The Film Book: A Complete Guide to the World of Cinema

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There’s still no film autobiography to match it for style, audacity and insight – and it deserves to be recognised as one of the 20th century’s great memoirs. Yet he was equally a master of the short demolition job (Princess O’Rourke: “An unobtrusive raising of the window, and the less said the better”), while his clairvoyant appreciation of Zéro de conduite almost single-handedly put Jean Vigo on the map in the English-speaking world. Revised and augmented several times (most recently in 1989), it remains unsurpassed and is the high-water mark of auteurist criticism, with Andrew Sarris’ taxonomic masterpiece The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 a close runner-up. We didn't think Paddington, a beloved fictional character in children's literature, could get any cuter—and then we saw him on the big screen. This may be a poor translation of Bazin, inadequately edited, but it was my generation’s first contact with cinema’s greatest post-war critic-philosopher and the godfather of the French New Wave.

I don’t think this has been equalled as a record of a life in show business desperate to get into art. From old Hollywood to how franchises like Star Wars changed movie history, there’s a book here for any film lover! Frank Kermode defined the ‘classic’ in literature as a work that can be endlessly re-interpreted, according to the needs and interests of successive generations. His family is one of the richest and well-known families in the country, and his mother is not exactly welcoming of her son's new romance.Essential reading for anyone curious about the physics and metaphysics of film, this slender volume can be profitably revisited over a lifetime. Covering every national school of film-making from Hollywood to Bollywood, The Film Book has something for everyone. We consider these approaches preferable to the common and-then-and-then histories, as these are usually too industry-development-keyed – i.

One that got away: Hugh Fordin’s MGM’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit (Da Capo, 1996), which I lent to someone in 1976 and never saw again. 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. A masterpiece of stills photography that captures the world behind the movie camera, culminating in her extraordinary on-set pics of Marilyn and The Misfits.Bresson’s slender collection of jottings and aphorisms (“The ejaculatory force of the eye”; “The terrible habit of theatre”; “Don’t run after poetry: it penetrates unaided through the joins”) is a witty example of the virtues of brevity. Covering every national school of film-making from Hollywood to Bollywood The Film Book has something for everyone.