essay books or films

Books Vs. Movies: Similarities and Differences Essay

Books vs. movies – introduction, similarities between books and movies, difference between books and movies, works cited.

This paper examines the similarities and differences between books and movies. Although both tell stories and evoke emotions, they also have distinct characteristics. For example, books rely on the reader’s imagination, while movies present a pre-determined visual interpretation. Another difference between books and movies is that books typically offer a more in-depth exploration of characters, while movies may prioritize visual spectacle over character development. Despite these contrasts, both books and movies have the power to entertain, educate, and inspire. This essay compares and contrasts the two products in detail and provides examples from famous works.

Books and movies are two of the most important mediums for communicating ideas to an audience. The two can be used for various purposes, including entertaining and informing. Books make use of written words to communicate with the reader. On the other hand, movies utilize audio-visual technology to communicate with the viewing audience. Books and Movies have several significant similarities and differences.

A major similarity is that both books and movies set out to tell stories that are often fascinating to the audience. Regardless of which medium is being used, efforts are made to create stories that are going to be engaging to the reader or viewer. For both movies and books, the story is a central part, and the authors or directors come up with themes and plotlines that can captivate and entertain the audience (Bordwell and Staiger 262). By using elements such as characters, setting, conflict, and resolution at the end, book authors and movie directors can come up with successful stories.

Another similarity is that both books and movies make great use of characters through whom the story is told. Bordwell and Staiger note that the characters used must be well suited to the story, and they must be clearly distinguished from one another (262). They are given personalities and used to fulfill the key elements of the story being told through the book or the movie. In most cases, it is the characters that make the audience regard a movie or book as superior or inferior.

A significant difference between books and movies is in the manner in which the visual images are created. When reading a book, the reader has to use his/her imagination to create a visual image from the words contained in the book (Mayer 17). For example, in the Harry Potter books, the reader is required to form his/her own image of the various magical creatures. On the other hand, movies present the reader with a ready visual image. In the Harry Potter Movies, the images of creatures such as trolls and goblins are presented to the audience. The imagination of the viewer is not required since the movie makers have already created the image they want the audience to have.

Books and movies differ in the level of detail provided. In books, the author spends a lot of time providing details of characters, events, objects, and places. These lengthy descriptions are necessary to help the reader to create a mental image of the story. With movies, there are no lengthy details used. Movies do not have to engage in detailed descriptions since a complicated image can be shown in a single movie shot. Mayer notes that a movie can, within the span of a few seconds, graphically show a mass of details to the viewer (17).

Books and movies are both adequate means of telling a story. While the two make use of different technologies to communicate with an audience, they have some similarities. These include the use of stories and the reliance on characters to tell the story. However, the two have major differences in terms of the level of imagination required of the audience and the use of details. Overall, books and movies are important communication mediums that play a great role in our society.

Bordwell, David, and Janet Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. NY: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Mayer, Robert. Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Books Vs. Movies: Similarities and Differences Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/books-vs-movies-similarities-and-differences/.

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Essays About Films: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Get ready to binge-watch some of the best films of all time and write essays about films with our essay examples and prompts. 

Films are an exciting part of the entertainment industry. From romance to science fiction, there is a film genre for everyone. Films are a welcome escape from reality, providing a few hours of immersive entertainment that anyone can enjoy. Not only are films masterful works of art, but they are also great sources of employment for many. As a work of intellectual property, films can promote job creation and drive economic growth while advancing a country’s cultural esteem. With such a vast library of films available to us, many topics of discussion are available for your next essay.

5 Intriguing Film Essays

1. scream therapy: the mental health benefits of horror movies by michael varrati, 2. reel truth: is film school worth it by jon gann, 3. why parasite’s success is forcing a reckoning in japan’s film industry by eric margolis, 4. streaming services want to fill the family movie void by nicole sperling, 5. church, critics say new movie on marcos family distorts philippine history by camille elemia, 10 engaging writing prompts on essays about films, 1. the best film that influenced me, 2. the evolution of animated films, 3. women in modern films, 4. creating short films, 5. diversity in films, 6. film critique of my favorite film, 7. how covid-19 changed the film industry, 8. promoting independent films , 9. importance of marketing strategies in films’ success, 10. how to combat film piracy.

“Galvanized by the genre’s ability to promote empathy and face down the ineffable monsters of our daily lives, Barkan’s exploration of how others use horror to heal and grow speaks to the wider impact of our engagement with these movies that are so often dismissed as having little moral value.”

Initially criticized for enabling sadistic tendencies, horror films are now proven to provide a relieving experience and psychological ease to their audience. Numerous theories about the mental health benefits of watching horror films have emerged. But beyond these profound reasons, horror films could be a great source of thrilling fun. You might also be interested in these essays about The Great Gatsby .

 “These programs are great at selling the dream of filmmaking, but rarely the realities of the business, so students graduate with few real-world skills, connections, or storytelling ability. Unable to get a job out of school, newly minted “filmmakers” go back into the system for a higher graduate degree… The cycle is self-perpetuating, and rarely benefits anyone, except the institution’s bottom line.”

One has to weigh several personal and external factors in determining whether a full degree would be worth the leap and their pockets. Directors spill the beans on their thoughts and experiences with film school to help the lost find their way. 

“Japanese cinema was trending on Japanese Twitter right after the Oscars, with cinephiles and film directors alike airing grievances about a film industry that is deeply flawed despite ample talent and a global appetite for Japanese goods.”

The Japanese lamented their lackluster film industry and waning cultural influence worldwide as the first Korean film took home the Oscars. Reminiscing its golden years of film in the mid-20th century, Japan is stricken with nostalgia. But for the industry to see a renaissance, Japan has to end exploitative labor conditions for creators and censorship.

“The decline today is due to a combination of factors: a hangover from the pandemic, efforts by studios like Disney and Paramount to bolster their own streaming services with fresh content and the risks of greenlighting family films that aren’t based on well-known intellectual property.”

The latest trend in the race to rule film streaming compensates for the lack of family movies in theaters. Giant video-on-demand platforms have started rolling their production and investments into the genre plans for animation and even expensive live-action.

“The film… has amplified existing online narratives that portray the elder Marcos’ presidency as the “golden era” of the Philippines rather than as the darkest chapter of the Southeast Asian country’s recent history, as critics allege.”

A film in the Philippines draws crowds and criticisms for revising facts in one of the country’s most painful periods. But, overall, the movie paints a positive image of the dictator’s family, whose two-decade reign was marked by murders and an economic crisis that was among the worst to hit the country.

Beyond being a source of entertainment, films have the power to shape how we lead our lives and view the world. In this essay, talk about the film that etched an indelible mark on you. First, provide a summary and specify what drew you to the story or its storytelling. Next, narrate the scenes that moved you the most. Finally, explain how you relate to this film and if you would have wanted a similar or different ending to your story and personal life. 

Animated films used to be a treat mainly for children. But now, their allure cuts across generations. For your essay, look into the history of animated films. Find out which countries are the biggest influencers in animated films and how they have fostered these intellectual properties to thrive in global markets. Research how the global direction of animation is heading, both in theatrical releases and streaming, and what animation fans can expect in the next few months.

Have the roles of women progressed in modern films? Or do they remain to be damsels in distress saved by a prince? Watch recent popular films, explain how they depict women, and answer these questions in your essay. Take note of apparent stereotypes and the depth of their character. Compare how they differ from the most popular films in the 90s. You can also compare original films and remakes and focus on the changes in women characters.  

Short films are great starting points for budding directors. They could require much less financing than those in theater releases and still deliver satisfactory quality content. For this essay, brief the readers through the stages of short film production — writing the script, choosing the cast, production, marketing, and so on. To go the extra mile in your essay, interview award-winning short filmmakers to gain tips on how they best optimize their limited budget and still bag an award.  

Has the film industry promoted diversity and inclusivity in its cast selection? Explore recent diverse films and analyze whether they have captured the true meaning of diversity. One example is when people from underrepresented backgrounds take on the leading roles, not just the story’s sidekicks. You can also build on this research by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers to show the revenue challenges non-diverse films face at the box office.

Watch your favorite film and write a critique by expressing opinions on various aspects of the film. For example, you can have comments on the plot, execution, effects, cinematography, actors, and dialogue. Take time to relay your observations and analysis, as these will be the foundations that will determine the strength or weakness of your comments. 

As it has impacted many of us, COVID-19 accelerated how we watch films. Explore the exodus to streaming during the pandemic and how theater operators cope with this shift. In addition, you can look into how the competition among content producers has shifted and intensified. 

Independent films can be a hidden treasure, but it could be difficult to sell them, given how niche their concepts can be. So, find out the best strategies that have worked wonders for now successful independent filmmakers. Specifically, learn how they marketed their content online and in film festivals. Then, find out what forms of support the government is extending to high-caliber independent filmmakers and what could be done to help them thrive.

The biggest mistake made by filmmakers and producers is not marketing their films when marketing is the best way to reach a bigger audience and gain profits to make more films. This essay should provide readers with the best practices filmmakers can adopt when marketing a film. For example, directors, producers, and actors should aggressively attend events for promotion. Developing viral movie campaigns also provide a big boost to exposure. 

As more films are released digitally, filmmakers must better protect their intellectual property. First, write about the needed measures before the film release, such as adopting a digital rights management strategy. Next, lay down what production companies need to do to deter piracy activities immediately. Some good responses include working closely with enforcement authorities.

Don’t forget to proofread your essay with Grammarly , the best grammar checker. 

For more related topic ideas, you can also check our guide for writing essays about cinema .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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The best film books, by 51 critics

Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written? This was the question we asked 51 leading critics and writers, and their answers are printed here in full.

☞ Read Nick James’ introduction ☞ See the top five

• Sight & Sound reviews the latest film books every month.

Geoff Andrew , Peter Biskind , Edward Buscombe , Michael Chanan , Tom Charity , Ian Christie , Michel Ciment , Paul Cronin , Richard Dyer , Olaf Möller , Christoph Huber , Lizzie Francke , Philip French , Chris Fujiwara , Graham Fuller , Charlotte Garson , Tom Gunning , Philip Horne , Kevin Jackson , Nick James , Kent Jones , Richard T. Kelly , Mark Le Fanu , Toby Litt , Brian McFarlane , Luke McKernan , Geoffrey Macnab , Adrian Martin , Peter Matthews , Geoffrey Nowell-Smith , Michael O’Pray , John Orr , Jonathan Rosenbaum , Sukhdev Sandhu , Jasper Sharp , Iain Sinclair , David Thompson , David Thomson , Kenneth Turan , Armond White Updated: 8 May 2020

This is an unabridged version of the Film Book poll published in the June 2010 issue of Sight & Sound

Jean-Pierre Melville

Index of contributors

Geoff Andrew Michael Atkinson Peter Biskind Edward Buscombe Michael Chanan Tom Charity Michel Ciment Kieron Corless Mark Cousins Paul Cronin Chris Darke Maria Delgado Geoff Dyer The Ferroni Brigade Lizzie Francke Philip French Chris Fujiwara Graham Fuller Charlotte Garson Tom Gunning Philip Horne Kevin Jackson Nick James Kent Jones Richard T. Kelly Mark Le Fanu Toby Litt Brian McFarlane Luke McKernan Geoffrey Macnab Adrian Martin Peter Matthews Sophie Mayer Henry K. Miller Kim Newman Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Michael O’Pray John Orr Tim Robey Nick Roddick Jonathan Romney Jonathan Rosenbaum Sukhdev Sandhu Jasper Sharp Iain Sinclair David Thompson David Thomson Kenneth Turan Catherine Wheatley Armond White

Geoff Andrew

Head of film programme, BFI Southbank, UK

Note : Publication dates are for first edition only, except where specified. However, votes for a particular title are collected together no matter what the edition (with the exception of Geoff Dyer’s voting for all five editions of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film).

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Peter Wollen, Secker & Warburg, 1969

A Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson, Secker & Warburg, 1975

Hitchcock’s Films Robin Wood, A.S. Barnes & Co, 1965

The Making of Citizen Kane Robert L. Carringer, University of California Press, 1985

Mamoulian Tom Milne, Thames & Hudson, 1969

Michael Atkinson

Critic, USA

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 Andrew Sarris, Doubleday, 1968

A Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson

Vulgar Modernism J. Hoberman, Temple University Press, 1991

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments James Agee, McDowell, Obolensky, 1958

Magic and Myth of the Movies Parker Tyler, Simon & Schuster, 1970

PLUS: Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s Edited By Jim Hillier Confessions of a Cultist   Andrew Sarris The Phantom Empire   Geoffrey O’Brien Durgnat on Film   Raymond Durgnat Science Fiction Movies   Philip Strick The Hollywood Hallucination   Parker Tyler Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies   Manny Farber The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building   Parker Tyler Film as a Subversive Art   Amos Vogel Dictionary of Films   Georges Sadoul Cinema: A Critical Dictionary Edited By Richard Roud On the History of Film Style   David Bordwell City of Nets   Otto Friedrich Visionary Film   P. Adams Sitney Hitchcock   François Truffaut Who the Devil Made It   Peter Bogdanovich Signs and Meaning in the Cinema   Peter Wollen

Peter Biskind

Author/critic, USA

The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era Thomas Schatz, Pantheon Books, 1988

I Lost It At the Movies Pauline Kael, Little, Brown, 1965

Final Cut Steven Bach, William Morrow, 1985

Indecent Exposure David McClintick, William Morrow, 1982

A Life Elia Kazan, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988

↑  Back to contributors’ list

Edward Buscombe

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Peter Wollen

The founding work of so-called Screen theory – which is where I came in, although it has now left me behind, or me it – is still a pretty enjoyable read today. Back in 1969 when it was first published, it was, like Martin Peters, ten years ahead of its time.

