Books on Cinema

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...

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 throws his  matches to Bacall in To Have and Have Not ). If Hawks invested ...