the sympathy for the different characters with conflicting points of view and their pertinent idiosyncrasies that is present in his films. His cinema is so marked by his personality that An...

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...

Luis Buñuel (1900-83) was a Spanish filmmaker, born in Calanda (whose drums he used for the soundtracks of his films, such as Nazarín (1959)), where he had a Catholic education, which to a greater or lesser extent is satirized in his films. In Paris, he made contact with the surrealist movement, where the friendship he formed with Salvador Dalí led to the creation of two controversial films with Freudian interpretations, Un Chien Andalou  (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). In Spain, Mexico and France, he created his body of work, essentially marked by criticisms of the bourgeoisie with its hypocrisies and neuroses, analyzing humorously the attachment it shows to patriarchy and Catholicism in successive tortuous repressions of desire, where there is no lack of a delicious fetish for legs and feet. Some of his most acclaimed films: Los Olvidados (1950, particularly marked by its social realism), Él (1953), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Diary of a Chambermaid (...

“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...

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...

James Naremore is a film scholar and a retired professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature. In The Magic World of Orson Welles (which, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, is “the best critical study of Welles available in any language”), Naremore makes an authoristic study of one of the most beloved filmmakers, through deep stylistic and thematic analysis of each one of his films that also include considerations of Welles’s liberal politics, biographical aspects and historical context. His radio work and theatre plays are also reviewed, and his unfinished films are also discussed. Excerpts : “His overreachers tend to be tyrants in spite of themselves, pathetically trying to determine their own fate even while they are doomed by their childhood and victimized by a society beyond their control. As Bessy has pointed out, the Wellesian tyrant, for all of his destructiveness, is a wielder of sham power: Kane tries to construct his own world at Xanadu; ...

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 th...

Orson Welles (1915-1985) is today remembered for being the author of what is arguably the "best film of all-time", but his artistic career wasn’t easy and involved a series of struggles that could have discouraged anyone. The son of a pianist and an inventor, he was exposed to the fine arts since an early age. He began his professional career as a painter in Ireland (where he sold his paintings on a donkey cart) and as a theatre actor for the Gate Theatre in Dublin. From then, he went to radio with peculiar results (his adaptation of War of the Worlds  provoked a mass hysteria - altough its dimension is still debatable - in the American population at the time, who really thought that the Earth was being invaded by Martians), and finally to the studios of the RKO to make Citizen Kane (1941). There, with the precious collaboration of Gregg Toland, he showed his cinematographic experimentalism, developing a baroque visual technique of low angles, great depth of field and exp...