The Best Books About Film

[domino harvey]

Soderbergh, but duh doy I'd choose that one. I haven't read it but I'm tempted to pick it up myself. I don't know if it's available for you, but the Jerry Lewis one is extensive and very very theoretical

[jbeall]

Matt Zoller Seitz lists his essential film criticism library.

I've only read three of the books on this list, but then film criticism is a luxury for which I don't have the free time. (If I could just do grad school over again...) So I don't know how the rest of the forum will take this list, but just putting it there to see what happens.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Agee book on there is spectacular. I'm going to have to look up the Bogle book, that one sounds pretty fascinating. Other than that, no huge surprises, except maybe that there's no slot for Lotte Eisner.

[Dylan]

A friend of mine recently asked me for a book recommendation, and as somebody who hasn't read any books on this particular subject I felt like I should ask here. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

From my friend:

"I am writing my thesis on the indie film movement that started in the 90s, and are there any books I should definitely check out?"

Anybody know any particularly good or great books on this subject? Thanks in advance!

[Professor Wagstaff]

I'm quite fond of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures which covers the indie film scene at the time, but largely discusses how the Weinsteins monopolized the market and turned indie filmmaking into a brand.

[tarpilot]

I think I liked Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes but all I can really remember is a scattered bunch of amusing gossipy anecdotes, so take from that what you will

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Cinema of Outsiders by Emanuel Levy is a good overview.

[dadaistnun]

Christine Vachon's Shooting To Kill is a good read. It touches on several films she produced, but the section on Velvet Goldmine is particularly interesting in terms of budget issues (she & Haynes had something like a third of their budget cut after they had already begun filming) and trying to manage such a relatively huge cast & crew .

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Christine Vachon's Shooting To Kill is a good read. It touches on several films she produced, but the section on Velvet Goldmine is particularly interesting in terms of budget issues (she & Haynes had something like a third of their budget cut after they had already begun filming) and trying to manage such a relatively huge cast & crew .

Let me second that book as well. She more or less expresses a philosophy of independent film in the book so you could look at it as a manifesto of sorts. The sections on Poison, Safe, and Velvet Goldmine are all worth reading. Also, Faber's editions of the Hal Hartley screenplays are a good source for information. Tracking down the published editions of the I Shot Andy Warhol and Velvet Goldmine screenplays might be worth your time as well since the former features an intro from Harron and the latter an interview with Haynes.

[Numero Trois]

I'm not sure if the previous edition of this board mentioned The Cineaste Interviews vol. 1 & 2. Just finished up reading the first volume, which includes interviews from :

Satyajit Ray, Costa-Gavras, Bud Schulberg, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Sembene, Alain Tanner, Francesco Rosi, Roberto Rossellini, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Fassbinder, Paul Schrader, Agnes Varda, Bertrand Tavernier, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, Andrzej Wajda, John Sayles, Molly Haskell, Bruce Gilbert, John Berger, Krzysztof Zanussi, Glauber Rocha, Miguel Littin, Dusan Makavejev, Jane Fonda, Lina Wertmuller, Gordon Parks.

My favorites were the screenwriter interviews. John Howard Lawson discusses how complicit Hollywood was in destroying the first attempts at unifying all screenwriters under a single union. Jorge Semprun gives some insight into how an ex-Communist Party member becomes, if not an ex-Communist, at least an independent thinker.

The most dispiriting interview? Satyajit Ray, where he in passing mentions how little progress Indian cinema made during his more than thirty years in the industry.

[Noiretirc]

Book: French Cinema by Charles Drazin

Oh god I'm probably doing this all wrong. I'll get crucified won't I? I want to know what others here think of this book, and I could not locate anything about it in search criteria (which I probably did all wrong). Anyway, I bolded The Point of this post and perhaps I will be shown the way.

Edit: Ahaa!! Thank you Mod.

[MichaelB]

It's already been mentioned twice in this thread (albeit in 2006-7), but Gilbert Adair's recent death is the perfect excuse to highlight the fact that Flickers is one of the most idiosyncratic, often infuriating but endlessly stimulating and beautifully written film books ever published.

It's probably maddening if you're after a handy single-volume history of the cinema's first 100 years (prior knowledge of the subject isn't so much recommended as mandatory) but it's an absolute joy otherwise.

[zedz]

Seconded! Possibly one of the most provocatively ornery publications to come out around the centenary. And as Michael suggests, its impact sort of counts on the reader knowing and noticing what's missing from the picture.

[MichaelB]

I've just finished compiling a selection of Adair's Sight & Sound/Monthly Film Bulletin pieces, which I hope will go live on the S&S website this week. To say that this was one of my more enjoyable recent commissions is a major understatement.

[Mr Sausage]

I've just finished compiling a selection of Adair's Sight & Sound/Monthly Film Bulletin pieces, which I hope will go live on the S&S website this week. To say that this was one of my more enjoyable recent commissions is a major understatement.

I hope you provide a link when it does. Between you and zedz, I've become rather keen to actually read his stuff.

