Books

Review
“Geoff King’s important book stands with the best scholarship I have seen on this vital, constantly evolving subject.” — —David Sterritt, author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Review

“In its dialectical relationship with the commercial mainstream, the independent film is distinguished by its more complex or decentered narrative structure. This hardheaded study, full of stats and stories, starts with the industrial context in which the US’s independent cinema has operated, especially since the mid, 1980s — an institutionalization that, according to King, makes it ‘easy to over — romanticize an earlier and supposedly purer notion of independence.’ The study springs to life in its close analyses of individual films and directors. It is even more valuable for its treatment of minor works than for its insights into the work of John Cassavetes and David Lynch, especially on the distinguishing formal devices. One chapter applies genre theory to this diversity.Read More »

From the preface:

How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? This book argues that shot-by-shot analysis is the best way for film students to learn about and appreciate the filmmaker’s art. Having taught film studies for many years, Marilyn Fabe has learned that viewers trained in close analysis of single film sequences are better able to see and appreciate the rich visual and aural complexity of the film medium. Close analysis unlocks the secrets of how film images, combined with sound, can have such a profound effect on our minds and emotions.Read More »

By Liv Ullmann
(Translated by the author in colloboration with Gerry Bothmer and Erik Friis)

Published by Knopf, 1977
(Origianly published in Norwegian as Forandringen, 1976)

Quote:

She opens herself to us as she writes about working with Bergman (“No studio is as silent as his… To film with Ingmar is long stretches of happiness where everything seems real”): about living with Bergman (“His dream was the woman who had been created in one peice, but I crumbled into bits and pieces if he wasn’t careful”):about travelling with him: about his monumental genius and idiosyncrasies; She lets us feel the almost overwhelming flow of her own feelings for her young daughter; She tells us about her first love, about the husband she left, the family she came from, the people she relies on..Read More »

Everyone seems to know what film noir is, but scholars and critics cannot agree on any definition. Some go so far as to insist that there is no such thing. What is Film Noir? claims that this confusion arises from the fact that film noir is both a genre and a period style, and as such is unique in the history of Hollywood. The genre, now known as “neo-noir,” continues into the present, while the period, which began in the early 1940s, had expired by 1960. William Park surveys the various theories of film noir, defines the genre, and explains how film noir relates to the style and the period in which it was created. The book corrects several common misconceptions: that film noir was an afterthought, that Hollywood was not conscious of what it was creating, and that film noir is too amorphous to be a genre. Park also provides a very useful theory of genre and how it relates to film study.Read More »

Description:
Bataille’s reflections on art and its relations with human inner experiences.
(Essay in English.)Read More »

The fruit of years of painstaking study, Pat Brereton’s Hollywood Utopia is a landmark in the emerging field of ecological media criticism. The more urban human societies become, the more our media reflect upon the landscapes, the animals and the fragile unities of our planet. Of no media formation is this more true than of Hollywood, as Brereton argues in this meticulously researched and carefully organised work. Far from trashing the planet, Hollywood films have, Brereton claims, a tradition stretching back to the 1950s of care and concern for humanity estranged from its roots, and a world at risk of destruction. Through innovative analyses of Jurassic Park, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, Star Trek, Terminator 2 and Blade Runner among countless older and newer films, Brereton traces a utopianism often overlooked in traditional film criticism. Not only films with explicitly Green agendas like Emerald Forest and Medicine Man, but in films noted for far different qualities exhibit the saving grace of nature.Read More »

Table of Contents
Preface 9
Introduction
European Cinema: Conditions of Impossibility? [2005]

National Cinema: Re-Definitions and New Directions
European Culture, National Cinema, the Auteur and Hollywood [1994]
ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries [2005]
Film Festival Networks: the New Topographies of Cinema in Europe [2005]
Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s [2005]

Auteurs and Art Cinemas: Modernism and Self- Reference, Installation Art and Autobiography
Ingmar Bergman – Person and Persona: The Mountain of Modern Cinema on the Road to Morocco [1994]
Late Losey: Time Lost and Time Found [1994]
Around Painting and the “End of Cinema”: A Propos Jacques Rivette’s
La Belle Noiseuse [1992]
Spellbound by Peter Greenaway: In the Dark … and Into the Light [1996]
The Body as Perceptual Surface: The Films of Johan van der Keuken [2004]
Television and the Author’s Cinema: ZDF’s Das Kleine Fernsehspiel [1992]
Touching Base: Some German Women Directors in the 1980s [1987] Read More »

amazon.com:
The one book, Nov 11 2002Reviewer: “anticinema” (Hollywood, CA
Hollywood, CA United States)

It is a new century, a new reality… Hail the new art form! one that will only 100 years of life awaits to be fully and beautifully exploited by new kinds of filmmakers, artists, philosophers, dreamers and siners!

This is the one book you need to read to fully understand the capabilities of Cinema as a true art form, not an obscene business.

Thank you Mr. Geuens, blessings to your creatively anarchic mind.Read More »

Third Cinema is a cinema committed to social and cultural emancipation. In this book, Mike Wayne argues that Third Cinema is absolutely central to key debates concerning contemporary film practices and cultures. As a body of films, Third Cinema expands our horizons of the medium and its possibilities. Wayne develops Third Cinema theory by exploring its dialectical relations with First Cinema (dominant,commercial) and Second Cinema (arthouse,auteur). Discussing an eclectic range of films, from Evita to Dollar Mambo, The Big Lebowski to The Journey, Amistad to Camp de Thiaroye, Political Film explores the affinities and crucial political differences between First and Third Cinema. Third Cinema’s relationship with Second Cinema is explored via the cinematic figure of the bandit (Bandit Queen, The General, Eskiya). The continuities and differences with European precursors such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Lukacs, Brecht and Walter Benjamin are also assessed. The book is a polemical call for a film criticism that is politically engaged with the life of the masses.Read More »