Hitchcock’s Films Robin Wood

Its opening sentence – “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” – strikes just the right note of courteous provocation in its determination to reorient our view of popular cinema. Although I disagree with much of it, Wood always demands to be taken seriously.

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 Andrew Sarris

The Bible of the dedicated cinephile when it was first published in 1968, and still an invaluable route map of what needs to be seen.

Horizons West: Studies in Authorship in the Western Jim Kitses, Thames & Hudson, 1969

Here I have to declare an interest, in both senses: an enduring love of the Western, and a role in editing the much-expanded second edition of 2004. The best book of criticism bar none on the most important film genre.

The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era Thomas Schatz

First published in 1988, and thus the only one of my choices not first published in the 1960s (showing my age). A marvellously subtle and informative account of the way the Hollywood film industry worked in its heyday and a book I wish I’d been able to write myself.

Michael Chanan

Academic, UK

The Technique of Film Editing Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, Focal Press, 1953

This is the book that taught me about film language – not just the nuts and bolts of how it works, but the aesthetics. But I forgot that I’d read it (as an undergraduate, when I was first thinking of making films) until many years later, when I first started teaching film and rediscovered it. Now I recommend it to all my students, whether they’re interested in practice or theory.

The World Viewed Stanley Cavell, Viking, 1971

A book I found so captivating I devoured it in a single night. As a postgrad studying aesthetics, I was enthralled to find an English-language philosopher who understood cinema! At the end I felt it had said practically everything it needed to say. An exaggeration, of course, but for a while I was convinced.

The Camera and I Joris Ivens, International Publishers, 1969

Like all autobiographies, Ivens’ leaves certain things out, but it’s a great testimony to political commitment and full of wisdom about the nature of documentary, which Ivens calls “a creative no-man’s land”. Very inspiring.

Hitchcock François Truffaut, Simon & Schuster, 1967

I enjoyed this immensely, though largely because it seemed to me to explain why I didn’t really care much for Hitchcock.

Histoire économique du cinéma Pierre Bachlin, La Nouvelle Edition, 1947

I found this browsing for second-hand film books in Paris at the very moment I was first trying to figure out how the film industry worked. Bachlin was a Marxist, and this was the first rigorous analysis of the industry I’d discovered that made real sense to me. It seems symptomatic that the book has never been translated into English – neither has the film writing of the Italian Marxist Umberto Barbaro (which I read in the translation published in Cuba by the ICAIC).

Tom Charity

Lovefilm and CNN.com, Canada

Hitchcock François Truffaut

These were the most inspirational books to me as a film student (as was Truffaut’s The Films in My Life). If the first edition of Robin Wood’s study hadn’t been so seminal for me, I would now choose Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, because it shows how critical engagement is a lifetime’s process, always evolving as we mature. The Hitchcock interview book has probably inspired more film books than any other, including, I assume, the entire Faber ‘Directors on Directors’ series.

This is Orson Welles Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, HarperPerennial, 1992

This is probably my favourite of the many books on Welles.

John Ford: The Man and His Films Tag Gallagher, University of California Press, 1986

Substantially revised in 2007 and made available for free download, this is exemplary film criticism, a book Ford would have delighted in deriding yet kept close by his bed, I’m sure.

But let’s have the original 1975 edition, when it was really something.

Ian Christie

Professor of Film History, Birkbeck, UK

Frank Kermode defined the ‘classic’ in literature as a work that can be endlessly re-interpreted, according to the needs and interests of successive generations. These are the books that I find myself returning to again and again, usually finding new information and insights that I hadn’t previously noticed.

Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Cinema Jay Leyda, Allen & Unwin, 1960

Surely one of the greatest books about a national cinema ever written? Leyda spent several years in the USSR in the mid-30s, studying at the world’s first film school, and assisting Eisenstein on his eventually banned film, Bezhin Meadow. And those ‘witnessed years’, as he calls them, are the fulcrum of the book. But the whole sweep of Russian cinema up to the years just after Stalin’s death are vividly chronicled by Leyda. We may know much more today about what really happened, but Leyda’s judgements were shrewd and his sheer enthusiasm is still infectious.

The book that every young film snob carried around or even memorised in the early 70s – just in case you might catch a rare Edgar Ulmer B movie in a rep cinema (yes, that’s how we saw films maudits in those days). Sarris’ classification of directors on different levels – from the ‘Pantheon’ to ‘Lightly Likeable’, via ‘Expressive Esoterica’ and ‘Less than Meets the Eye’ is imprinted on my attitude to American cinema, and I still have to argue in my head with Sarris’ unforgettably snappy put-downs. Sarris was far more influential than Chabrol, Truffaut and co., I’m sure, in shaping the British politique des auteurs.

What is Cinema? André Bazin, translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967 (Volume 1) and 1971 (Volume 2)

This may be a poor translation of Bazin, inadequately edited, but it was my generation’s first contact with cinema’s greatest post-war critic-philosopher and the godfather of the French New Wave. After first swallowing Bazin whole, I turned against his Catholic humanism, but I find myself returning to him almost every week to check something, to argue with him, and often to agree.

Circles of Confusion Hollis Frampton, Visual Studies Workshop, 1983

Frampton wasn’t just the high priest of ‘structural cinema’, with his cerebral but playful masterpieces, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia), but a superb essayist on classic photography and on the ontology of film as “the last machine”. This long-unfindable book (now revived in a new edition) brings together essays that can stand alongside those of Borges, Barthes and just about anyone who helped shape it.

A Life in Movies Michael Powell, Heinemann, 1986

After years of professional disappointment, Michael Powell decided to write a passionate no-holds-barred autobiography that would tell the story of cinema as the 20th century’s folk art from the standpoint of one who had helped shape it. There’s still no film autobiography to match it for style, audacity and insight – and it deserves to be recognised as one of the 20th century’s great memoirs. Apart from conveying what it felt like to be at the top of the game (and sliding to the bottom in the second, equally fascinating volume, Million Dollar Movie), it also provides dozens of shrewd judgements on film-makers who are only now being discovered.

Five is not enough! It leaves no room to mention Ray Durgnat’s crucial book, A Mirror for England, that staked a claim for British cinema when few film enthusiasts in Britain cared; or Rachael Low’s pioneering seven-volume history of British cinema from the very beginning to, alas, only 1939, although Low is a treasure trove of discoveries still being made. Or Dan Talbot’s eclectic Film: An Anthology (1966), a stirring alternative to Ernest Lindgren and Paul Rotha, which first introduced me to writings by Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Gilbert Seldes and Erwin Panofsky. Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, as elegantly written as it was groundbreaking, made semiotics exciting and revealed the political and wider aesthetic context of film. And what about the writing that was never in book form when it was most influential? How many Xeroxes of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ Screen article have I passed on, along with essays by P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson and many others, before film books became common?

Michel Ciment

Editor, Positif, France

What is Cinema? André Bazin

An anthology of the best French film critic of the 1940s and ’50s.

A groundbreaking interview book and a model of its kind.

A Life Elia Kazan

The best autobiography (with Bergman’s) of a theatre and film director.

Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Todd McCarthy, Grove Press, 1997

A perfect example of the critical biography: informed, never complacent, analytical and with a superb knowledge of the industry background.

Viv(r)e le cinéma Roger Tailleur, Institut Lumière, 1997

Personal Views: Explorations in Film Robin Wood, Gordon Fraser, 1976

Two volumes of selected film criticism by two inspirational critics, from France and England respectively.

Kieron Corless

Deputy Editor, Sight & Sound

Abel Ferrara Nicole Brenez, University of Illinois Press, 2006

Poétique du cinématographe Eugène Green, Actes Sud, 2009

Notes on the Cinematographer Robert Bresson, Editions Gallimard, 1975

Fassbinder’s Germany Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam University Press, 1996

Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies Manny Farber, Da Capo Press, 1998 (expanded edition)

Mark Cousins

Critic and filmmaker, UK

Who the Devil Made It?: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema Edited By Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, BFI, 1994

Notes on the Cinematographer Robert Bresson

Currents in Japanese Cinema Tadao Sato, Kodansha Int, 1982

Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis Barry Salt, Starword, 1983

Paul Cronin

Writer / filmmaker, UK

On Directing Film David Mamet, Viking, 1991

A beautiful, idiosyncratic articulation of the job of the film director. Eisenstein for the new millennium.

The Technique of Film Editing Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar

There is no better explanation of what it’s all about. Theory and practice intersect at craft.

My Life and My Films Jean Renoir, Collins, 1974

Autobiography and common sense.

Film: A Montage of Theories Edited Richard Dyer, MacCann, E.P. Dutton, 1966

A definition of film theory: anything written about the cinema.

Film as a Subversive Art Amos Vogel, Random House, 1974

Because he has spent the past 60 years opening up new worlds to us.

Chris Darke

The Republic Plato

Cinema was invented in the fourth century BC with the Myth of the Cave, a thought experiment illustrating the hard-won virtues of education via a parable of perception and knowledge. Socrates’ mise en scène depicts underground captives facing a wall on which the light of a fire casts lifelike shadows, which they mistake for reality. The question of whether we should believe our eyes (or any of our senses) is dramatised in a setting that uncannily predicts cinema. The Cave is the first work of film theory, and considerably more readable than most examples of the genre written since.

Illuminations Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955

For ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), a jazz standard of an essay that writers have riffed on (and ripped off) ever since. Benjamin was one of the first people to grapple with the question of how art is transformed by technology, supposedly sacrificing ‘aura’ for accessibility. A modernist rapture over the possibilities of the film image – deathlessly described as “an orchid in the land of technology” – is palpable throughout.

In his clarity of expression and the way he develops theoretical ideas from specific examples, Bazin was a truly great writer on cinema. Two essays from the 1940s are irreplaceable, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ and ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, both setting film in art’s longue durée. Should one want to get a handle on the thorny philosophical question of ‘faith’ in the image in the digital era, Bazin is the first go-to guy…

The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord, Buchet-Chastel, 1967

…and Debord is the second. Platonic mistrust of mere appearances goes into late-1960s overdrive here, but Debord’s analysis remains astonishingly prescient given that the spectacle – described as “the other side of money” – is now the element we live in. And while cinema is inevitably compromised by its fundamental role in this state, it should be remembered that Debord was also a master of the found-footage film.

The Invention of Morel Adolfo Bioy Casares, Editorial Losada, 1940

There’s no shortage of novels deserving of a place on the shelf, including Shoot! Or the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio by Luigi Pirandello (1916), pretty much everything by Don DeLillo, and Me, Cheeta by James Lever (2008). Three rules for great novels about film: 1) they needn’t be ‘great novels’; 2) they should concern themselves less with the intrigues of filmmaking than with cinema as a metaphor for the modern condition; 3) they must remain resolutely unfilmable. Which ought to rule out The Invention of Morel, the inspiration for Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Bioy Casares was a friend and collaborator of Borges, and his 1940 fantasy shares his quizzically metaphysical character and was inspired by the author’s Louise Brooks fixation. A fugitive finds his way to an unnamed island, discovers he has unexpected company, sees two suns rise, and observes how, with the aid of Dr Morel’s magical machine, space and time can be irretrievably altered. Borges called the plot “perfect” – if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

Maria Delgado

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky, The Bodley Head, 1986

Poetry as cinema, cinema as poetry. One of the best books on artistic endeavour and the craft of film-making. Just beautiful.

Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema After Franco John Hopewell, BFI, 1986

The first book to really explore what had happened to Spanish cinema post-Franco, rooting the argument in a discussion of how film-making had functioned under El Caudillo’s dictatorship. Still indispensable.

Letters François Truffaut, translated by Gilbert Adair, Faber & Faber, 1989

A funny, droll, incisive, idealistic and perceptive collection of letters to friends and collaborators, colleagues and film-makers he admired (and fell out with).

The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema Martin Walsh, edited by Keith Griffiths, BFI, 1981

I picked it up as an undergrad and never looked back.

Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society Richard Dyer, BFI, 1986

The first edition was published in 1986 and changed the way I thought about film acting and stardom.

