Print quality is fantastic so you’ll be able to make out every little detail of the concept paintings. This is great for concept artists who want to study other artwork and use that as a springboard to evaluate work quality. Print quality is fantastic and the book is pretty large measuring just over 13″ tall. There’s a lot of text and plenty of cast/crew interviews to keep you busy beyond just the pictures. In June 1999, I was invited by the Cultural Office of Munich to present a series of lectures at the splendid ArriKino. 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 ElderbushGulch, Sjöström’s IngeborgHolm, Hawks’ HisGirlFriday, Mizoguchi’s LifeofOharu, and Tykwer’s RunLolaRun.

full sizeAn effort to propose a poetics of popular film, while also celebrating a tradition I love. It’s also a mix of academic film history and film analysis with a looser, more informal writing style. Writing it was quite hard, since the subject kept changing from week to week: new films, a fresh crisis in the industry, another batch of books and articles, a new wave of information bursting off the Net. But I hope both fans and nonspecialists find some of it worthwhile. Other Hong Kong pieces are noted in the articles section. When Last Year at Marienbad was first shown in 1961, many critics offered widely varying interpretations of it. When faced with most films, these critics would have been looking for implicit meanings behind the plot. But, faced with Marienbad, their interpretations were attempts simply to describe the events that take place in the film’s story. These proved difficult to agree on. Did the couple really meet last year? If not, what really happened? Is the film a character’s dream or hallucination? full sizeAnother venture into poetics, this time concentrating on international stylistics. 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. A fourth chapter brings the story up to date, concentrating on “revisionist” work in early cinema (Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Kristin Thompson, Ben Brewster, etal.). Each chapter offers some criticisms. 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.full sizeIt was inevitable, once my old friend Noël Carroll came to Madison’s philosophy department in 1991, that we’d wind up collaborating. This anthology was an effort to gather a range of work in film theory, film analysis, film history, and the philosophy of film which seemed not to fit into the agenda canonized in academic cinema studies. The field had become defined by anthologies claimed that poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and multiculturalism was where the action was—a Big Theory that was best qualified to explain cinema. So this book tries to suggest that there are alternatives: analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, close analysis of films, social theory that recognizes transcultural affinities, and empirical history. We hoped to open a dialogue with what the discipline took as its leading edge. Several essays in Post-Theory have been translated into various Eeuropean languages. Hollywood churns out the finest talent in visual arts and it’s the largest entertainment center anywhere in the world. 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. Also be advised: at least in my copy (8th edition), the included CD-ROM does not function properly unless your computer has a PowerPC processor. Like Last Year at Marienbad, Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected (more correctly translated as Innocent Unprotected) diverges markedly from the norms of classical narrative filmmaking. In analyzing the film, it is useful to think of its form as a collage, an assemblage of materials taken from widely different sources. By playing up the disparities among the film’s materials, the collage principle permits Makavejev to use film techniques and film form in fresh and provocative ways. The result is a film that examines the nature of cinema — particularly, cinema in a social and historical context.

full sizeMy third book-length director study, again seeking to do several things at once. First, it gives an overview of Eisenstein’s cinematic work—the films he made, the theories he generated. Taking him as a director trying to fuse theory and practice, I analyze his theoretical writings and all of his films. Secondly, as usual, the book tries to put the director into a pertinent context. Traditionally he is thought of as Comrade Film Constructivist, cinema’s Rodchenko or Mayakovsky. But this doesn’t allow for what he did after 1930, except to consider it a sad decline into official art. Film art and filmmaking. Film as art : creativity, technology, and business -- Film form. The significance of film form ; Narrative as a formal system -- Film style. The shot : mise-en-scene ; The shot : cinematography ; The relation of shot to shot : editing ; Sound in the cinema ; Summary : style as a formal system -- Types of films. Film genres ; Documentary, experimental, and animated films -- Critical analysis of films. Film criticism : sample analyses -- Film history. Film art and film history There’s a lot of magic in the Lucasfilm art department and you get a sneak peek into this world with The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.I’ve added online supplements to the published chapters, with the advantage of color illustrations. Film theorist André Bazin has written of John Ford’s Stagecoach: “ Stagecoach is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection… Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position.” This effect results from the film’s concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal. It has some nicely presented and helpful examples and film stills, but these aren’t particularly great.