By André Bazin
André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) were classics of movie experiences for so long as they've been to be had and are thought of the most useful within the box of movie feedback. even supposing Bazin made no movies, his identify has been essentially the most very important in French cinema because international struggle II. He used to be co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which lower than his management turned one of many world's such a lot exotic courses. Championing the movies of Jean Renoir (who contributed a quick foreword to quantity I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he grew to become the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to quantity II. This new version contains swish forewords to every quantity by means of Bazin pupil and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his position in modern movie examine. The essays themselves are erudite yet constantly obtainable, highbrow, and stimulating. As Renoir places it, the essays of Bazin "will live to tell the tale no matter if the cinema does not."
Read Online or Download What Is Cinema?, Volume 2 PDF
Best film books
Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997
In 1897, Archibald Constable & corporation released a singular by way of the unheralded Bram Stoker. That novel, Dracula, has long past directly to turn into might be the main influential novel of all time. To commemorate the centennial of that groovy novel, Carol Margaret Davison has introduced jointly this selection of essays by way of a few of the world's major students. The essays research Stoker's unique novel and have a good time its legacy in pop culture. the ongoing presence of Dracula and vampire fiction and movies offers evidence that, as Davison writes, Dracula is "alive and sucking. "
"Dracula is a Gothic mandala, an enormous layout within which a number of reflections of the weather of the style are configured in stylish 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, illness in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the wreck, and the tomb. collecting up and unifying all that got here ahead of it, and casting its nice shadow over all that got here and keeps to return after, its impact on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and picture is exclusive and impossible to resist. "
-from the Preface through Patrick McGrath
From Amazon: "For Nick James, the pleasures and virtues of this movie are combined and complicated. Its distinctive compositions and minimalist variety are entangled with a specific form of extravagant bombast. The complexities upload to the curiosity of this bold movie. " Nick James is the editor of Sight and Sound journal.
The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema: The Films of Peter Weir
Interesting, attractive and provocative . .. This finely researched learn is a must-read for movie students, movie enthusiasts and someone drawn to the non secular dimensions of pop culture and well known leisure. Barbara Creed, Professor of display stories, Head of the varsity of tradition and communique, college of MelbourneA hugely unique paintings of scholarship .
The British Official Film in South-East Asia: Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong
This publication explores the ways that the British authentic movie used to be utilized in Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong from 1945 to the Seventies. Aitken uncovers how the British professional movie, and British respectable details enterprises, tailored to the epochal contexts of the chilly battle and finish of empire. as well as an intensive creation, which touches on a few severe concerns concerning the post-war British respectable movie, the booklet presents an account of the way the culture of film-making linked to the British documentary movie circulation unfold into the quarter through the post-war interval, and the way that culture was once contested by means of a ‘Colonial place of work’ culture of film-making.
- Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
- French Cinema: A Critical Filmography, Volume 2: 1940–1958
- Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930-1945: Reading Between the Frames
- The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen (2nd Edition) (Directors' Cuts)
- My Movie Business: A Memoir
Additional info for What Is Cinema?, Volume 2
Sample text
Better still, although the styles are so different, 38 All Aesthetic of Reality the narrative follows basically the same pattern in Citizen Kane and in Paisa. In short, although they use independent techniques, without the least possibility of a direct influence one on the other, and possessed of temperaments that could hardly be less compatible~ Rossemni and Welles have, to all intents and purposes, the same basic aesthetic objective, the same aesthetic concept of realism. I had leisure enough as I watched the film to compare the narrative of Paisa with that of some modem novelists and short story writers.
There is a burst of gunfire in the distance. From a highly elliptical conversation we gather that the Germans have shot the fishermen. 3. The dead bodies of the men and women lie stretched out in front of the little farmhouse. In the twilight, a half-naked baby cries endlessly. Even with such a succinct description, this fragment of the story reveals enormous ellipses--or rather, great holes. A complex train of action is reduced to three or four brief fragments, in themselves already elliptical enough in comparison with the reality they are unfolding.
Ve are familiar with what Sam Wood did to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Basically all he wanted was to retell a plot. Even if he had been faithful to the originaL sentence by sentence, he would not, properly speaking, have transferred anything from the book to the screen. The films that have managed to translate something of the style of novels into images can be counted on the fingers of one hand, by which I mean the very fabric of the narrative, the law of gravity that governs the ordering of the facts, in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos.