Film Art: An Introduction

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Four little volumes of essays and reviews written in the 1940s and 1950s, published posthumously, that were absolutely formative for the film-makers of the nouvelle vague and for critics ever after. Hepburn’s fey, tomboyish persona may not have been radical exactly, but its very oddity created a worrying disturbance in her films that even the ritual clinch at the end didn’t entirely pacify. Each section covers a different topic in the film and you’ll find a lot of split pages with screens from the film intermixed with concept art of that scene. Stars back then embodied vital social contradictions – one doubts whether the featureless pretty people of contemporary celebrity would repay so subtle and scrupulous a treatment.

This book features storyboards, sketches, and animation cels back when traditional animation reigned supreme. And while cinema is inevitably compromised by its fundamental role in this state, it should be remembered that Debord was also a master of the found-footage film. It seems symptomatic that the book has never been translated into English – neither has the film writing of the Italian Marxist Umberto Barbaro (which I read in the translation published in Cuba by the ICAIC).Burch has changed his position many times since 1967 (when the chapters first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma), but there is still much to excite in these pages.

Or almost any of her collections, really, but wasn’t she at her best when she had plenty of movies to love? The Parade’s Gone By is the most accessible of Brownlow’s great books about silent film, though I could as easily have picked The War, the West and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence. But I forgot that I’d read it (as an undergraduate, when I was first thinking of making films) until many years later, when I first started teaching film and rediscovered it.

This book is pretty sizable with 256 pages full of production art, matte paintings, and concept designs for costumes/weapons. Not at all professionally involved in film when I bought it, I wanted something to help a London art student get more out of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette.

And you’ll find a bunch of interviews with production team members from every part of the creative process. First, the book sketches a history of film interpretation, from the work of early critics through the rise of academic film studies in the 1960s and 1970s, ending in the great quantity of interpretive work that emerged in the 1980s. Here’s the answer: the most radical, innovative and inventive tome of cinema study in the past quarter-century, boldly proposing a ‘figural’ approach that combines meaning with emotion, history with imagination. The best novel of recent years is Theodore Roszak’s astonishing Flicker (1991), while the finest on British cinema is Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet (1945), but greatest of all is Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at his death in 1940 and superbly edited by his friend Edmund Wilson.Not just one of the best film books, one of the best later 20th-century books of criticism of any medium. A funny, droll, incisive, idealistic and perceptive collection of letters to friends and collaborators, colleagues and film-makers he admired (and fell out with). A terrific piece of journalism and a landmark in the history of American non-fiction writing, this look at how John Huston made The Red Badge of Courage remains the ultimate Hollywood behind-the-scenes story. I do wish this had even more CGI/concept art because it does feel lacking in a few areas, but overall this is such a cool book and well worth grabbing if you’re a fan of the original anime.

S. books relied chiefly on films which had distribution here, forgetting that many outstanding films don’t get access to American audiences. A fourth chapter brings the story up to date, concentrating on “revisionist” work in early cinema (Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Kristin Thompson, Ben Brewster, et al. Fortunately, thanks to the gifted Russian-Australian scholar Julia Vassilieva, this project is on the way.Finally, the film illustrates how narration can manipulate the audience’s knowledge, sometimes making drastic shifts from moment to moment. The book has been translated into Chinese (Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 1995) and Spanish (Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica, 1995).