What cinema books are you reading right now?
last book i read was ‘videodrome: studies in horror film’
i was in the middle of reading ‘toms,coons,mulatoes,mammies and bucks’, but i stopped reading it for a few reasons a couple of days ago. i’ll pick it back up some time in the future.
im trying to decide if i want to read this werner herzog/fitzcaraldo book or buy ‘10 best latin american films of the decade’ and start reading that.
my sister got me this as a present. It has some great stills all over the book (it’s Taschen, what would you expect :P), though the written content is a bit shallow at times. I can’t believe Norman McLaren didn’t even get a slight mention in the abstract cinema part!
Everything is Cinema- The Working Life of Jean Luc Godard by Richard Brody
Godard on Godard
two must reads for any Godard fan!
I NEED Film as a Subversive Art!
@filmbot
“though the written content is a bit shallow at times”
I fully agree on the writing in Art Cinema! Sadly the case in several of Taschen’s cinema series (Horror was awful and Erotic Cinema was also lacking, both in content and style)
“I NEED Film as a Subversive Art! "
Same here :(
Eros Plus Massacre- An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema by David Desser
Voices from the Japanese Cinema by Joan Mellen
Behind the Pink Curtain- the Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema by Jasper Sharp
Cinema, censorship, and the state: the writings of Nagisa Oshima by Nagisa Oshima, Annette Michelson, and Dawn Lawson
The films of Nagisa Oshima: images of a Japanese iconoclast by Maureen Cheryn Turim
I was leafing through the Farber collection the other day and suddenly realized that I really want to get it. Not so much because I’m in awe of his writing but because he writes about many films I’m interested in. Of course I’m open to discovering if he really is all he’s cracked up to be as a talent.
Just picked up PHAIDON’s awesome new book, TAKE 100- The Future of Film: 100 New Directors.
http://www.phaidon.com/store/film/take-100-9780714849553/
@Michael – How are the two Oshima books. Caught my interest when I saw your post.
@Danger – My that one is expensive! Is it huge like other Phaedon books?
@KNDY- yeah, it’s pretty bulky and kinda pricey… but it’s my holiday gift to myself! :) It’s worth checking out if you’re visiting your local bookstore.
I just finished tonight The Making of The Empire Strikes Back and I thought it was great! It’s around 351 pages and it’s by J.W. Rinzler. It’s loaded with photographs, pictures and paintings that went into the making of the film. Very detailed and quite a good read. It covers the film from it’s very beginning to it’s reception when it came out into the theaters. I learned in this book that George Lucas put a lot of his own money into Empire and would have failed financially speaking, if the film had been a bomb. I admire George Lucas for being able to control the production of his own film. I borrowed the book from my local library and I read a book just before that I had just bought which is one of those slim paperback BFI film classic books on Star Wars as well and thought that that was a good read too. That one was written by Will Brooker. It tackles such issues as the editing, sound design, cinematography, performances and the shots and how George Lucas was influenced by filmmakers such as Ford, Kurosawa and Godard. It also states how he had been influenced by documentaries and how Star Wars was not a departure from his previous film but rather a continuation of them.
Oh, by the way. There is another Star Wars book that Rinzler wrote three years ago about the making of the original Star Wars.
Kurosawa by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Yoshimoto is a genius but he’s extremely tough on the state of Japanese cinema studies and the critics who approach it. No methodology, identity claim or text is unscathed in his critique.)
Post-Theory by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll
Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from WWII to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film by Brian Locke
Just finished Cinema, censorship, and the state: the writings of Nagisa Oshima by Nagisa Oshima
Making Movies by Lumet
“Me And You And Memento And Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work” by J.J. Murphy, and the latest edition of the Journal of Screenwriting.
Finished Lumet’s book and read a short ‘diary’ by Tom DiCillo on the making and selling of Living in Oblivion
“Conquest of the Useless” – werner herzog
Yellow Future – Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema.
The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World by Ray Carney.
Not quite halfway through this one. It’s the first book I’m testing out on the Kindle.. I may start to save some shelf space after all.
While I think Carney is fairly spot on in his assessments, he tends to reiterate his case ad naseum. Still, well worth checking out for any Leigh fans.
Just finished J. Hoberman’s excellent An Army of Phantoms, the first of his projected Cold War trilogy. (The second, <iThe Dream Life about the 1960s, is already out.) This one covers the years 1945-1956, a great period for Hollywood movies (The Searchers, Rebel Without a Cause, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and really bad ones for Hollywood (HUAC, McCarthy, the Blacklist).
Also reading Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever. It’s entertaining.
Pascal Bonitzer – Le champ aveugle (translated version) (1982)
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto – Logic of Sentiment: The postwar Japanese cinema and questions of modernity (1993)
Both excellent, so far.
I’ve already read it, but it’s highly recommended:
Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination. (Verso, 1999) I’m just getting into it, but I can already tell that it’s a first-rate theorization of films involving anarchists; Porton is clearly less interested in films that are “anarchic” on their own aesthetic terms.
@FPoetic – How is the Kieslowski book? Thought about purchasing that one!
None at the moment. But that Greenaway book seems like an intriguing read.
My latest….
The Cinema Book Pam Cook.
Fatal Subtraction
Z. Bart
From University of Chicago Press—like our Criterion pals, they’re having a big sale right now—I just received Rosanna Maule’s “Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Spain, and Italy Since the 1980s.” Unwieldy title, but it looks like a cool study. Includes chapters on Pialat, Assayas, Salvatores, Amenabar, Besson, and Denis.