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; ...

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...

Edited by James Quandt (senior programmer at Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque),  Robert Bresson gathers academic essays, interviews and opinions from worldwide filmmakers (such as Scorsese or Michael Haneke) about one of the most acclaimed and influential film directors in history. The adaptation of  Journal d'un curé de campagne  discussed by André Bazin, the spirituality of his body of work seen by Susan Sontag, the impressive use of sound in Mouchette  (1967) studied by Lindley Hanlon, an interview conducted by Godard that reveals much of Bresson’s aesthetic intentions, among many other relevant texts, all this makes this book the most important on the French filmmaker. Excerpts: "Bresson's aesthetic is, therefore, based essentially on the linguistic system called asyndeton, which consists of eliminating the links between terms or groups of terms that are closely related. More precisely, understatement, ellipsis, and metonymy are the figu...

Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) was an American film critic. He was the one who coined the term " auteur  theory" (a not completely correct translation from the french  politique des auteurs ), brought from  Cahiers du Cinéma  to the American appreciation, mainly in his influent article  Notes on the Autheur Theory . This "policy" is known for focusing criticism mainly in those directors ("authors") whose personal styles and visions of the world are consistent along their bodies of work. He wrote for  Film Culture ,  The Village Voice  and  The New York Observer . The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is his most famous book, the American film history organized in the form of a guide to the work of two hundred film directors. Even though some of his opinions have become somewhat debatable (regarding Rouben Mamoulian, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, among others in the second half of the book), Sarris’s eloquence reveals a pa...

Robert Bresson was a French filmmaker, known for his ascetic and austere style, where the protagonists seek redemption in a world inhabited by despair and indifference. His minimalist approach, with characters absent from a background, use of non-professional actors (or "models" as he called them), fixed camera, absence of non-diegetic soundtrack (except in unexpected moments such as religious masses who enclose his films) and the depuration of action without visual embellishments, made him one of the most influential filmmakers in film history. Of his short work (13 feature films and a short film), his most remembered films are  Journal d'un curé de campagne ( Diary of a Country Priest , 1951), Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ( A Man Escaped , 1956) and Pickpocket (1959). Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film , written by psychoanalyst and former film teacher Tony Pipolo, is the first study of Bresson’s career, using his films, their literary sources and psycho...

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was an American  avant-garde  filmmaker. His approach to cinema was heavily experimental and non-narrative, having painted and scratched celluloid, used camera handheld and multiple exposures, while exploring the rhythms in the editing through fast cutting techniques. His film is more sensory, exploring subjects like mythology ( Dog Star Man cycle), the birth ( Window Water Baby Moving ) or death. Although the narrative's absence did not allow him to reach a large audience, his poetic cinema was acclaimed and became widely influential. Metaphors on Vision  is his statement on the visual experience, written in a very idiosyncratic style. Excerpts: "Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspec- tive, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered  in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a fie...