The Best Books About Film

[der_Artur]

Hi,

I'm in search of a book not about movies but about audiences. And not from a reception studies standpoint, but from an economic. I'm interested in research concerning especially so called "arthouse audiences", covering not only standard demographic topics, but also answering questions like "what does this audience expect from a movie?", "What are its preferred modes of consumption in regard of time, place, medium?" and so on...

[Dr Amicus]

Martin Barker's books cross the boundaries between economic analysis and reception studies (actually, as you seem to do so in your question) - his books on Crash and Judge Dredd have much of interest.

There is also an excellent book on post-war British audiences, which I have but can't remember the title of. I'll check next time I'm at my storehouse (also known as my parents...). It manages to bring in a study of chocolate tastes in Vienna to 'explain' art house tastes.

[Michael]

Now reading The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film by Jeffrey Couchman. Another nice reminder of what a great film TNOFTH is.

[Ovader]

There is a new English translation by Timothy Barnard of What is Cinema? available in Canada which claims to be the definitive translation of Bazin's selected essays over other English translations which was discussed here.

[King Prendergast]

They won't ship it to the US though. {|=

[domino harvey]

Just wait for Amazon.ca to carry it I guess?

[King Prendergast]

Here's a good dossier on the new translation and the recent renewed interest in Bazin. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/offscreen/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[denti alligator]

I just read and thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Mulhall's philosophical essays on the Alien quartet published by Routledge in their "Thinking in Action" series. On Film, it's called.

[Donald Brown]

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber is due in September from the wonderful Library of America.

[Highway 61]

Wow. Nice work LOA. I assumed they were done with film criticism after Agee and the Lopate anthology. So glad to see that they seem to have a firm commitment now to film writing.

[Vic Pardo]

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber is due in September from the wonderful Library of America.

Wow, that's a must-have book. Thanks for the heads-up.

Allow me to recommend a couple to everybody, two of the best books on film by authors not known for writing about film:

"The Devil Finds Work," by James Baldwin, in which he writes a lot about his reactions to movies (and Harlem's reactions) when he was growing up, including great bits on Bette Davis and Sylvia Sidney, among others, plus a section on THE DEFIANT ONES.

"Screening History," by Gore Vidal, in which he mixes his personal and childhood history with the movies of the time in a broad commentary on the way history is treated in the movies.

I wish Joan Didion had written a nonfiction book about film during her life. She still has time, but I doubt one will be forthcoming. Her novel about Hollywood, "Play It as It Lays," is pretty good. (I've taped the film version, but never watched it.) Her late husband wrote a couple of books on film, but as I read them, I kept wishing his wife had written them. She has a much sharper eye for the details of that particular culture than he does.

[King Prendergast]

Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle is the best work of Grand Theory, as David Bordwell perjoratively calls it, to come out in years; probably since Deleuze.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

What do you mean by perjorative? The book sounds quite interesting. What would Bordwell have against it?

[psufootball07]

Braudy and Cohens Film Theory and Criticism provides insight into film scholarship and critical methods/movements. Some good stuff on Eisenstein, a couple of Bazin articles, Kracauer's Caligari to Hitler and Auteur theory.

[Matt]

What do you mean by perjorative? The book sounds quite interesting. What would Bordwell have against it?

You should read this essay. Alas, the complete text is not available on Google Books, but you should be able to find the book in a library.

[King Prendergast]

What do you mean by perjorative? The book sounds quite interesting. What would Bordwell have against it?

You should read this essay. Alas, the complete text is not available on Google Books, but you should be able to find the book in a library.

Matt provides the relevant citation. Also see Bordwell's Making Meaning. Beller's main thesis--that cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been constructed by capital as productive labor--is totally anathema to the Bordwellian approach to film studies; i.e. formal/stylistic analysis.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

What do you mean by perjorative? The book sounds quite interesting. What would Bordwell have against it?

You should read this essay. Alas, the complete text is not available on Google Books, but you should be able to find the book in a library.

