Film Art: An Introduction

Product Information

You won’t find these interviews anywhere else and they offer some real insight into the filming process. Published to accompany a BFI documentary, this is a beautifully illustrated and very sharp-eyed tour through a century of American cinema by a true obsessive. I found this browsing for second-hand film books in Paris at the very moment I was first trying to figure out how the film industry worked.

The Pirates trilogy has become a staple of American culture and a beautiful look into a bygone era when pirates roamed the seas. For US critics of a certain age this is the most obvious choice, but there is no over This is the book that taught me about film language – not just the nuts and bolts of how it works, but the aesthetics. full sizeKristin Thompson and I grew concerned that film history textbooks didn’t reflect the growing scholarship in the field, particularly on early film and non-Western film.

This was the volume that made a god awful 26-hour greyhound bus trip to New York seem bearable – in fact, time well spent. e. disinterested in spheres like documentary cinema, the avant garde, sponsored films, amateur praxis, etc, which we consider all equal in importance and interest.

Because of this you’ll often find a lot of talent in movie art books featuring concept art, vis dev art, and custom sets/props. Leyda spent several years in the USSR in the mid-30s, studying at the world’s first film school, and assisting Eisenstein on his eventually banned film, Bezhin Meadow.Or almost any of her collections, really, but wasn’t she at her best when she had plenty of movies to love? There was only a handful of books on the cinema when I and my contemporaries (now aged 70+) became cinephiles after World War II: Paul Rotha’s seminal The Film Till Now (1930 and never updated by its author); Alistair Cooke’s lively anthology of criticism, Garbo and the Night Watchmen; several theoretical works (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Spottiswoode, Balázs, Arnheim); some dull sociological studies; and Manvell’s Pelican paperback Film. This was my first exposure to the complexity, provocation and sometimes perversity of this French critic, a champion of cinephilic promiscuity and a brilliant expander of small, seemingly inconspicuous details into troubling symptoms. The film must present us just enough of the story to keep us engaged, while holding back the answers to the puzzles—and sometimes, like a magician, distracting us from what is really going on. The competition isn’t fierce, but this book remains easily the best serious full-length study of a star.