I would restrict my choice to the various editions (the fifth, I believe, is forthcoming) of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film. I’m sure some future scholar will produce an admirable thesis comparing the changes in – and evolution of – what has come to be, along with everything else, a vicarious and incremental autobiography. In that context, even Thomson’s diminishing interest in cinema – or current cinema at any rate – becomes a source of fascination. The Dictionary is not only an indispensable book about cinema, but one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time. It deserves a shelf to itself.

The Ferroni Brigade aka Christoph Huber & Olaf Moller

Critics, Austria/Germany

Dictionnaire du cinéma Edited by Jacques Lourcelles, Laffont, 1993

The only general dictionary we trust: absolutely partisan while commendably catholic in its scope and taste – just check out the list of auteurs worth discussing more deeply at the very end of the second edition from 2003.

Lignes d’ombre: une autre histoire du cinéma soviétique (1926-1968) Edited by Bernard Eisenschitz, Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2000

Histoire du cinéma Naz i Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars, Eric Losfeld/Éditions Le Terrain Vague, 1972

Two tomes that (should have, at least) changed the way we think about film history; two attempts to understand the (extra)ordinary in film cultures deemed totalitarian and therefore artistically irrelevant by our unquestioning middlebrow culture and its collaborators high and low.

Enciclopédia do Cinema Brasileiro Edited by Fernão Ramos and Luiz Felipe Miranda, Senac São Paulo, 2000

Anschluß an Morgen and Das tägliche Brennen Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald, Residenz Verlag, 1997 and 2002

Two exemplary ways of making sense of a national film culture: the first is an encyclopedia that invites the seeker to find his or her own way through a labyrinth of myriad relationships; the second offers creative criss-cross readings of topoi and obsessions through various decades, genres and political systems. We consider these approaches preferable to the common and-then-and-then histories, as these are usually too industry-development-keyed – i.e. disinterested in spheres like documentary cinema, the avant garde, sponsored films, amateur praxis, etc, which we consider all equal in importance and interest.

Mauritz Stiller och hans filmer 1912-1916 Gösta Werner, Norstedt, 1969

Leo McCarey: sonrisas y lágrimas Miguel Marías, Nikel Odeon, 1999

The value of the late Gösta Werner’s work lies in its author’s age: he was old enough to have seen many a Stiller work now (considered) lost, meaning his memories are probably as close as we’ll ever get to these films. Marías’ McCarey monument is of interest and dear to us as an instance where the best analysis of an essential oeuvre was written and published in a language other than that of the auteur in question.

Soshun: Früher Frühling von Ozu Yasujiro Helmut Färber, Eigenverlag des Autors, 2006

Red Cars y David Cronenberg, Volumina, 2006

Put them in your apartment and feel the atmosphere change for the better. Soshun is the most outstanding piece of film analysis in decades – based on only the first few minutes of the subject’s work.

Zur Kritik des Politischen Films: 6 analysierende Beschreibungen und ein Vorwort “Über Filmkritik” Peter Nau, DuMont Buchverlag, 1978

Der lachende Mann: Bekenntnisse eines Mörders Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, Verlag der Nation, 1966

Criticism and agitation, reflection and documentation, theory and praxis.

Lizzie Francke

Development Producer, UK Film Council, UK

On Film-making Alexander Mackendrick, Faber & Faber, 2004

The Cinema Book Edited by Pam Cook, BFI, 1985

Suspects David Thomson, Secker and Warburg, 1985

Philip French

Critic, Observer, UK

Film Roger Manvell, Pelican, 1944

There was only a handful of books on the cinema when I and my contemporaries (now aged 70+) became cinephiles after World War II: Paul Rotha’s seminal The Film Till Now (1930 and never updated by its author); Alistair Cooke’s lively anthology of criticism, Garbo and the Night Watchmen; several theoretical works (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Spottiswoode, Balázs, Arnheim); some dull sociological studies; and Manvell’s Pelican paperback Film. First published in 1944 and constantly revised over the next decade, Manvell’s marvellous book covered all aspects of cinema and was the one book that all of us owned. Affordable, deeply serious, clearly written, it gave us our first filmographies, 15 frame blow-ups from Battleship Potemkin and a cinematic canon that we eagerly accepted and then rebelled against.

When this original paperback appeared in 1965, the first full-length study of Hitchcock in English, I wrote in my Observer review: “It is an important publication that sets an altogether new standard for critical books on the cinema in this country.” Revised and augmented several times (most recently in 1989), it remains unsurpassed and is the high-water mark of auteurist criticism, with Andrew Sarris’ taxonomic masterpiece The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 a close runner-up.

The Parade’s Gone By Kevin Brownlow, Secker & Warburg, 1968

Few people have done so much to revive interest in silent cinema and none has written so well about it as Brownlow. This beautifully produced book, the first and most essential volume in a trilogy on American cinema before the coming of sound, is based entirely on evidence gathered at first hand and mostly illustrated by photographs from the author’s own collection. It’s an informative delight to read and look at and the kind of thing that gives passionate enthusiasm a good name.

The Film Encylopedia Edited by Ephraim Katz, Crowell, 1979

First published in 1979, this is by some way the best, most wide-ranging single-volume reference book on the cinema ever written. Entirely the work of one man, an Israeli documentarist resident in New York, it has been updated, though sadly not improved, since Katz’s untimely death at the age of 60 in 1992. It should be kept within easy reach by anyone interested in the cinema, whether writer or film fan.

The Last Tycoon F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1941

The cinema as a subject for fiction has attracted serious writers ever since Luigi Pirandello’s Shoot! was published in 1915, and there are 50 or 60 examples on my shelves, gathered over the years for a book I’ll now never write. The best novel of recent years is Theodore Roszak’s astonishing Flicker (1991), while the finest on British cinema is Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet (1945), but greatest of all is Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at his death in 1940 and superbly edited by his friend Edmund Wilson.

Chris Fujiwara

Rivette: Texts and Interviews Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, BFI, 1977

A manifesto for a revolutionary cinema, this compact selection of talks with and essays by Jacques Rivette includes his seminal text on Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Godard on Godard Jean-Luc Godard, edited and translated by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1972

It may not always be obvious from reading Godard’s early reviews that the writer would become a film-making giant, but it’s clear he could inspire five or six others to do so.

Every page of this slim volume – the Pascal’s Pensées of film – is filled with riches. Opened at random: “To your models: ‘You must play neither someone else, nor yourself. You have to play no one’”; “Neither director, nor film-maker. Forget that you’re making a film”; “Slow films in which everyone gallops and gesticulates; quick films in which people hardly move”; “Your film must be like the one you see while shutting your eyes.”

It launched and defined an era of cinephilia in the United States.

Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies Manny Farber

The only reason I list this edition instead of 2009’s Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings is that the smaller collection is the one I spent years marveling at, puzzling over and taking comfort from as from a favourite food.

Graham Fuller

The Parade’s Gone By Kevin Brownlow

The History of World Cinema David Robinson, Stein and Day, 1973

The Haunted Screen Lotte Eisner, Le Terrain Vague, 1952

Suspects David Thomson

Working on The Movie, a multi-volume history of the cinema published in weekly parts at the start of the 1980s, I found the first four books on this list not only remarkable for their scholarship and practical use, but as sources of magic – Eisner’s not least because of the dread-heavy stills and the electrifying chapter on G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, since exceeded only by ‘Lulu and the Meter Man’ in Thomas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After. Though in need of updating, Robinson’s History is unequalled as a single-volume narrative primer on cinema’s evolution. The Parade’s Gone By is the most accessible of Brownlow’s great books about silent film, though I could as easily have picked The War, the West and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence.

Thomson’s Dictionary was a revelation when it first appeared 35 years ago because it doubled as a work of reference and (brilliant) criticism – it remains indispensable. Thomson was a historian writing like a novelist and so it was logical that he would eventually weave fiction with history in the serpentine Suspects, from which one can learn more about the iconography of film noir than from many worthy textbooks.

That’s five – and still I’m missing The BFI Companion to the Western and Hollywood Babylon.

Charlotte Garson

Critic, Cahiers du cinéma, France

Encompasses all film book categories: interview, yes, but also memoir, monograph, theory, picture book…

It’s always fruitful to go back to Bazin’s writings, less as a theoretician than as a critic (with theoretical intuitions that are sometimes hazardous).

The first film book I ever read.

Eric Rohmer Pascal Bonitzer, Cahiers du cinéma, 1991

Along with Bazin’s unfinished Jean Renoir this is one of the best monographs I know on any director.

Film: A Sound Art Michel Chion, Columbia University Press, 2003

Godard au travail: Les années 60 by Alain Bergala A wealth of documents, but also Alain Bergala’s ever-clear, precise prose on one of the film-makers he knows best. (Also, in French: Nul mieux que Godard, an anthology published by Cahiers du cinéma on Godard and edited by Bergala.)

La Maison et le monde by Serge Daney The anthology (in two volumes) of the Cahiers and Liberation French critic offers a panoramic view of the changes French criticism went through from the 1960s to the ’90s.

My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film by Jean Cocteau

The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics By William Rotman

John Ford hors-série , Cahiers du cinéma

Mikio Naruse by Jean Narboni

Sul cinema By Roland Barthes , edited by Sergio Toffetti Only in Italy are Barthes’ writings on film collected!

Tom Gunning

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, USA

Film Form Sergei Eisenstein, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt Brace, 1949

Visionary Film P. Adams Sitney, OUP, 1974

The World Viewed Stanley Cavell

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Siegfried Kracauer, Princeton University Press, 1947

Philip Horne

Prater Violet Christopher Isherwood, Methuen, 1945

The best novel I know on the film-making process, set in the 1930s and dealing (as if from the experience of ‘Christopher’ himself) with the career of Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann, whose genius is thrillingly evoked.

One of the great landmarks, a meeting of two film cultures, two languages, two personalities – full of omissions and evasions, but richly suggestive, and a demonstration that criticism and creation can enter into a significant dialogue.

A Life in Movies Michael Powell

Powell was a major film-maker who could write and who cared immensely and generously for literature and art – this magnificently vivid, self-dramatising yet wonderfully responsive first volume of his memoirs brings to life one eccentric but steely Englishman’s journey to greatness.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy John Boorman, Faber & Faber, 2003

Like Powell, Boorman can write like a dream as well as direct films like Point Blank and Deliverance “in a state of grace”, and this wise, intensely sympathetic, informative, amusing, moving account of his globe-spanning trajectory from Carshalton via L.A. to Galway is a classic.

After three decades of use, it’s an old companion, rather taken for granted and occasionally irritatingly prejudiced (eg on Ford), as well as funny and endlessly suggestive about avenues to explore; but whatever reservations it inspires (and expresses) it’s a grand example of appreciative, impassioned, intelligent, encyclopaedic criticism that shaped a generation or two of film watchers.

Kevin Jackson

Godard on Godard Jean-Luc Godard

A thrilling confection of passionate advocacy, youthful extremism, ardent love and lofty disdain. The one film book I crammed into my suitcase to keep me company when I went to live abroad for a couple of years; every dip into its pages offered something to think about, wonder at or silently dispute. So what if it borders on eccentricity, and then crosses the borders? It turns up the old mental rheostat every time. Well worth it even if you don’t much care for his films, and all the more so if you do.

Doesn’t everyone enjoy these interviews? Highly informative when read innocently, highly entertaining when read for the implied drama: the hero-worshipping young man (who is no dummy, mind), paying court to the urbane old master who seems to give so much away, and yet, cunning trickster/shaman that he is, really yields nothing that could be used in court against him. The dialogue as artform.

Reeling Pauline Kael, Little, Brown, 1977

Or almost any of her collections, really, but wasn’t she at her best when she had plenty of movies to love? And wasn’t the 1970s the period of cinema she loved best? This was the volume that made a god awful 26-hour greyhound bus trip to New York seem bearable – in fact, time well spent. 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. Has anyone ever managed that balance as well?

A miracle. How could anyone – especially someone with a boring day job, and before the video/DVD age – have seen so much, noticed so much, understood so much, remembered so much at such a young age… and then written about it in a prose style of such idiosyncratic verve, lyricism and aphoristic pith? Not just one of the best film books, one of the best later 20th-century books of criticism of any medium. A monument.

Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers Antonia Quirke, Fourth Estate, 2007

Plus one: this lightly fictionalised memoir of film criticism, love affairs and the quest for beauty and perfection is so funny that it often makes you bark with laughter. Plus two: it is also an achingly serious discussion about why movies can be so potent, about the way they shape our fantasy lives and so our real lives, about how it really does matter whether or not you can love Withnail & I. Plus three: Quirke has an effortless knack for the mot juste; eat your liver, Flaubert. A potent and delicious cocktail.

Editor, Sight & Sound

Like most people in the unique position of foreknowledge of what others have said, I have avoided the choices that now seem obvious in this survey. My list is therefore devised partly to champion books neglected by everyone else.

