A LIBRARY OF FILM BOOKS
By: Kenji
In a 2010 edition of the British film mag Sight and Sound, there was a poll of numerous critics’ 5 favourite film books. So i thought i’d add many of the books nominated to some of my own favourites and other notable books, towards a decent library. The S&S poll is dominated by Anglo-American opinion and books, and also French critics are held in high esteem, but generally it lacks a decent international spread (partly due to books not translated), and as so often, women are under-represented among both respondents and favourites. It is surely the case that fine writers from a wide range of countries have written excellent books that deserve translation, distribution and attention. In the section for films underneath, I’ve listed some films covered well in the BFI Classics series of books and prominently elsewhere.
My favourites:
Figures Traced in Light (David Bordwell)
This concentrates on 4 directors- with a packed chapter each-, who are masters of staging: Feuillade, Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos and Hou. Bordwell is an expert on details of how films are made and he also addresses and criticises Hollywood’s “intensified continuity” of recent years.
Flickers (Gilbert Adair)
100 film stills, each representing a year of cinema from 1895-1994. Adair’s prose is delightfully florid and snobbish, his style and article on Rope influenced my shorter review on Russian Ark here.
A History of Narrative Film (David Cook)
An astonishing achievement, Cook seems familiar with and master of a huge range of films and national cinemas.
Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Paul Willemen)
I don’t know if this has been updated since 1999 but it’s crammed with info on numerous films and contributors to Indian cinema, and with sharp insights both specific and panoramic
Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (Andrew Robinson)
Impeccable bio: wise, sound, sufficiently in-depth, unpretentious job by Robinson whose knowledge and love for the subject shines through without any fanboy excess or blinkers
Top 100 Movies (John Kobal)
80 international critics pick their top 10s for an overall 100. Still a useful intro to many classics, this is the book that really got me hooked on world cinema in the late 80s, and introduced me to names i was unfamiliar with like Tarkovsky and Mizoguchi. And so the wonderful discoveries began, a time of heady excitement that sadly cannot be recaptured.
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Gilbert Adair: Flickers: A History of the Cinema in 100 Images
James Agee: Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments
John Alton: Painting with Light
Dudley Andrew: The Major Film Theories
Dudley Andrew & Carole Cavanaugh: Sansho Dayu
Geoff Andrew (ed) : Film: The Critics’ Choice
Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon
Jacques Aumont, Michel Marie: L’Analyse des Films
Charles Barr: Ealing Studios
André Bazin: Essays on Chaplin
What is Cinema?
David Berry: Wales and Cinema: The First Hundred Years
Audie Bock: Japanese Film Directors
David Bordwell: Figures Traced in Light
The Way Hollywood Tells It
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson:
Film Art: An Introduction
Film History: An Introduction
David Bordwell and Noel Carroll: Post Theory
Richard Boston: Boudu Saved from Drowning
Stan Brakhage: Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American Independent Film-makers
Robert Bresson: Notes on the Cinematographer
Andrew Britton: Katharine Hepburn: The Star as Feminist
Louise Brooks: Lulu in Hollywood
Kevin Brownlow: David Lean: A Biography
The Parade’s Gone By
Giuliano Bruno: Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film
Luis Bunuel: My Last Breath
Peter Biskind: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
Simon Callow: Night of the Hunter
Ray Carney: The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies
Allan Casabier: Film Appreciation
Michel Ciment: Kubrick
Jean Cocteau: Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film
David Cook: A History of Narrative Film
Shaun Considine: Betty and Joan: The Divine Feud
Pam Cook (ed): The Cinema Book
Roger Corman: How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime
Mark Cousins, Kevin Macdonald (eds): Imagining Reality
Hamid Dabashi: Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future
Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema
Serge Daney: Given the Increase in Handbag Thefts
Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 1
Cinema 2
David Desser: Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to Japanese New Wave Cinema
Nathan Dunne (ed): Tarkovsky
Raymond Durgnat: Durgnat on Film
Films and Feelings
Jean Renoir
Nouvelle Vague: The First Decade
W.R.Mysteries of the Organism
Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form and Film Sense
Method
Lotte Eisner: The Haunted Screen
Thomas Elsaesser: Fassbinder’s Germany
Weimar Cinema and After
Robert Evans: The Kid Stays in the Picture
Manny Farber: Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies
Hollis Frampton: On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
Marc Fursteau: The Film Theory Reader
