Over 240 pages you’ll find rare concept art like sketches, illustrations, character designs, storyboards, and so much more. Knopf, 2002) – confirmed that, even within the studio system, there were different lives being lived and different stories being told. First published in 1988, and thus the only one of my choices not first published in the 1960s (showing my age).

This book features storyboards, sketches, and animation cels back when traditional animation reigned supreme. The fifth chapter suggests studying the history of style as linked problems and solutions, and the approach is illustrated through a history of depth staging. This was my first exposure to the complexity, provocation and sometimes perversity of this French critic, a champion of cinephilic promiscuity and a brilliant expander of small, seemingly inconspicuous details into troubling symptoms. The first edition was published in 1986 and changed the way I thought about film acting and stardom. Each chapter also includes interviews with various cast and crew members who share their thoughts about working on the film.Moreover, the film also offers an object lesson in the use of cinematic style for narrative purposes. First, the book sketches a history of film interpretation, from the work of early critics through the rise of academic film studies in the 1960s and 1970s, ending in the great quantity of interpretive work that emerged in the 1980s.

Because of this you’ll often find a lot of talent in movie art books featuring concept art, vis dev art, and custom sets/props. Each lecture drew upon a wide array of examples and concluded by concentrating on one or two films as exemplary of a trend in cinematic style: Griffith’s Battle of Elderbush Gulch, Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm, Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu, and Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. Soshun is the most outstanding piece of film analysis in decades – based on only the first few minutes of the subject’s work. W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, since exceeded only by ‘Lulu and the Meter Man’ in Thomas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After.It doesn’t matter if you don’t admire all her raving and comminations; she is almost always a gas, and brought to film criticism an addictive combination of driven, garrulous intensity and loose-limbed, slangy intimacy. It’s a book of historiography, reviewing three major trends in understanding the history of film style: the orthodox position that emerged in the 1920s (and still governs most history-writing); a counter-position that emerged with André Bazin’s generation in France during the 1940s and 1950s; and a modernist wave that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, epitomized by the work of Noël Burch.

It has been translated into Chinese (Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 1995) and Spanish (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, 1999). Films and Feelings makes it because its extended chapter on the history of Franco-Anglo-American film criticism, ‘Auteurs and Dream Factories’, has yet to be bettered. It is very detailed with tons of rare production art, not to mention behind-the-scenes interviews and segments with the crew. Which ought to rule out The Invention of Morel, the inspiration for Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. In recent decades there has been no more cogent a rethinking of the physical and psychological experience of film as it evolved, both as a technology and as an artform.Though in need of updating, Robinson’s History is unequalled as a single-volume narrative primer on cinema’s evolution. Though he could get it wrong (as in his cranky dismissal of Citizen Kane), Agee’s intense moral engagement with cinema sets him far above critics who merely get it right. This is as sharp, witty and lacerating as all his best pictures; Buñuel’s observing eye turned into an act of reflective writing on his own life. Here’s the answer: the most radical, innovative and inventive tome of cinema study in the past quarter-century, boldly proposing a ‘figural’ approach that combines meaning with emotion, history with imagination.