A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1970

I first encountered Durgnat’s seminal book by proxy in the stirring poetic quotes from it that turned up regularly in the reviews of old British films in London listings magazines. It was out of print by the time I wanted to buy it, but I found a copy on my first trip to New York in 1982 (along with Kings of the Bs), devoured it, then lent it to a friend and never saw it (or him) again. So it’s as mysterious a treasure for me as, say, any film seen and loved years ago and not re-encountered since – though of course there’s a copy in the BFI library just three floors down from my office. Call it deferred gratification.

Melville on Melville Edited by Rui Noguera, translated by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1971

This most inspiring of interview texts is at least as fine a demonstration as Truffaut’s Hitchcock of why the Q&A format is so often more revealing than the mediated profile article or book. As befits his flinty films, Melville is a pugnacious, affectionate and slightly melancholy observer: sanguine and unequivocal about the daring with which his films were made. He gives a cool insight too into the rich inheritance of pre-war French cinema that declined post-war into the cinéma du papa so decidedly trashed by Truffaut. Towards the book’s end, Melville says, “I estimate the final disappearance of cinemas to take place around the year 2020.” Let’s hope he’s not right.

The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette James Monaco, OUP, 1976

Again, for me this book was about self-education. Not at all professionally involved in film when I bought it, I wanted something to help a London art student get more out of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette. And if it was as puzzling in its way as some of the films seemed at the time, then that only intrigued me more, as any introduction to so important a subject should.

The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy Robert B. Ray, Harvard University Press, 1995

Judging from this survey few, if any, colleagues seem to share my enthusiasm for Ray’s attempts to break out of the cul-de-sacs of postmodern film theory, but I find his use of surrealist randomising and brainstorming games to generate new perspectives on classic Hollywood and other material stimulating, imaginative, informative and very entertaining, both here and in his more recent The ABCs of Classic Hollywood.

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium Gilberto Perez, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998

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. I want to read it again, soon.

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber Manny Farber, Library of America, 2009

King Vidor, American Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, University of California Press, 1988

The American Cinema Andrew Sarris

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage Stanley Cavell, Harvard University Press, 1981

These are the books that I’ve lived with the longest (excepting Farber On Film), so I suppose they’re the ones that have had the most profound effect on me.

Richard T. Kelly

Fun in a Chinese Laundry Josef von Sternberg, Secker & Warburg, 1965

My Last Breath Luis Buñuel, Jonathan Cape, 1983

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film Jean Cocteau, J.B. Janin, 1946

Mark Le Fanu

Academic / critic, Denmark

The books that most influence you tend to come early in one’s life – whether one likes it or not, everyone is a product of their generation. I started reading about cinema in the late 1960s, the heyday of auteurism: the books that I read then formed my taste and have marked me as a certain kind of cinephile and, 40 years on, after the great adventure (or misadventure) of theory, that is still how I would define myself.

The opening revelation in my case was the discovery of the late Robin Wood’s writings, specifically the five or six beautiful monographs he wrote around that time on contemporary film-makers, so let me single out Bergman (Praeger, 1969). Wood’s patient, unpedantic, exegetical prose remains for me the permanent model of how to do these things.

Next, an interview book: Jon Halliday’s extended conversation Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday (Secker & Warburg, 1971) hints at profound connections between European and American cinema and the sophisticated passage between the two cultures – connections deepened and cemented by my more or less simultaneous discovery of Andrew Sarris’ extraordinary handbook (compact and encyclopaedic at the same time) The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 . Over the years this little volume must surely have been the Bible for many of us.

Another bible (can there be two?) that has never left my desk is David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film . Readers of Sight & Sound will need no introduction to Thomson’s stunningly erudite film scholarship – for over 30 years he has been a leading contributor to this journal.

Alas, only one more book! There are so many wonderful writers out there. Should I opt for something from my collection written by Geoffrey O’Brien? Or Pauline Kael? Or Robert Warshow? Or André Bazin? Or either of the two wise Gilberts (Perez and Adair)? No, it is going to be François Truffaut’s collection of essays The Films in My Life (translated by Leonard Mayhew, Simon & Schuster, 1978). The peerless lucidity of his writing about cinema is underscored by a profound moral passion. Indeed, this is true about all the writers on film that I admire most – even the aesthetes and dandies.

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky is my all-time favourite director. But while this is fascinating, I sometimes find his statements frustratingly evasive. Or to the point but about very vague subjects: “Time”. Everything’s a lot clearer in the films. Yet this is what he had to say about them, and that makes it uniquely valuable.

Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now! Eleanor Coppola, Simon & Schuster, 1979

For a while I became obsessed with what must have been the best-documented disaster shoot in film history. I had the photo of Francis Ford Coppola pointing a revolver at his head up on my office wall the whole time I was writing Corpsing.

Louise Brooks Barry Paris, Hamish Hamilton, 1989

This depressed the hell out of me, but it’s a great read. Louise Brooks was one of the few actresses with absolute integrity. This may have something to do with why she also had the most vivid screen presence.

Lulu in Hollywood Louise Brooks, Hamish Hamilton, 1982

And she could write, too.

Quay Brothers Dictionary Michael Brooke

In the absence of a full book on my favourite contemporary film-makers, this pamphlet that came with the DVD Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 will do very well. I’m still following up all the references to writers, artists and poster designers.

Brian McFarlane

Academic, Australia

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments James Agee

I loved his willingness to find excitement in unexpected places, to do justice to merit when he found it and to write in such a strongly personal voice.

Ealing Studios Charles Barr, Cameron & Tayleur/David & Charles, 1977

This still seems to me the definitive account of the ethos of a studio. Lucid, rigorous and utterly readable.

David Lean: A Biography Kevin Brownlow, Richard Cohen Books, 1996

The best biography of a film-maker I’ve ever read. An enthralling account of a man enraptured by cinema, written by another man enraptured by cinema.

Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in British Cinema Andrew Spicer, I.B. Tauris, 2001

Gives a whole new perspective on the phenomenon of male stardom in British film, wears its theory lightly and is written with wit and perception.

Infuriating and stimulating by turns, this is an idiosyncratic inclusion. It leaves out Phyllis Calvert and includes Audie Murphy, which enrages me, but I read it from cover to cover.

Luke McKernan

Curator, Moving Image, British Library, UK

Spellbound in Darkness Edited by George C. Pratt, University of Rochester, 1966

A loving anthology, with commentary, on the silent cinema. An invitation to discovery on every page, and perhaps the best title for any film book yet published.

The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970 Denis Gifford, David & Charles, 1973

The nearest we have to a British national filmography was created not by any institute or university but by one man.

Ealing Studios Charles Barr, 1977

A classic analysis of a film studio’s output in terms of nation, society and politics. There is no better stimulus to look at films seriously.

The Pleasure Dome Graham Greene, Secker & Warburg, 1972

Greene’s film reviews from the 1930s are filled with sharp observations and haunting turns of phrase no other critical anthology can match.

The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State Charles Urban, The Charles Urban Trading Company, 1907

Written at the dawn of cinema, an inspirational manifesto for film as an educative medium.

Geoffrey Macnab

The richness of Powell’s autobiography lies in its scope and its colour. On the one hand, it’s a fantastically useful resource for anyone interested in British film history. Powell offers vivid portraits of his colleagues and collaborators, many of them émigrés. This is a gossipy and very colourful memoir, full of anecdotes and asides about Powell’s romantic life and his sometimes vexed relationships with studio bosses. On the other hand, it is also a self-portrait by a brilliant and uncompromising English film-maker.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, Faber & Faber, 1997

Published to accompany a BFI documentary, this is a beautifully illustrated and very sharp-eyed tour through a century of American cinema by a true obsessive. Scorsese is as interested in Allan Dwan, Phil Karlson, Jacques Tourneur and Sam Fuller as he is in the bigger-name directors.

Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words Preston Sturges, Simon & Schuster, 1990

Sturges’ autobiography is as well written, droll and well observed as his best films.

The Magic Lantern Ingmar Bergman, translated by Joan Tate, Hamish Hamilton, 1987

There’s a wild streak of perversity to Bergman’s autobiography. He is honest and self-lacerating about his own foibles and equally caustic about those of others. Morbidity and lyricism run side by side as he lays bare his demons.

An Autobiography of British Cinema Brian McFarlane, Methuen, 1997

This book is easy to undervalue. At first glance it looks like a series of nostalgic, fireside chats with actors and film-makers from the good old days of British cinema. However, no one else was doing these interviews. Thirteen years on, many of the 180 interviewees have died. McFarlane did future British historians an extraordinary service by capturing their reminiscences.

Adrian Martin

Critic, Australia

Theory of Film Practice Noël Burch, Secker & Warburg, 1973

A book that opens minds to formalism in the fullest and most supple way. Burch has changed his position many times since 1967 (when the chapters first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma), but there is still much to excite in these pages.

The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film Mikhail Iampolski, University of California Press, 1998

So you think you know what intertextuality is? Iampolski, a pre-eminent contemporary Russian theorist, gives a dazzling demonstration of how, when, where and why films quote other films (and other media) and why we should care. A book so far ahead of its time we haven’t caught up with it.

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium Gilberto Perez

The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Béla Balázs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez’s superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet?

Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism 1980-1990 By Judith Williamson, Marion Boyars, 1992

Journalist-critic heroes play out, on a weekly or even daily basis, the tension between the pressure to publish an instant response and the background resource of a lifetime’s reflection. Bazin, Daney, Rosenbaum and a dozen others fill this role admirably, but my vote is for Britain’s own Judith Williamson, whose books of collected reviews from the 1980s and ’90s are an unending inspiration.

Poetics of Cinema Raúl Ruiz, Dis Voir, 1995 (volume 1) and 2007 (volume 2)

Writings on film by film-makers form a generally undervalued genre. Among the many candidates – from Eisenstein, Tarkvosky and Pasolini to Alexander Kluge, Marcel Hanoun and Alexander Mackendrick – Ruiz’s ongoing Poetics of Cinema project stands out for its intellectual generosity, its luminous storytelling, its sly wit and its surrealist vision of what cinema could still become.

PLUS FIVE UNTRANSLATED GEMS:

Method Sergei Eisenstein, Museum of Cinema, Eisenstein-Centre, 2002

A casual observer might think we have much or most of Eisenstein’s writings in English, but the complete assemblage of his lifelong two-volume project Method has only appeared in Russian (and German) over the past decade. It will forever change the way we regard his life, work and thought. Fortunately, thanks to the gifted Russian-Australian scholar Julia Vassilieva, this project is on the way.

De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: L’invention figurative au cinéma Nicole Brenez, De Boeck, 1998

English-language film cultures have kept pace with French aesthetic philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, but forgot to check where film analysis itself went in France after the heyday of semiotics. 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. Brenez is our greatest living critic.

Im/Off: Filmartikel Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas, Hanser, 1974

Emerging from Filmkritik magazine in the late 1950s, this lively pair shaped much future German-language film culture to come with their analyses, programming, teaching and restoration work. Grafe (1934-2002), in particular, combined a crisp, evocative, Barthesian style with a rigorous eye and brilliant mind. This book is among the key chronicles of the 1960s and ’70s revolutions in cinema and film criticism.

Viv(r)e le cinéma Roger Tailleur

Francophiles, in general, know a lot about Cahiers du cinéma (and the whole artistic-intellectual culture that goes with it) and almost nothing about Positif (ditto). The saddest lacuna of all is Roger Tailleur (1927-85), an extraordinary prose stylist and encyclopaedic brain who, on a good day, makes Manny Farber seem like Harry Knowles. This selection, lovingly assembled by Positif comrades Michel Ciment and Louis Seguin, and containing classic essays on Bogart, Antonioni, Hawks and Marker, really just scratches the surface of Tailleur’s remarkable oeuvre – a true thinking-person’s cinephilia.

Kantuko Ozu Yasujiro Shigehiko Hasumi, Chikuma Shobo, 1983

Hasumi’s analytical method is deceptively simple: he takes us through the facts, limpidly described, of the everyday world of Ozu’s films – the walking, sitting, dressing, banal chit-chat – in order to arrive at often devastating revelations of this master director’s sensibility at work. Few critics give us such a concrete sense of what Godard once called “the evidence”. Cahiers du cinéma published a French version in 1998; we English readers are still waiting.

Peter Matthews

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comment James Agee

The greatest American film reviewer of the 1940s is a neglected figure these days, no doubt as his lofty humanist standards are out of tune with our own cynical resignation to ‘entertainment’. Ever the disappointed idealist, Agee offered grudging praise to such compromised efforts as Meet Me in St. Louis and Double Indemnity in long, delicately cadenced sentences that would never survive the copy editor now. Yet he was equally a master of the short demolition job (Princess O’Rourke: “An unobtrusive raising of the window, and the less said the better”), while his clairvoyant appreciation of Zéro de conduite almost single-handedly put Jean Vigo on the map in the English-speaking world. 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.

Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Andrew Britton, Studio Vista, 1995

The competition isn’t fierce, but this book remains easily the best serious full-length study of a star. Shunning the high road of 1970s ‘apparatus theory’, with its curiously self-defeating notion that pleasure is an ideological error, Britton champions Hollywood icons as authentic sources of emotional and political inspiration. Hepburn’s fey, tomboyish persona may not have been radical exactly, but its very oddity created a worrying disturbance in her films that even the ritual clinch at the end didn’t entirely pacify. Stars back then embodied vital social contradictions – one doubts whether the featureless pretty people of contemporary celebrity would repay so subtle and scrupulous a treatment.

The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium Gilberto Perez

This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism – a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an artform. The book is really about nothing beyond the author’s own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style. Has anyone else been quite so astute regarding the poetics of the shot/reverse shot (in Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons) or the uses of stasis (in Dovzhenko’s Earth)? A work of transcendent intelligence.

These aphoristic memos from the legendary director are often as inscrutable as Zen Buddhist koans, yet reflecting on them can produce a similar enlightenment. Bresson’s notorious contempt for acting is explained here in the distinction he draws between cinematography (pure writing with images) and mere cinema (still beholden to the mimetic fakery of theatre). The professional player counterfeits truth vaingloriously, whereas the amateur or ‘model’ simply reveals a soul. Essential reading for anyone curious about the physics and metaphysics of film, this slender volume can be profitably revisited over a lifetime.

Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday Edited by Jon Halliday

A book that revolutionised film studies. Douglas Sirk’s erudite exchanges with Halliday in 1971 turned his previous reputation as a merchant of lachrymose piffle upside down by revealing he had been a cool ironist all along. Universal loved the Panglossian optimism of the title All That Heaven Allows, but Sirk knew what it really meant (‘heaven is stingy’) and proved the point with a mise en scène that systematically undercuts its own chocolate-box display of luxury. Through his sophisticated apologia for melodrama, a despised genre was propelled into the academic spotlight where it has remained ever since.

I could as easily have picked William Rothman’s Documentary Film Classics, Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage or Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. I haven’t included André Bazin’s What is Cinema? because it sits in a class by itself.

Sophie Mayer

Decreation Anne Carson, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film Jean Cocteau

Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film Maya Deren, edited by Bruce McPherson, Documentext, 2005

Queer Edward II (annotated screenplay) Derek Jarman, BFI, 1991

When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics Trinh T. Minh-ha, Routledge, 1991

Henry K. Miller

Let’s Go to the Pictures Iris Barry, Chatto & Windus, 1926

A product and record of the years when cinema first came to be ‘taken seriously’ in Britain, to use the conventional phrase. Barry was a cinephile pioneer among the literati, and one of film culture’s seminal figures. Very little was outside her scope. Sample observation: “Every habitual cinemagoer must have been struck at some time or another by the comparative slowness of perception and understanding of a person not accustomed to the pictures: the newcomer nearly always misses half of what occurs. To be a habitué makes one easily suggestible through the eye, quick at observing manners, gestures and tricks of expression.”

The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema Jean Mitry, Indiana University Press, 1997

Overflowing with riches, it’s something of a scandal that Mitry’s summa went untranslated until the 1990s while the canon was packed by scores of philosophers manqués.

Films and Feelings Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1967

Hard to pick just one Durgnat. 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.

The Studio John Gregory Dunne, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1969

This account of a year at Twentieth Century Fox during the dying days of the dream factory is the best of the ‘inside Hollywood’ books by dint of Dunne’s peerlessly dry prose.

Cinema: A Critical Dictionary Edited by Richard Roud, Secker & Warburg, 1980

The single best reference work on the cinema I’ve dipped into, this ought to have become standard household issue. Having assembled an all-star team of contributors – from Jean-Andre Fiéschi to Robin Wood to P. Adams Sitney – editor Roud (an S&S mainstay) himself jumps in at the end of each entry to register the extent of his disagreement.

An Illustrated History of the Horror Film Carlos Clarens, Putnam, 1967

The first film book I ever bought – or nagged my parents to buy me – and still a model of genre history/criticism, teasing out bigger narratives from the mosaic achievements of individual films.

Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System Edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, Dutton, 1975

Full of important things, like Manny Farber on Val Lewton and Roger Ebert on Russ Meyer, and evaluations of previously obscure films (Thunder Road) and film-makers (Sam Katzman).

Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam Julian Smith, Scribner, 1975

A study that manages to say a lot of fascinating, illuminating things about its subject even though it labours under the handicap that when it was published (1975) Hollywood had made almost no films about the Vietnam War.

Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents Stephen Thrower, FAB Press, 2007

A huge study of independent American horror films of the 1970s and ’80s, this is a rare book that tells me things I didn’t already know. A monumental achievement, and it’s only the first part.

Science Fiction Movies Philip Strick, Octopus, 1976

Strick, a long-time S&S commentator, was one of the sharpest writers on science fiction in film and literature. This was one of a series of disposable illustrated books, but proved that the wordage between the stills needn’t just be rehashed press releases. Like all books I go back to, it has solid information, wide-ranging insight and an elegant, precise, wry prose style.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Academic and writer, UK

Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?) André Bazin, Editions du Cerf, 1958-62

Four little volumes of essays and reviews written in the 1940s and 1950s, published posthumously, that were absolutely formative for the film-makers of the nouvelle vague and for critics ever after. The selective and not very good English translation as What is Cinema? may have done more harm than good in reach-me-down film studies courses. A much better translation of most of the key essays has recently been published (What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Timothy Barnard, Montreal: Caboose, 2010), but for copyright reasons is available only in Canada.

A Bazin antidote. Harbinger of the theory boom of the 1970s, but much more readable than most of what followed.

Thoughts and opinions of the most important and revolutionary film-maker of the past 50 years. Beautifully edited and translated, but it unfortunately stops just before 1968. For Godard’s later thinking, avoid books and watch his extraordinary Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998).

For a reference book, am I allowed to put forward The Oxford History of World Cinema, despite being its editor (OUP, 1996)? If debarred, then the 2000 edition of the Time Out Film Guide, being less bulky than it has since become.

Michael O’Pray

Visionary Film P. Adams Sitney

Magisterial. It was written over 30 years ago, yet remains the most lucid and critically coherent account of American avant-garde film.

A World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film Stanley Cavell, Harvard University Press, 1971

The most sophisticated marriage of philosophy and film written. Brimming with ideas and beautifully written.

Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol Stephen Koch, Marion Boyars, 1991

Still the best book on Warhol’s cinema. A cool gaze at a cool world.

My Last Breath Luis Buñuel

Surrealism, not as a set of dogmas, but as a life lived.

Durgnat on Film Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1976

So sharp and so readable.

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.

L’Imaginaire Jean-Paul Sartre (mistranslated as The Psychology of the Imagination), Gallimard, 1940

This is the book of books that helped me develop a cinematic eye.

Memoirs of the Beijing Film Academy Ni Zhen, National Publishers of Japan, 1995

Charts the rise of the Fifth Generation out of nowhere to astonish the world.

Ingmar Bergman Jacques Aumont, Cahiers du cinéma, 2003

In which the French critic says it all and shows us that further Bergman books must lie in new detail or a broader window on the film world.

Film Journal Eve Arnold, Bloomsbury, 2001

A masterpiece of stills photography that captures the world behind the movie camera, culminating in her extraordinary on-set pics of Marilyn and The Misfits.

Critic, Daily Telegraph, UK

The Aurum Film Encyclopedia Edited by Phil Hardy, Aurum, 1983-98

This guide to the horror (1983 edition), science fiction (1984) and Western (1984) genres is addictive, exhaustive and unsurpassed.

Reeling Pauline Kael

My favourite Kael collection because the period it covers (1973-75) coincides with so many of her true passions.

Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism Jonathan Rosenbaum, University of California Press, 1995

No one else seems to get the point of film criticism as well as Rosenbaum, or to pursue it with such prickly independence.

Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography John Coldstream, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

This grasping of a unique career and life is an absolute model of diligence and wisdom.

The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood Julie Salamon, Delta, 1992

Outstrips even Steven Bach’s Final Cut as an appalled account of big-budget catastrophe.

Nick Roddick

André Bazin’s What is Cinema? introduced me to a different way of thinking about film and Christian Metz’s [two-volume] Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Klincksieck, 1968 and 1972) took things to a whole new level – even if the air up there was sometimes a little too thin to breathe.

In an entirely different context, a trio of Hollywood autobiographies – Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), Raoul Walsh’s Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director (Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1974) and Sam Fuller’s A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) – confirmed that, even within the studio system, there were different lives being lived and different stories being told.

So, in a quite different but unforgettable way, did Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon (J.J. Pauvert, 1959), which should be prescribed reading on every po-faced film course.

One that got away: Hugh Fordin’s MGM’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit (Da Capo, 1996), which I lent to someone in 1976 and never saw again.

But if there is one book to rule them all, it is Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema . The revised and enlarged edition of 1972 is the most concise, lucid and inspiring introduction to thinking about film ever written.

Jonathan Romney

Critic, Independent on Sunday, UK

Deadline at Dawn Judith Williamson

This is an exemplary collection, with a superb opening essay on the importance of resisting complicity with the culture supermarket. Its key statement, provocative but true: asking a critic what films to go to is as inappropriate as asking a geographer where to go on holiday.

Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main, cinéma, télévision, information Serge Daney, Aléas, 1997

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 title is what they used to warn audiences about in French cinemas: “Given the increase in handbag thefts…”

Flicker Theodore Roszak, Summit, 1991

Dan Brown avant la lettre for film buffs and those who tolerate their obsessions, Roszak’s novel is the best airport thriller ever, a passionate mythomanic celebration of cinema and its possible secret histories and, incidentally, a prescient forecast of the satanic-brat film-making generation of Gaspar Noé, Harmony Korine, Eli Roth et al. If ever I were to use the term ‘unputdownable’…

Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles David Thomson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Biography as something close to picaresque fiction. At once imaginative myth-making and insightful, demystifying critical essay.

The Phantom Empire Geoffrey O’Brien, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993

A sui generis reimagining of film history – a poetic treatise, cultural delirium and phenomenological evocation of the mysterious, multiform rapture of watching. O’Brien’s prose textures alone bear testimony to the power of film to galvanise the creative impulse.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Films and Feelings Raymond Durgnat

This first collection by the most thoughtful, penetrating, and far-reaching of UK film critics ever remains scandalously overlooked and undervalued. Conceivably more ideas per page can be found here than in the work of any other English-language critic, and Durgnat’s grounding in surrealism and the school of Positif is merely one of the starting points for an exploratory critical intelligence that is nonetheless quintessentially English.

I also prize the expanded original, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard of 1985 – it’s only the first of two volumes, but still a doorstop at 638 pages. The shorter English version of this seminal collection of criticism and interviews may be only 292 pages, but Tom Milne’s translation and commentary are exemplary, and there’s no other volume of criticism from Cahiers du cinéma that has influenced me as deeply. (The main reason, incidentally, why I haven’t selected any collections in French by André Bazin or Serge Daney is the absence of any fully satisfying volume in the first case and too many possible candidates in the second.)

More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts James Naremore, University of California Press, 2008 (revised and expanded edition)

Although it’s hard to arrive at a single title by my favourite academic film critic (my second choice would probably be the updated edition of The Magic World of Orson Welles), this is probably the most enjoyable, edifying, and rereadable of Naremore’s books – and certainly the best study of noir ever published.

After much internal debate, I’ve opted for this essential collection over the far heftier Farber on Film because this includes the lengthy and indispensable interview Farber and Patricia Patterson gave to Richard Thompson in 1977, whereas the other volume, even though it sports the almost accurate subtitle The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, contains only excerpts from it.

Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges James Harvey, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987

Before arriving at this 720-page definitive compendium, I came very close to selecting the 1977 640-page The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin by a leftist intellectual of the 1920s and ’30s with a truly international grasp of cinema – and the first critic ever to write about film cults. But I keep returning to Harvey’s judicious book even more often.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Channel 4 Guide to François Truffaut Channel 4, 1984

As all who recall the glory days of the fanzine will know, great, life-changing literature often comes through the front door in a self-addressed envelope. This small booklet, issued as a pedagogic aid of sorts, is a reminder of a time when terrestrial television scheduled whole series dedicated to individual arthouse directors (at prime time!) – series that would initiate ignorant schoolboys like me into the joys of world cinema.

Geoff Dyer once wrote: “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” Bresson’s slender collection of jottings and aphorisms (“The ejaculatory force of the eye”; “The terrible habit of theatre”; “Don’t run after poetry: it penetrates unaided through the joins”) is a witty example of the virtues of brevity.

100 Modern Soundtracks Philip Brophy, BFI, 2004

It doesn’t have the most compelling title, and this kind of synoptic volume is usually far less than the sum of its parts, but Brophy is a terrifically incisive and generative thinker about the possibilities of Ear Cinema, audio-delving into films as diverse as India Song and I Spit on Your Grave to create what he calls a “Braille for the deaf”.