Tag Gallagher: John Ford: The Man and his Films
Louis Giannetti: Understanding Movies
Jean-Luc Godard: Godard on Godard
Peter Hames: The Czechoslovak New Wave
James Harvey: Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges
Hasumi Shigehiko: Kantuko Ozu Yasujiro
Ronald Haver: David O Selznick’s Hollywood
Andrew Horton (ed): The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos
Guillermo Cabrere Infante: A 20th Century Job
Joris Ivens: The Camera and I
Alexander Jacoby: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors
Randal Johnson, Robert Stam: Brazilian Cinema
Pauline Kael: Reeling
Elia Kazan: A Life
Ehsan Khoshbakht: Celluloid Architecture
John Kobal: Top 100 Movies
Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
Kyung Hyun Kim: The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema
Mikhail Lampolski: Intertextuality and Film
Mark le Fanu: The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky
Mizoguchi and Japan
Jay Leyda: Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Cinema
Jacques Lourcelles (ed): Dictionnaire du Cinéma
Sidney Lumet: Making Movies
Derek Malcolm: A Century of Films
James Roy McBean: Film and Revolution
Millicent Marcus: Italian Film in the Light of Neo-Realism
Todd McCarthy: Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood
Alberto Mira (ed): The Cinema of Spain and Portugal
Jean Mitry: The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema
Semiotics and the Analysis of Film
James Monaco: How to Read a Film
Michel Mourlet: La Mise-en-Scene Comme un Langage
Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
James Naremore: More than Night: Film Noir in its Contents
Bill Nichols: Movies and Methods
Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed): The Oxford History of World Cinema
Oshima Nagisa (et al): Cinema, Censorshop and the State: the Writings of Oshima Nagisa
Robert Parrish: Growing up in Hollywood
Gregor Patalas: Geschichte des Films
Gilberto Perez: The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium
V.F.Perkins: Film as Film
Michael Powell: A Life in Movies
Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen: Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema
Satyajit Ray: Our Lives, Their Lives
Jean Renoir: My Life and my Films
Donald Richie: A Hundred Years of Japanese Film
Ozu
Andrew Robinson: Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Placing Movies: the Practice of Film Criticism
Essential Cinema: The Importance of Film Canons
(ed) This is Orson Welles
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed Vafa: Abbas Kiarostami
Richard Roud (ed): Cinema: A Critical Dictionary
A Passion for Films
Raul Ruiz: Poetics of Cinema
Catherine Russell: The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity
Georges Sadoul: Dictionary of Film
Andrew Sarris: The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-68
Confessions of a Cultist
You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet
Sato Tadao: Currents in Japanese Cinema
Mizoguchi Kenji and the Art of Japanese Cinema
Thomas Schatz: The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era
Paul Schrader: Transcendental Style in Film
Martin Scorsese: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
Ella Shohat, Robert Stam: Unthinking Eurocentricsm
Douglas Sirk: Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday
P.Adams Sitney: Visionary Film
Josef von Sternberg: Fun in a Chinese Laundry
Howard Suber: The Power of Film
Roger Tailleur: Viv®e le Cinéma
Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time
David Thomson: A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Have You Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films
Pete Tombs: Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinemas around the World
Trinh T.Minh-ha: When the Moon Waxes Red: Gender and Cultural Politics
Francois Truffaut: The Films in my Life
Hitchcock
Noel Vera: Critic After Dark : A Review of Philippine Cinema
Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive Art
Virginia Wexman: A History of Film
Richard Williams: The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion, and Internet Animators
Peter Wollen: Signs and Meanings in the Cinema
Robin Wood: Hitchcock’s Films
Personal Views: Explorations in Film
Yoda Yoshikata: Memories of Mizoguchi
Yoshimoto Mitushiro: Kurosawa
Zhang Yingjin: Chinese National Cinema
Zhen Ni: Memoirs of the Beijing Film Academy
Mitchel Zukoff: Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
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(Yoda’s is a little pocket book i like to turn to, only translated into French not English)
Other recommendations very welcome, especially from or about neglected countries
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01Dušan Makavejev
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02Charles Laughton
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03Kenji Mizoguchi
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04Jean Renoir
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05Jean Cocteau
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06Yoshishige Yoshida
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07Martin Scorsese
