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Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Melies's Trip to the Moon has a DVD with both the reconstructed version with commentary (by Matthew Solomon) and a German tinted (not hand-colored) version of the film (also with Solomon commentary). The disc is surely no substitute for the forthcoming Flicker Alley version, but just in case you are a completist or also wanted some scholarly and historical context...

I completely forgotten I'd pre-ordered Geoff Dyer's Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room until it turned up on my iPad's Kindle browser yesterday - happily, at the start of a 90 minute train journey, so I read it in one sitting.

Though I greatly enjoyed it, I suspect it will attract mixed reactions, and that's putting it mildly. In a nutshell, Dyer offers a commentary on Tarkovsky's Stalker, literally watching the film from beginning to end, describing it in fetishistic detail, and expanding on certain aspects, often through extensive footnotes. When the film ends, so does the book - it's as much about the temporal experience of viewing Stalker as it is about the film's content or context.

My advantage as a sympathetic reader is that I've been familiar with the film for as long as Dyer has - although he's nearly a decade older than me, I precociously caught the same first run at the Academy Cinema in 1981, and have probably notched up a similar number of viewings in various rep cinemas and on DVD (like him, I dutifully taped the 1989 Channel Four broadcast but could never bring myself to actually watch it!). I'm also the same nationality, which is another major advantage as the text is peppered with asides like this:

The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left - possibly the only one - where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary.

I suspect this kind of slangy, popular culture-saturated and strongly British approach would have driven Tarkovsky spare, but I also think that Dyer is fully aware of what he's doing and indeed why he's doing it - because one of his recurring observations is the way that Stalker echoes aspects of his own personal experience, of which Top Gear is naturally a part. Indeed, Leckhampton station, closed down in 1962, was his own childhood Zone:

The windows of the disused station building had been smashed and the rain had seeped in; it looked as if it had long ago fallen into decay. (It may have only been three or four years previously that the station closed down but this, to me, was half a lifetime ago.) Faded, rain-buckled, the timetable was still displayed - a memorial to its own passing. An empty packet of Player's cigarettes, the ones my mother smoked, with the face of the bearded sailor on the front, gone to a watery grave at the bottom of a puddle: frog-spawny, rust-coloured, pond-size, cloudy with gnats. The tracks had rusted, were overgrown with weeds, grass, stinging nettles, dandelions. Sometimes we followed them for a while, beyond the ends of the platforms, but never as far as the next station along the line - also abandoned - a couple of miles away, in Charlton Kings.

Here we are, says Stalker. Home at last.

In short, it's a bizarre and (I thought) rather beguiling mixture of film criticism, autobiography and psychogeography, and while I'd have thought prior familiarity with the film was absolutely essential to make anything out of it at all, the five-star rave on Amazon is by someone who's never seen Stalker and never intends to.

Thanks for the info MichaelB, i've got Zona on the way and am glad it sounds interesting/amusing.
It also sounds quite similar, in structure and intent, to Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones which takes a scene by scene, but highly personal approach, to Ozu's Late Spring. It's certainly worth a read if you haven't already picked it up.

Is City of Nets any good? I'm pretty interested in the blacklisting and all that politics and heard it casually thrown around recently.

Yes, absolutely, it's a great look at Hollywood in the 40s

Thanks, I know what I'm getting next pay check.

Tender Comrades is another good one one the blacklist, filled with first-person accounts. Looks like it's out-of-print now but there are some inexpensive used copies still for sale online.

Thanks for reminding me about City of Nets. I'll probably get to it right after Naremore's More Than Night which I've been inexplicably putting off for about three years now...

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

I don't have a Kindle but would quite happily spend £6 on this. Presumably it's just going to be a pdf file or something?

Now that we're about to move onto the 50s with the next lists project, are there any recommendations for this decade?

thirtyframesasecond wrote:Now that we're about to move onto the 50s with the next lists project, are there any recommendations for this decade?

Not directly film-related, but David Halberstam's the Fifties is HIGHLY recommended if you'll be watching a lot of Hollywood cinema from the decade

Movie Love in the 50s by James Harvey might be a good one as well.

I have that and wasn't too impressed with it

Ed Sikov's Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s is definitely worth checking out, if only for his analysis of Tashlin and the great Artists and Models.

I received this book this weekend. A glorious achievement. Really, everything I hoped it would be.
Absolutely required for any Bresson fan.

The Murnau Shadows book is out of print, but a couple of used copies at semi-reasonable (under $200) prices came up the last day.

I bought one. There's still another, apparently!

Wow, $70 is super tempting, even though the UMass library near me has that book. The Murnau scripts with handwritten alterations she copied into the back are fascinating.

As noted in the Tashlin thread (admin's prerogative to cross-post): my friend Ethan has a new book on Tashlin.

thirtyframesasecond wrote:Now that we're about to move onto the 50s with the next lists project, are there any recommendations for this decade?

Delayed response - my apologies - but Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror For England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence is a great book and has just been reissued. If you're interested in British cinema of the period, this is pretty much a must read.

Dr Amicus wrote:

thirtyframesasecond wrote:Now that we're about to move onto the 50s with the next lists project, are there any recommendations for this decade?

Delayed response - my apologies - but Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror For England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence is a great book and has just been reissued. If you're interested in British cinema of the period, this is pretty much a must read.

Here's the book page at Amazon USA.

Just a head's up to UK forum members, HMV have a random selection of Taschen books going realatively cheap in store. I picked up Michaelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films for £2, Jean Renoir: The Complete Films for £5, Alfred Hitchcock: The Complete Films for £7 and Japanese Cinema for £5. All are hardback except for the Antonioni book, and all are of Taschen's usual excellent aesthetic quality. There were a handful more such as a Stanley Kubrick: The Complete films for £7 and "the best films of the..." series each for £7.

The tenth edition of Film Art: An Introduction will be aided by a partnership with Criterion in terms of video essays to accompany parts of the book.

Drucker wrote:The Murnau Shadows book is out of print, but a couple of used copies at semi-reasonable (under $200) prices came up the last day.

I bought one. There's still another, apparently!

If enough people request it, hopefully NYRB will consider releasing it.

Starting tomorrow through Thursday, Indiana University Press will have a 50% off spring sale. Film books page here. They're the ones who published that Bresson anthology and Eros Plus Massacre.

Am I to assume if I go to either the Oxford St/Picadilly store, I'll be in luck?

I saw the Renoir for the same in an indie music store in Brighton the other week but couldn't face lugging it round with me. I'd love all these.

bigP wrote:Just a head's up to UK forum members, HMV have a random selection of Taschen books going realatively cheap in store. I picked up Michaelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films for £2, Jean Renoir: The Complete Films for £5, Alfred Hitchcock: The Complete Films for £7 and Japanese Cinema for £5. All are hardback except for the Antonioni book, and all are of Taschen's usual excellent aesthetic quality. There were a handful more such as a Stanley Kubrick: The Complete films for £7 and "the best films of the..." series each for £7.