As a film writer, my knee-jerk position is to use the word ‘studio’ as shorthand for greed, enervated groupthink, imaginative inertia, capitalism, western imperialism, evil itself. Sometimes, especially after you’ve just stumbled out of the remake of Clash of the Titans, that seems an intellectually responsible position. Mostly though, as this fastidiously researched and elegantly argued rebuff to auteurism shows, it’s not: the complex mesh of marketing, production and management enabled as much as it retarded the creation of the best US cinema of the mid-century.

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 Zhang Zhen, University of Chicago Press, 2006

As the years trundle by, I’m more and more embarrassed by the parochialism of my filmic knowledge. Of Bollywood and Nollywood and Latin American cinema I know a bit, but not as much as I ought. As for Chinese film, well, this superb history, in which Zhang spotlights the teeming interplay between movies, photography and architecture in early 20th-century Shanghai, performs the function of all the best literature: it leaves you ravenous for more.

Jaspar Sharp

Midnight Eye, UK

The Japanese Film: Art and Industry Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, Princeton University Press, 1959 (expanded edition 1982)

Although only covering developments prior to the 1960s, this is still the most essential publication out there on Japanese film.

The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-45 Peter B. High, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

An exhaustive and fascinating account of how the Japanese film industry was mobilised during the war years.

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Siegfried Kracauer

Its arguments as to how Germany’s national cinema portended the rise of Nazism might seem a bit oversimplified, but this book still provides a fascinating insight into the rise and fall of one of the world’s greatest film industries.

A Pictorial History of Horror Movies Denis Gifford, Hamlyn, 1973

I owe my obsession with cinema to being given a copy of this at the age of ten.

Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema around the World Pete Tombs, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998

The book that really opened my eyes to some of the more obscure corners of global film culture.

Iain Sinclair

Proving you don’t need to rehash the plot (it’s only there to secure financing). And for that essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art’. And for the undeceived appreciation of Sam Fuller. Rescues, with painterly intelligence, a defunct form.

Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life David Caute, Faber & Faber, 1994

Begins with the balance sheet: accountancy, documentation, polemic. The cultural connections of that period, from Brecht to Pinter, nicely fixed.

Knotty meat. A good place from which to steal.

Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American Independent Film-makers Stan Brakhage, Polygon, 1989

Generous evaluations of his peers by the inspirational film poet.

Nouvelle Vague, The First Decade Raymond Durgnat, Motion, 1963

Provocative, opinionated and a little crazy. I read this one until it fell apart, pre-viewing in my imagination films I had not yet seen and might never see. A fine example of literature as catalogue.

David Thompson

Critic/documentarian, UK

A Discovery of Cinema Thorold Dickinson, OUP, 1971

Reeling By Pauline Kael Film as a Subversive Art By Amos Vogel

I would also add a complete set of Sight & Sound – no kidding!

David Thomson

Critic/author, USA

I don’t think this has been equalled as a record of a life in show business desperate to get into art.

Final Cut Steven Bach

The most candid and complete account of a film, and a famous disaster – which looks better every time you see it.

David O. Selznick’s Hollywood Ronald Haver, Bonanza, 1980

The most beautiful film book.

This is Orson Welles Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Endlessly fascinating, a book of record that is bursting to be a novel.

The Deer Park Norman Mailer, Putnam, 1955

Mailer had so many great insights about film and they start in this 1955 novel.

Kenneth Turan

Critic, LA Times, USA

Picture Lillian Ross, Rinehart, 1952

A terrific piece of journalism and a landmark in the history of American non-fiction writing, this look at how John Huston made The Red Badge of Courage remains the ultimate Hollywood behind-the-scenes story.

The Pat Hobby Storie s F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1962

The great American novelist turned his attention to a Hollywood he knew well for this collection of short stories about a washed-up screenwriter, which retain their relevance and punch to this day.

For US critics of a certain age this is the most obvious choice, but there is no overestimating the impact its English-language exploration of auteur theory had on serious filmgoers and critics.

The book that almost single-handedly revived serious interest in the long-reviled world of silent film.

King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn Bob Thomas, Putnam, 1967

A deliciously gossipy biography of Harry Cohn, the feared and reviled head of Columbia Pictures. As comedian Red Skelton said of the man’s well-attended funeral, “It proves what Harry always said: ‘Give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.’”

Catherine Wheatley

Critic/Academic, UK

Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger

Postcards from the Cinema Serge Daney, P.O.L Editions, 1994

Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, MIT Press, 2004

Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film Giuliana Bruno, Verso, 2002

The Cinema Book Pam Cook

Armond White

Critic, New York Post, USA

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Pauline Kael, Litte, Brown, 1968

A treasure chest of critical art anchored to her ‘Notes on Movies’ – a personal, inspiring history of cinema without a single received idea.

A one-man tour de force that cements the case for the auteur theory.

Heavenly Bodies: Stars and Society Richard Dyer

The one true advance from pop criticism into academic thought, yet that still relates to pop, pleasure and real life.

The only example of a great film era (the 1970s) meeting a worthy, attentive journalist. Includes her essential ‘On the Future of Movies’ essay, a timeless cri de coeur.

The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World Armond White, Overlook Press, 1995

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17 Essential Movies For An Introduction To Essay Films

Put most concisely by Timothy Corrigan in his book on the film: ‘from its literary origins to its cinematic revisions, the istic describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience’.

Perhaps a close cousin to documentary, the film is at its core a personal mode of filmmaking. Structured in a breadth of forms, a partial definition could be said to be part fact, part fiction with an intense intimacy (but none of these are necessarily paramount).

Stemming from the literary as a form of personal expression borne from in-depth explorations of its chosen topic, the film can be agitprop, exploratory, or diaristic and generally rejects narrative progression and concretised conclusions in favour of a thematic ambivalence. Due to its nature as inherently personal, the term itself is as vague and expansive as the broad collective of films it purports to represent.

To borrow Aldous Huxley’s definition, the is a device for saying almost everything about almost anything. In built then is an inherent expansiveness that informs a great ambition in the form itself, but as Huxley acknowledges it can only say almost anything; whether extolling the need for a socialist state (Man with a Movie Camera), deconstructing the power and status of the image itself (Histoire(s) du Cinema, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Los Angeles Plays Itself) or providing a means to consider ones of past (Walden, News from home, Blue), the film is only the form of expression, which unlike any other taxonomic term suggests almost nothing about the film itself other than its desire to explore.

Below is an 17 film introduction to the film that cannot be pinned down and continue to remake and remodel itself as freely as it sheds connections between any of the films within its own canon.

1. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) dir. Dziga Vertov

An exercise in technical experimentation, Man with a Movie Camera is the pioneering, not to mention most lauded, of Vertov’s filmic polemics: espousing not only a new, necessary way of life, but a means of living that is created through cinema.

Shot by Maurice Kaufman, brother of Vertov, the film is a portrait of a city across 24 hours via bold experimentation based on Vertov’s staunchly Marxist ideologies. Its propagandist structure does not however belie its beauty.

Through masterful technique it became the defining film of 1920’s Soviet Union (perhaps on a par with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin). Its propagation of film as the means through which life is realised, that the camera is now an unequivocal feature of modernity and too a powerful political tool, creates a filmic love letter to industrialisation and the humanist elements of physical labour.

In opposition to Eisenstein, Vertov is a master of his own brand of idiosyncratic montage which, with its sublime manipulative technique combined with realist images, rejects the opiate affects of traditional narrative cinema, attempting to create instead a cinematic language in which the camera becomes the pen of the 20th century.

2. A Propos de Nice (1930) dir. Jean Vigo

Shot by Boris Kaufman, brother of Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera), A Propos de Nice is a satirical portrait of life in 1920’s Nice. The leisurely upper classes of French society are the subjects of a portrayal the blind escapism and ignorance created by modernity.

Vigo thus contrasts the bourgeois culture of relaxation with the daily grind of the poor in society. The parodic form of the travelogue as anthropological study is employed as a means of document increasing social and economic disparities which Vigo sought to present as necessitating a revolutionary stance (the likes of which cinematographer Kaufman glean from his brother’s agit-prop, propagandist Kino-Pravda series).

Engrained in the very structure of modern society is, for Vigo, deep social inequality; life in this case masks its own inequalities through ignorance and selfishness. Images of women energetically dancing are reduced to slow modern and thus arises from them the absurdity of inherent inequalities.

Like a Jay Gatsby party, the excitement and laughter only serves to mask a profound emptiness whose own ridiculousness is an unacknowledged form of societal freakshow, which only those on the outside can perceive.

3. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) dir. Jean-Luc Godard

In a year of 3 Godard diatribes against neo-capitalism, 2 or 3 Thing I Know About Her is the most contemplative; if La Chinoise a document of the soon to be riotous students, 2 or 3 is the suburban families watching the events unfold on their television screens.

Fraught with concern for the disintegration of lexical meaning, Godard’s collage of modern life follows the existentially empty Julitte Jeanson, a bourgeise housewife-come-prostitute, as she contemplates her preconceived societal role and the deadened collective consciousness of everyone whom Godard’s camera encounters.

If language is the house one lives in, as Juliette informs her son, then the house is subject to the blind whims of suited right wing repo men.

The portrait of Juliette is a composite sketch of the modern citizen, replaceable, replicable to the extent that Godard introduces Juliette first as Marina Vlady, the actress who plays her, before acknowledging her as a fictional creation; a less subtle evocation of the resignation to role playing in post-war France, watching death in Vietnam while decided whether or not to go and wash the car.

4. Walden; Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969) dir. Jonas Mekas

Walden is the film in its most diaristic form. Essentially a suitably handsome extended home video, Mekas’s film, shot from 1964-1969, features a series of chronologically edited video diaries that span from eating Chinese food with John Lennon, footage from the Velvet Underground’s first performance, or just the filmmaker eating a croissant in Marseille.

Given the length, the film could be criticised as an epic exercise in self-gratification (the filmic equivalent of continuous name dropping), or simultaneously as an invitation into the expansive but hermetic world of the New York art scene in the late 60’s, of which Mekas’ himself was a central fixture.

As with Akerman’s News From Home, it is the film’s internal focus, an exposure of the personal, wherein its interest lies. Mekas’ ability to construct a montage that appears at ease with itself in all its fragmentation, relying on meticulous in-camera precision, creates a sea images which with each wave comes harmony and contrast. Walden emerges then as an unpretentious acknowledgment of the inextricability of experience and image, finding within it celebrations of life’s variety and extended harmonies.

5. F for Fake (1973) dir. Orson Welles

Welles’s final film is an explosive and intelligent scrutinisation of the filmmaking process and the concept of authenticity in art. Centrally presenting Elmyr de Hory’s career as an art forger, F for Fake transcends basic narrative or documentary expositions to instead philosophise on the ontology of authorship.

Increasingly Welles rejects infallibility in favour of a profound ambivalence that is read across the careers of various forgers to eventually become, as is naturally the case for such a sublime example of the film, a personal contemplation of his own career and his self-definition as a perpetual sceptic.

Through rhythmic montage editing and questioning of the structure and the power of the image itself, F for Fake eulogizes the image as a consistently fallible, or deconstructible form, and in true Wellesian style, given it is the form that its director made his career,cannot help but find humour within.

6. Le Fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin Without a Cat (1977) dir. Chris Marker

Widely acknowledged as the master of the film, Le fond de l’air est rouge is a personal rumination of discontent on the progression and dissolution of left-wing politics from Vietnam up until the films release in 1977.

10 years after the Marker conceived Loin du Vietnam, a protest film against the Vietnam war structured in segments from a wealth of French Filmmakers including Godard, Resnais, Lelouch, Varda and Klein, the film is markedly more melancholic, plagued by a scepticism highlighted in the French title (directly translated as the essence of the air is red) that implies the socialist sentiment only ever existed in the air.

Opening with shots from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Marker’s mastery of the appropriated image emerges. The film’s first four minutes are perhaps the finest montage sequence of post-war cinema, commending the bravery of those who fought for the socialist ideal but ultimately acknowledging the inevitability of its failure at the hands of right wing opposition, whose growth in power Marker sees as masked by the outward protests of the left.

Behind closed doors centre right solidarity, particularly in Marker’s native France, was only increased in the face of a scattered, disorganised and self-destructive shouts for power from the left.

Marker’s film is archival re-appropriation at its most controlled, his erudition and poetic narration reinforcing the notion of history itself as recreated and retold by individuals, always having an agenda.

7. News From Home (1977) dir. Chantal Akerman

Borne from the influence of the structuralist filmmakers Akerman encountered in New York (see Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton), News from Home is a portrait of a city as seen through the eyes of a foreigner, as she attempts to come to terms with her new surroundings and the contrast to the life she left in Brussels (constantly referenced in the letters from her mother that are used to narrate the film).