[MichaelB]

I've just finished compiling a selection of Adair's Sight & Sound/Monthly Film Bulletin pieces, which I hope will go live on the S&S website this week. To say that this was one of my more enjoyable recent commissions is a major understatement.

I hope you provide a link when it does. Between you and zedz, I've become rather keen to actually read his stuff.

I'll post it here.

And here's a taster in the form of his review of And Give Us Our Daily Sex, one of the soft-porn films that was depressingly common fare in British cinemas in the late 1970s, and which newcomers to the Monthly Film Bulletin had to review as a rite of passage. Most such reviews consisted of variations on a theme of "it's shit", but Adair was far more eloquent:

An inept if never unsalvageably bad sex comedy, whose meagre virtues include some possibly fortuitous echoes of Stolen Kisses, in the treatment of its adolescent hero, and Divorce Italian Style, in the faintly satirical portrait of his pompous, hair-netted father, as well as the exceptional beauty of the two lesbian nurses who, between them, rate at least ‘20’ on the Dudley Moore scale. For the English viewer, however, deprived of the adolescent hero’s long-awaited sexual baptism and beset by dubbing that goes to excruciating lengths in its doomed endeavours to synchronise Latin and Anglo-Saxon speech patterns, the degree to which José Larraz has capitalised on these assets must remain conjectural. The only scene of specifically cinematic interest is that in which Albert sneaks into a porn cinema: film-within-a-film distanciation being ingeniously effected by glimpses of grainy sex games even less competently shot than those of And Give Us Our Daily Sex itself. This allows Larraz to frame a handful of bored spectators in a head-on medium shot, momentarily confronting those of his own film with their melancholic mirror image.

That's part of an amuse-bouche selection of his capsule reviews: the much longer pieces that I've selected include reviews of Affaires Publiques (Bresson's little-seen slapstick comedy short), Amadeus, Carmen (Rosi), Class Relations, E.T., Ginger & Fred, Gregory's Girl, La Luna, The Oberwald Mystery, The Outsiders and Stalker, a 5,000-word profile of his friend and occasional collaborator Raúl Ruiz, his notorious Roland Barthes-inspired April Fool spoof 'The Nautilus and the Nursery', and a selection of his supposedly pseudonymous 'Heurtebise' columns, including a eulogy to Mike Leigh as the closest thing to a British Ozu, written at a time (1985) when he'd only made one cinema feature and lots of television.

[colinr0380]

It is nice to know that Adair seems to have noted Laura Gemser's (aka the one 'm' Emanuelle) charms in that review! He didn't happen to review Larraz's Britain-set Black Candles or Vampyres did he?

[MichaelB]

My nine-page Gilbert Adair tribute has just been published.

[jouvet]

Hi Noiretirc. For what it's worth, I don't like the Charles Drazin French cinema book much at all and can't recommend it. My main concern is that Drazin often ignores the large secondary literature on French film in favor of glib reviews from newspapers and the like. Ginette Vincendeau, for example, isn't cited or referred to once, for all the writing she's generated about French cinema over thirty years of research! She's hardly obscure or difficult to read, but in Drazin's section on Jean-Pierre Melville he opts for interview testimony (fair enough) and paper reviews rather than the dozens of articles and several books that exist on Melville -- snubbing Vincendeau's BFI book. This is inexplicable to me. Faber and Faber pushed the book really heavily, meaning it got lots of reviews, but it's not a major contribution to the field. Drazin's other major failing -- again, as Royal Tenenbaum would say: this is just one man's opinion -- is that he glosses over everything post-1968, rushing from Bresson to Besson, you might say, and doesn't get us much past the usual canonical texts. The 1970s and 2000s, two of French cinema's least systematically explored and most diverse periods, get short shrift.

For my money, get and read "Republic of Images" (origins to the 1990s) and "Brutal Intimacy" (1990s to today) and you've got a good historical basis.

Peacock: A long time since your post, but my belated response is that Udden's book is very strong, part of the whole historical poetics/Wisconsin approach: Hou considered on his own terms (stylistic, etc.), connected to the industry in Asia; an "active agent" but not a romanticized auteur, in other words. If you haven't yet picked it up, I recommend you do.

[Noiretirc]

Thank you for this, jouvet.

[Calvin]

Can anyone recommend a book on Eastern European cinema? I've found this but would like to get some informed opinions from here first!

[Dick Laurent]

I'm not familiar with that book, but if you want a great book about the czech movement get this

[MichaelB]

Can anyone recommend a book on Eastern European cinema? I've found this but would like to get some informed opinions from here first!

Oh, thanks for that - I didn't know it was out. I shall download the Kindle edition forthwith and get back to you.

It sounded like a very interesting project on paper: I was approached to contribute to it, but was insanely busy at the time.

[Calvin]

The eBook is cheaper direct but I suspect it's in ePub format.

I'm not familiar with that book, but if you want a great book about the czech movement get this

Thanks! That one looks pretty good.

[Mr Sausage]

The eBook is cheaper direct but I suspect it's in ePub format.

There are free programs that will easily switch the format for you.