By Philip French
For almost part a century, Philip French's writing on cinema has been crucial examining for filmgoers, cinephiles, and an individual who enjoys witty, clever engagement with the large monitor. This assortment brings jointly the very best of French's movie writing from 1964 to 2009 and explores various subject matters, together with British cinema, the Addams kin, Satyajit Ray, Doris Day, Hollywood, and Hitchcock. A beneficiant and enthusiastic compilation, this e-book is an illuminating spouse to the realm of cinema.
Read Online or Download I Found It at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile PDF
Best film books
Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997
In 1897, Archibald Constable & corporation released a unique through the unheralded Bram Stoker. That novel, Dracula, has long past directly to turn into possibly the main influential novel of all time. To commemorate the centennial of that groovy novel, Carol Margaret Davison has introduced jointly this number of essays by means of the various world's major students. The essays examine Stoker's unique novel and rejoice its legacy in pop culture. the ongoing presence of Dracula and vampire fiction and movies offers facts that, as Davison writes, Dracula is "alive and sucking. "
"Dracula is a Gothic mandala, an unlimited layout during which a number of reflections of the weather of the style are configured in dependent units of symmetries. it's also a type of lens, bringing concentration and compression to various Gothic motifs, together with not just vampirism yet insanity, the evening, spoiled innocence, sickness in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the spoil, and the tomb. amassing up and unifying all that got here sooner than it, and casting its nice shadow over all that got here and keeps to come back after, its effect on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and movie is exclusive and impossible to resist. "
-from the Preface by way of Patrick McGrath
From Amazon: "For Nick James, the pleasures and virtues of this movie are combined and complicated. Its certain compositions and minimalist variety are entangled with a specific type of extravagant bombast. The complexities upload to the curiosity of this formidable movie. " Nick James is the editor of Sight and Sound journal.
The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema: The Films of Peter Weir
Interesting, enticing and provocative . .. This finely researched examine is a must-read for movie students, movie fans and an individual drawn to the religious dimensions of pop culture and well known leisure. Barbara Creed, Professor of monitor reviews, Head of the college of tradition and verbal exchange, collage of MelbourneA hugely unique paintings of scholarship .
The British Official Film in South-East Asia: Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong
This ebook explores the ways that the British legitimate movie used to be utilized in Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong from 1945 to the Seventies. Aitken uncovers how the British reliable movie, and British professional info companies, tailored to the epochal contexts of the chilly struggle and finish of empire. as well as an intensive advent, which touches on a few severe matters regarding the post-war British legit movie, the booklet presents an account of the way the culture of film-making linked to the British documentary movie circulation unfold into the zone throughout the post-war interval, and the way that culture was once contested through a ‘Colonial place of work’ culture of film-making.
- Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond
- Film Comment (March/April 2014)
- MCM C/Mixed Technologies and Thick Film Sensors
- Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion
- A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors)
Additional resources for I Found It at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile
Example text
British film critics are indeed forever proclaiming a renaissance, and this time they must be heartened at finding that for once they’re not standing alone. Yet each impending new birth has usually turned out to be a hysterical pregnancy. Whenever the cautious are tempted into optimism, they usually live to regret it. During 1962 for instance, Penelope Gilliatt had seen no sign of a rebirth and picked only one British film (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) among the year’s ten best. Yet she felt something stirring and wrote (and I would forbear from quoting her, were it not for the fact that her end-of-the-year comments are preserved between hard covers): I’m looking forward to the thrillers we are going to produce next year; directors like Cliff Owen (who made the pungent A Prize of Arms) are pulling them up by the bootstraps.
While the censor is rarely troubled in this way by imports from the United States, around two out of three American films leave on his floor a few hundred feet of violence of a kind that would scarcely disturb a sensitive youth in Dubuque, Iowa. Violence on the screen tends, I have said, to take its character and form (if often obliquely) from the mood of the time and place in which it originates. This operates in two ways. On one level is the creative artist responsive to the undercurrent of the society in which he works and reflecting it in his personal vision.
They also share another quality that is not so superficial: no other medium could have presented what is contained in these initial scenes so rapidly or with such impact – before, in fact, we had any knowledge of the characters or the story other than that which we bring from other films. I have dealt at such length with these two pictures because they highlight many of the ways in which violence is handled in the contemporary cinema, and because they help explain why there is and has been so much violence in the movies.