Akerman films New York with the intricate eye of someone completely out of their depth, attempting to survive in a city they hardly know, emphasised by the concern of the letters from her mother. News from Home is a contemplation of the inescapability of the past and how it informs the present viewed from a perspective of awe, confusion and intense deliberation.

Akerman’s stares at New York as if to glean some meaning from its landscape as the letters from her mother cannot help make her feel at once a child and to the unchartered explorer entering a new terrain with bravado and wonder.

8. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) dir. Godfrey Reggio

Koyaanisqatsi, meaning life out of balance, is a poetic ode to absurdity constructed through cinematographic deconstructions of time and space. By slowing down images or speeding them up via time-lapse techniques, Reggio presents the fog of modernity as a means to highlight the absurdity of purported meanings, whether it is mass production of hot dogs or humanities destructive capabilities life lived blindly, perceived without questioning, is insignificant.

The film’s rejection of language forces full focus onto the status and power of imagery, especially when contorted, to suppose passivity and acceptance as a way of life, unsurprisingly drawing influence, like Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, going as far as to acknowledge him in the credits along with fellow critics of mass communications, big society and the power of technology, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich and Leopold Kohr.

As with Godard’s concern for the disintegration of language into base semiotic signifiers, evocative of nothing but materials and the literal, Koyaanisqatsi presents ‘a state of life that calls for another way a living’; a visually stunning but essentially aggressive denouncement of advanced capitalism, its pretence to knowledge and its ability to create an omnipresent complacency that drapes life in a visually pleasing veil, underneath which lies a profound nothingness.

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55 Writing about the Novel: Film Comparison

You began the process of writing your literary comparison paper in the Introduction to the Novel chapter by choosing an essay, reading it carefully, and writing a personal response. In this chapter, we will move through the remaining steps of writing your paper.

Step 3: Choose a Film for Comparison

The key to a good comparison essay is to choose two subjects that connect in a meaningful way. The purpose of conducting the comparison is not to state the obvious, but rather to illuminate subtle differences or unexpected similarities.

When writing a film comparison paper, the point is to make an argument that will make your audience think about your topic in a new and interesting way. You might explore how the novel and the film present the theme…or how the novel and the film explore the identity of a main character…or…the options are limitless. Here’s a quick video giving you a little overview of what a film vs novel comparison might look like:

To this end, your next goal is to choose a film adaptation of your novel. Some novels may only have one, but some have many that have been created over the last 100 years! Your adaptation could be a feature film, a YouTube short, or an indie film. Choose one that allows you to make an interesting point about the portrayal of the theme of the novel and the film.

Step 4: Research

Once you’ve chosen a second piece, it’s time to enter into the academic conversation to see what others are saying about the authors and the pieces you’ve chosen.

Regardless of the focus of your essay, discovering more about the author of the text you’ve chosen can add to your understanding of the text and add depth to your argument. Author pages are located in the Literature Online ProQuest database. Here, you can find information about an author and his/her work, along with a list of recent articles written about the author. This is a wonderful starting point for your research.

The next step is to attempt to locate articles about the text and the film themselves. For novels, it’s important to narrow down your database choices to the Literature category. For essays, you might have better luck searching the whole ProQuest library with the ProQuest Research Library Article Databases or databases like Flipster that include publications like newspapers and magazines.

Finally, you might look for articles pertinent to an issue discussed in the novel. For example, The Grapes of Wrath is about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, but it also contains an environmental theme. Depending on what aspect you want to highlight in your comparison, you might look for articles about the Great Depression or about farming and the environment.

Remember, it is helpful to keep a Research Journal to track your research. Your journal should include, at a minimum, the correct MLA citation of the source, a brief summary of the article, and any quotes that stick out to you. A note about how you think the article adds to your understanding of the topic or might contribute to your project is a good addition, as well.

Step 5: Thesis & Outline

Similar to other academic essays, the film comparison essay starts with a thesis that clearly introduces the two subjects that are to be compared and the reason for doing so.

This video highlights some of the key differences between novels and films:

Begin by deciding on your basis for comparison. The basis of comparison could include items like a similar theme, differences in the focus of the piece, or the way both pieces represent an important issue.

This article gives some helpful advice on choosing a topic.

Once you’ve decided on the basis of comparison, you should focus on the points of comparison between the two pieces. For example, if you are focusing on how the literary elements and the cinematic elements used impact the message, you might make a table of each of these elements. Then, you’d find examples of each element from each piece. Remember, a comparison includes both similarities and differences.

By putting together your basis of comparison and your points of comparison, you’ll have a thesis that both makes an argument and gives readers a map of your essay.

A good thesis should be:

• Statement of Fact: “The novel and the film of Pride and Prejudice are similar in many ways.”
• Arguable: “The film version of Pride and Prejudice changes key moments in the text that alter the portrayal of the theme.”
• Personal Opinion: “‘The novel is definitely better than the movie.”
• Provable by the Texts: “Both the novel and the film focus on the importance of identity.”
• Obvious: “The movie provides a modern take on the novel.”
• Surprising: “Though the movie stays true to the original themes of the novel, the modern version may lead viewers to believe that the characters in the book held different values than are portrayed in the novel.”
• General: “Both the novel and the film highlight the plight of women.”
• Specific: “The novel and the film highlight the plight of women by focusing on specific experiences of the protagonist. “

The organizational structure you choose depends on the nature of the topic, your purpose, and your audience. You may organize compare-and-contrast essays in one of the following two ways:

• Block: Organize topics according to the subjects themselves, discussing the novel and then the film.
• Woven: Organize according to individual points, discussing both the novel and the film point by point.

Exercises: Create a Thesis and Outline

You’ll want to start by identifying the theme of both pieces and deciding how you want to tie them together. Then, you’ll want to think through the points of similarity and difference in the two pieces.

In two columns, write down the points that are similar and those that are different. Make sure to jot down quotes from the two pieces that illustrate these ideas.

Following the tips in this section, create a thesis and outline for your novel/film comparison paper.

Here’s a sample thesis and outline:

Step 6: Drafting Tips

Once you have a solid thesis and outline, it’s time to start drafting your essay. As in any academic essay, you’ll begin with an introduction. The introduction should include a hook that connects your readers to your topic. Then, you should introduce the topic. In this case, you will want to include the authors and title of the novel and the director and title of the film. Finally, your introduction should include your thesis. Remember, your thesis should be the last sentence of your introduction.

In a film comparison essay, you may want to follow your introduction with background on both pieces. Assume that your readers have at least heard of either the novel or the film, but that they might not have read the novel or watched the film–or both–…or maybe it’s been awhile. For example, if you were writing about Pride and Prejudice , you might include a brief introduction to Austen and her novel and an introduction to the version of the film you’ve chosen. The background section should be no more than two short paragraphs.

In the body of the paper, you’ll want to focus on supporting your argument. Regardless of the organizational scheme you choose, you’ll want to begin each paragraph with a topic sentence. This should be followed by the use of quotes from your two texts in support of your point. Remember to use the quote formula–always introduce and explain each quote and the relationship to your point! It’s very important that you address both literary pieces equally, balancing your argument. Finally, each paragraph should end with a wrap up sentence that tells readers the significance of the paragraph.

Here are some transition words that are helpful in tying points together:

Finally, your paper will end with a conclusion that brings home your argument and helps readers to understand the importance/significance of your essay.

In this video, an instructor explains step by step how to write an essay comparing two films. Though you will be writing about a novel and a film, rather than two films, the same information applies.

Here’s another instructor explaining how to write a comparison essay about two poems. Note the similarities between the two videos.

Here’s a sample paper:

Attributions:

• Content created by Dr. Karen Palmer. Licensed under CC BY NC SA .
• Content adapted from “Comparison and Contrast” from the book Successful Writing licensed CC BY NC SA .

The Worry Free Writer Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Karen Palmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Essay Film

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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 12 April 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

The term “essay film” has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the first to analyze a film, which was Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958), according to the essay form. The French New Wave created a popularization of short essay films, and German New Cinema saw a resurgence in essay films due to a broad interest in examining German history. But beyond these origins of the term, scholars deviate on what exactly constitutes an essay film and how to categorize essay films. Generally, scholars fall into two camps: those who find a literary genealogy to the essay film and those who find a documentary genealogy to the essay film. The most commonly cited essay filmmakers are French and German: Marker, Resnais, Godard, and Farocki. These filmmakers are singled out for their breadth of essay film projects, as opposed to filmmakers who have made an essay film but who specialize in other genres. Though essay films have been and are being produced outside of the West, scholarship specifically addressing essay films focuses largely on France and Germany, although Solanas and Getino’s theory of “Third Cinema” and approval of certain French essay films has produced some essay film scholarship on Latin America. But the gap in scholarship on global essay film remains, with hope of being bridged by some forthcoming work. Since the term “essay film” is used so sparingly for specific films and filmmakers, the scholarship on essay film tends to take the form of single articles or chapters in either film theory or documentary anthologies and journals. Some recent scholarship has pointed out the evolutionary quality of essay films, emphasizing their ability to change form and style as a response to conventional filmmaking practices. The most recent scholarship and conference papers on essay film have shifted from an emphasis on literary essay to an emphasis on technology, arguing that essay film has the potential in the 21st century to present technology as self-conscious and self-reflexive of its role in art.

Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship. Biemann 2003 brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades 2016 also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age . New York: Springer, 2003.

This anthology positions Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) as the originator of the post-structuralist essay film. In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. In its resistance to the French/German theory influence on essay film, this anthology makes a concerted effort to include other theoretical influences, such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia . London: Wallflower, 2016.

This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media.

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Books vs. Movies: Comparison of Features

We all have a friend who yells during a movie that this moment was shown differently in the book. At the same time, another friend says that he or she is bored with reading and would rather wait for the movie adaptation. Both of these friends can be right, since much of a book or film’s success depends on the talent of its writer, screenwriter, director, and actors. Hence, comparing books and movies is a challenging task as both have their advantages.

The main thing in common between books and films is that they convey a story and evoke emotion. A plot can be fiction, fantasy, or a real story from someone’s life. However, it is extremely rare that a story is completely truthful. This statement does not mean that all authors and screenwriters lie, but embellishment or exaggeration is an integral part of books and films. The author can slightly change the sequence of events or the order of words in the phrase, add or omit minor details to make the story more engaging. The director casts an actor with a different color of eyes or hair than a real character or uses a more picturesque setting for the stage. These features are intended to bring readers or viewers more pleasure and evoke stronger emotions, and they are common to movies and books.

At the same time, a book differs from a movie because it can have more details and focus on the characters’ feelings. Quite often, fans of famous books, such as Harry Potter, are outraged that the movie does not show this or that episode, which distorts the character’s personality. Such flaws arise because all the book details cannot be placed in the standard or the appropriate time for a movie. In addition, actors may not accurately convey the characters’ feelings with their acting, while the words in a book precisely describe them. For this reason, the advantage of books is that they can reveal details of the story and feelings of its characters, which bring stronger emotions in readers.

However, the advantage of movies is that a director can use impressive graphics that are difficult for a person to imagine, and musical accompaniment to emphasize the atmosphere of the moment. For example, a person who reads about aliens, magic, or outer space cannot clearly visualize some images, since he or she has no real experience with such objects, but computer graphics can create anything. Music also enhances the mood of the moment; for example, a dramatic song sounds during battles or the scene of a character’s death, and harsh sounds are usually a part of horror films. Thus, a viewer can feel the mood of the moment and enjoy the visuals while relaxing in a movie theater.

Therefore, books and movies have a common purpose in conveying a story to readers or viewers. Their similar feature is that they often embellish reality more or less to offer readers or viewers the best version of a story. However, the main advantage of books is their detail and description of the characters’ feelings, while films allow people to perceive their plot visually and audibly but not only through the prism of their experience. Consequently, books and movies are different in the way of delivering ideas, and the choice of people depends on their preferences.

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How the Essay Film Thinks

Professor of Film and Screen Media

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Less than a decade ago the expression "essay film" was still encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criticism, and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers and artists worldwide to characterize their work-while continuing to offer a precious margin of resistance to closed definitions. Eschewing essentialist notions of genre and form, and bringing issues of practice and praxis to the fore, this book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where such strategies operate. On the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film’s disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.

