Books on Cinema

“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; ...