Film Art: An Introduction

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Two essays from the 1940s are irreplaceable, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ and ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, both setting film in art’s longue durée. 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. Wiseman received permission to film at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, and he acted as sound recordist while his cameraman shot footage in the hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, and auditorium of the institution. A wealth of documents, but also Alain Bergala’s ever-clear, precise prose on one of the film-makers he knows best. This book is massive and offers a ton of concept art, character designs, and never-before-seen sketches from pre-production.

Although only covering developments prior to the 1960s, this is still the most essential publication out there on Japanese film. The saddest lacuna of all is Roger Tailleur (1927-85), an extraordinary prose stylist and encyclopaedic brain who, on a good day, makes Manny Farber seem like Harry Knowles. Some of these books are more recent while others date back a few years, but they all feature incredible concept pieces and inspiring behind-the-scenes resources. The single best reference work on the cinema I’ve dipped into, this ought to have become standard household issue. Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, as elegantly written as it was groundbreaking, made semiotics exciting and revealed the political and wider aesthetic context of film.

English-language film cultures have kept pace with French aesthetic philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, but forgot to check where film analysis itself went in France after the heyday of semiotics. We shall see that creating several protagonists does not necessarily make a film any less “classical” in its form and style. So, in a quite different but unforgettable way, did Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon (J.

How many Xeroxes of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ Screen article have I passed on, along with essays by P. I’m sure some future scholar will produce an admirable thesis comparing the changes in – and evolution of – what has come to be, along with everything else, a vicarious and incremental autobiography. This guide to the horror (1983 edition), science fiction (1984) and Western (1984) genres is addictive, exhaustive and unsurpassed. In an entirely different context, a trio of Hollywood autobiographies – Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer (Alfred A.This is the book that taught me about film language – not just the nuts and bolts of how it works, but the aesthetics. The main reason, incidentally, why I haven’t selected any collections in French by André Bazin or Serge Daney is the absence of any fully satisfying volume in the first case and too many possible candidates in the second. These are the books that I’ve lived with the longest (excepting Farber On Film), so I suppose they’re the ones that have had the most profound effect on me.