Books on Cinema

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; ...

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...