Matt provides the relevant citation. Also see Bordwell's Making Meaning. Beller's main thesis--that cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been constructed by capital as productive labor--is totally anathema to the Bordwellian approach to film studies; i.e. formal/stylistic analysis.

Thank you very much, guys. It sounds like it's worth a read. I was interested in the Debord angle, but this also sounds like some feminist media theory I've read (if I recall correctly). By the way, I also second Braudy and Cohen's Film Theory and Criticism. It's a huge book, but the content was quite valuable.

[King Prendergast]

Beller is very much a Debordian, lots of Society of the Spectacle quotes, and a committed feminist, but that comes out more in some of his other work; Cinematic Mode is more strictly Marxist materialist. The Braudy-Cohen collection is full of a lot of canonical stuff; for another collection that is all Grand Theory (i.e. what Bordwell is arguing against), see Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen, who also wrote Change Mummified, which is quickly becoming the most important work of film theory/scholarship of this decade.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Is Change Mummified the future of film criticism for now or just another theory du jour? I'm curious because I love Bordwell (good style and clear analysis) but a Debordian reading of the film could be valuable - although I don't know it's limitations yet as I've been shown those of an Adornian reading which I find too limiting - because looking isn't just a pure analysis and is based on its biases or preferences. So then a Debordian analysis of those socially constituted preferences or biases could work. I mean, I wouldn't boil it all down to capital, but it's certainly there.

[King Prendergast]

Well it's 450 pages so it's not one thing; its history, historiography, theory, etc. A really important work of scholarship in film studies. It certainly has more of a Grand Theory-streak than Bordwell; and if you are a die-hard Bordwellian I guess you should avoid the Beller. It is everything Bordwell hates in the sense that Marx and Lacan have a pretty large presence in the book. It's also dense, challenging reading; unlike the Intro to Film 101 style of Bordwell.

[foggy eyes]

for another collection that is all Grand Theory (i.e. what Bordwell is arguing against), see Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen

That collection's not that "grand" - for one thing, I bet Bordwell didn't kick Kristin out the house for her Excess essay!

[King Prendergast]

for another collection that is all Grand Theory (i.e. what Bordwell is arguing against), see Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen

That collection's not that "grand" - I bet Bordwell didn't kick Kristin out the house for her Excess essay, for one thing!

Well Bordwell himself has an essay in there, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures," but that book has long been the one-stop shopping for all your 1970s-theory (aka Screen theory) needs. Its got all the usual suspects of Grand Theory: Metz, Wollen, Barthes, MacCabe, Mulvey, Willemen, Silverman, Kristeva, Baudry, Lyotard, Heath, Comolli. Not to mention the title itself pretty much sums up the raison d'etre of theory in this period.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Well it's 450 pages so it's not one thing; its history, historiography, theory, etc. A really important work of scholarship in film studies. It certainly has more of a Grand Theory-streak than Bordwell; and if you are a die-hard Bordwellian I guess you should avoid the Beller. It is everything Bordwell hates in the sense that Marx and Lacan have a pretty large presence in the book. It's also dense, challenging reading; unlike the Intro to Film 101 style of Bordwell.

I'll have to look into it. Thanks for the info, Prendergast.

[Dr Amicus]

For those interested in English comedy, Andy Medhurst's A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities is excellent [Disclaimer: Andy was my Doctoral supervisor].

Film is only part of his coverage - namely the Carry Ons, Mike Leigh, George Formby, Frank Randle - and there is also coverage of television (including an interesting chapter on The Royle Family) and stand-up. His basic argument - that comedy is a site for communal coming togetherness and thus popular comedy can reveal something about culture(s) (note the plural 'identities' in the title). The first third of the book is basically the theoretical approaches being used and terms being defined, the rest of the book specific examples. It's not a difficult read at all, but mainly because the theoretical approaches are made the servant of the analysis, not its master.

And it's often very funny...

[King Prendergast]

For a more sympathetic synoptic history of Grand Theory than Bordwell's Making Meaning, see D.N. Rodowick's The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. In fact, see all of Rodowick's work; he's one of the best around these days.