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Essays on the Essay Film (Film and Culture Series) Paperback – Illustrated, March 14, 2017

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• Part of series Film and Culture
• Print length 392 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Columbia University Press
• Publication date March 14, 2017
• Dimensions 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• ISBN-10 0231172672
• ISBN-13 978-0231172677
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press; Illustrated edition (March 14, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231172672
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231172677
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
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• #865 in Photo Essays (Books)
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Godard and the Essay Film

A Form That Thinks

by Rick Warner

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

288 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 in , 49 b-w images

• 9780810137370
• Published: July 2018
• 9780810137387
• 9780810137394
• Description

RICK WARNER is an assistant professor of film in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“ Godard and the Essay Film is a first-rate piece of scholarship that makes substantial contributions on a variety of topics, including the essay as literary and cinematic form, film and philosophy, and the study of the indispensable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard.” —Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary    ". . . a superb piece of work, reaffirming cinema as a (potentially) philosophical machine that can lead us to think (that we have not yet begun thinking)." — Studies in European Cinema

“ Godard and the Essay Film is an exceptionally innovative and fresh study that manages to rethink one of the most important and challenging filmmakers in cinema history. In the process, Warner has also engaged one of the most important and prominent waves in modern filmmaking, the essay film. While there is a growing body of scholarship on this subject, Warner’s more focused engagement offers keen new insights that extend beyond Godard’s work.” —Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"It is made clear in Godard and the Essay Film, through meticulous close readings of scenes and techniques, that Godard's primary goal in his essay films is to establish a conversation with the viewer. Such a dialogue, where the viewer is asked to decode montaged connections, identify references and provide answers to posed scenarios, is understandably difficult and ultimately always unfinished . . . Also unique to this book is the emphasis on co-filmmaking . . ." —Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Screen "There is no shortage of books on provocative French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, but this one serves the additional function of intervening in discussion of a difficult-to-define type of move: the essay film . . . The book's strongest discussions are those in which Warner opens up Godard's work to its contexts, and a particular highlight is the chapter on couples and coupling, which deals with Godard's collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville." —K. M. Flanagan, George Mason University, CHOICE

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Learn more about upcoming publications, events, and news from Northwestern University Press.

Best Essays and Books About Horror Movies

Learn more about your favorite frightening films, or film theories of horror itself, with this list of creepy books and essays.

You’ve probably wondered about the inspiration behind your favorite scary movies and the background of some of those horrifying stories. Sometimes the origins of a horror movie are as simple as an author telling a scary story, and at other times films are based on more sinister, true events . You might also be interested in the making of certain horror movies or the impact they have on the audience or the cast. Maybe you're into film theory and want to study the gender dynamics, cultural and political significance, and philosophy of horror, like in Carol Clover's seminal book Men, Women, and Chainsaws . Luckily, there are plenty of resources that explore these exact topics and the development of horror movies in general.

You might be interested in why people are attracted to horror movies and the act of feeling fear. In which case, you might want to read Stephen King’s essay Why We Crave Horror Movies . Digging even deeper, you might notice horror films can help us examine fears around eating, sexuality, religion, and more. You might even wonder about the characters that often die first and why, which is explained by Lindsay King-Miller in her essay A Love Letter to the Girls Who Die First in Horror Movies . Whatever it may be, in addition to the aforementioned texts, here are the best essays and books about horror movies.

Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares

Director John Landis ( American Werewolf in London, Twilight Zone: The Movie ) wrote a book on movie monsters covers some of cinema’s most terrifying creatures and their development. Landis explores the design of movie monsters and special effects, both in high and low-budget films. Monsters in the Movies includes interviews with the minds behind the monsters, their historical origins, and tricks behind bringing these ghouls to life.

Nothing Has Prepared Me for Womanhood Better than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Sarah Kurchak’s essay examines a subject people might not consider in horror movies. The truth is that many scary films express beliefs about women and their experiences via horror and gore. Kurchak dissects how Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 features female stereotypes in hot pants but also explores women facing the threats of men and emerging from adolescence completely altered. Kurchak argues that this horror comedy can teach female viewers about what to expect from the world and adolescence.

Stephen King At the Movies: A Complete History of Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror

The chilling stories of author Stephen King have made both startling reads and frightening films. King’s works have established more than 60 horror movies and 30 television series. This book covers the making of all of them, including behind-the-scenes material and King’s opinion on some adaptations. If you’re looking to dive deeper into some iconic films based on King’s stories , consider picking up Stephen King at the Movies .

There’s Nothing Scarier than a Hungry Woman

Remember how we said that horror movies can contain messages that don’t appear obvious on the surface? Laura Maw notices how in many horror movies there is always a scene of a ravenous woman eating, and her fascinating essay considers the meaning behind that.

Related: Best Performances in Horror Films of All Time, Ranked

Maw writes that “horror invites us to sit with this disgust, this anxiety, and to acknowledge our appetite and refuse to suppress it.” Maw presents a feminist analysis of hungry women in well-known horror movies in a way which both explores and challenges preconceptions about women.

Behind the Horror: True Stories that Inspired Horror Movies

Dr. Lee Miller’s research into the origin stories of movies like The Exorcist and A Nightmare on Elm Street are compiled in this handy book. Miller details the true accounts of disappearances, murders, and hauntings that inspired these hit movies.

Behind the Horror explains the history of the serial killers featured in Silence of the Lambs and takes a good look at the possessions that motivated the making of The Exorcist and The Conjuring 2 .

My Favorite Horror Movie: 48 Essays by Horror Creators on the Film that Shaped Them

Arguably one of the best books to read if you are curious about the makers behind famous horror movies. My Favorite Horror Movie features over 20 essays from filmmakers, actors, set designers, musicians, and more about the dark works that solidified their careers.

The films discussed include It , Halloween , The Shining , and others. It’s a good book for looking at horror movies from different angles and recognizing the many minds that contributed to these iconic works.

The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History

Yet another great book for establishing a rounded perspective of horror movies, this time in a much more visual way. The Art of Horror sorts through famous illustrations, movie posters, cover art, comics, paintings, photos, and filmmakers since the beginning of horror with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s infamous Frankenstein . Learn about these talented artists, their chilling work, and their impact on the direction of horror.

Wes Craven: Interviews

If you’re trying to hear from the best horror directors themselves, the Wes Craven interviews are a great place to start. Craven is responsible for films like Scream , The Hills Have Eyes , A Nightmare on Elm Street , and The Last House on the Left , and is often considered one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time.

Related: The Best Scream Queens of All Time, Ranked

Craven established a particular style in his films that changed the way horror movies are made, and this book pulls information from the master himself. Wes Craven: Interviews includes almost 30 interviews with the director ranging from the 1980s until Craven passed away in 2015.

101 Horror Movies You Should See Before You Die

Ever wonder if you’re missing a great horror film from your spooky collection? This is the book for you. 101 Horror Movies You Should See Before You Die covers the absolute essentials of every kind of horror film, from gothic to slasher and international horror classics as well. Horror can take on so many different forms and this book is one of the best for finding horror films you might have missed.

The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects Stunts, and Stories Behind Your Every Fright

Authors Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence examine women in horror movies in this book that explores feminist horror films , and more misogynistic ones from the standpoint of feminist film theory. The Science of Women in Horror recalls the history of women in horror movies and goes on to analyze more recent, women-centered horror flicks and series such as The Haunting of Hill House and Buffy the Vampire Slayer . If you want to know more about the women on and off-screen in horror movies, check out this book!

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Essential Film Criticism Books for Any Film Lover’s Shelf

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No cinephile’s bookshelf is complete without a well-curated selection of film criticism books to complement their robust movie library. After all, criticism exists to enhance our understanding of art, and really any creative endeavor. The art of film criticism is almost as old as film itself, and has evolved just as film has over the past century or so.

The below selection of film criticism classics includes a wide variety of literature that helps enhance the filmgoing experience, from in-depth histories of specific films to exhaustive analysis of filmmakers and actors; from essay collections of famed critics to histories of film movements and eras. They’re both historical and contemporary, with original release dates spanning nearly eight decades. These books aren’t only covering classics, either — sometimes the zero-star reviews about notorious flops are just as illuminating as thoughtful takes on some of film’s most revered movies.

See our selection of best film criticism books below.

“The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael : A Library of America Special Publication”

There have been many collections of Pauline Kael’s work, but a great deal of them — “For Keeps” and “I Lost it at the Movies” included — are hard to find or out of print. This 2016 collection features the sharply opinionated New Yorker critic’s takes on “The Godfather,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and more seminal works, and spans her entire career.

“Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies”

Another seminal and divisive critic with a very distinct style of prose, Farber, an accomplished painter, deconstructs films and scenes with a unique eye. His definition of “termite art,” as opposed to “white elephant art,” opened up a whole new discourse around appreciating the aesthetic greatness of B movies and genre films that don’t necessarily telegraph their artistic intent with the literalism and obviousness of “prestige” efforts. This collection comes with seven essays he wrote with his wife, the artist Patricia Patterson, along with an in-depth interview.

“Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth” by A.O. Scott

Longtime “New York Times” film critic Scott examines the discipline of criticism as a whole, using his own work as a lens to demonstrate how criticism allows creativity to thrive. This particular volume was inspired by the author’s own Twitter feud with Samuel L. Jackson, following Scott’s pan of “The Avengers.” Everyone’s a critic, because critical thinking informs all aspects of life, from art to politics and everything in between.

“Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide: The Modern Era”

Maltin stopped updating his annual movie guides a few years ago, but the 2015 edition serves as a capstone of sorts and includes nearly 16,000 entries of essential information on films from the modern era — box office record-breakers, cult classics, and complete bombs alike.

“I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie” by Roger Ebert

Yes, you should definitely add any volume from Ebert’s “The Great Movies” collection to your bookshelf. But just as important as the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic’s raves are the scathing takedowns that, in many cases, are even more fun than the movies themselves. This is the first best-selling collection of Ebert’s one-star (or less) reviews, followed by the equally entertaining “Your Movie Sucks” and “A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck.”

“Murder and the Movies” by David Thomson

In his latest volume, film historian Thomson investigates film’s obsession with murder and what that says about us as viewers through the lens of classics including “Strangers on a Train,” “The Godfather,” and “The Shining.” (Also shelf-worthy: The most recent update of his comprehensive “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.” )

“Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood” by Karina Longworth

The creator of the essential film podcast “You Must Remember This” reminds readers that the film industry’s obsession with sex and power predates the #MeToo movement. Before Harvey Weinstein there was Howard Hughes, and “Seduction” shows how Hughes’ wielded his power via the stories of ten women who had relationships with the mogul.

“Hollywood Black” by Donald Bogle

Bogle’s overview of Black filmmaking, from the silent era through “Black Panther,” tells the history of Black Hollywood, including its films, stars, and filmmakers, and includes a foreword by the late John Singleton.

“From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition” by Molly Haskell

Originally published in 1974, the latest update to Haskell’s classic piece of feminist film criticism was released in 2016. It includes an insightful investigation into the way women are portrayed on screen versus their status in society, plus a new introduction about how Haskell’s views have evolved since its initial publication.

“What is Cinema?” by André Bazin

This foundational text of film studies comes from one of film criticism’s most influential voices, the French critic Bazin, who championed filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini.

“From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film” by Siegfried Kracauer

This defining history of German expressionist film, first published in 1947, examines how the Weimar Republic produced such politically charged work as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “M,” “Metropolis,” and “The Blue Angel.”

“Pictures at a Revolution” by Mark Harris

Harris focuses on the best picture nominees at the 1967 Academy Awards — “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Graduate,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Doctor Doolittle,” and “Bonnie and Clyde” — to show how the cultural revolution of the 1960s changed Hollywood forever.

“Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas” by Glenn Kenny

Kenny’s history of Scorsese’s classic mob movie arrives on Sept. 15, just in time for the 30th anniversary of Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1990 film. This behind-the-scenes story features interviews from Scorsese and star Robert De Niro and sheds light on why the film’s legacy has endured over the past three decades.

“Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan” by J. Hoberman

“Make My Day” chronicles the relationship between politics and cinema in Reagan’s 1980s, and is the third volume in Hoberman’s trilogy (after “The Dream Life,” about the 1960s, and “An Army of Phantoms,” about American movies in the first decade of the Cold War).

“Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor” by Amy Nicholson

Nicholson investigates the career of the all-American superstar, from his first role (in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders”), his rise to super-stardom in the ’80s (in “Top Gun” and beyond), and his enduring status as modern-day action hero (in the “Mission Impossible” series).

“David Lynch: The Man from Another Place” by Dennis Lim

Lim digs into the career of the director not by trying to de-mystify his mysterious mind, but by embracing the strangeness of the multi-hyphenate artist.

“Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade” by Dave Kehr

Film critic Dave Kehr’s work is compiled in this second volume of criticism, compiled from his time at the Chicago Reader and Chicago magazine between 1974 and 1986, which features some of the in-depth, nuanced essays for which Kehr is known.

Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 by Anna Everett

“Returning the Gaze” is an exploration of Black film criticism, from the first half of 20th   century. The book shares film commentary through the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, in addition to pieces written during the Great Depression, and the pre-and-post-war era. The book looks at how Black media pushed back against racist themes in film, and called attention to the use of lynching footage as examples of both a commercial, and callous, act of exploitation.

Regarding Film Criticism and Commentary by Stanley Kauffman

Released in 1993, this collection of writings from late critic Stanley Kauffman includes films from major established directors, musings on cinematic adaptations of Mozart’s operas, and independent cinema, in addition to exploring changing public attitudes towards film as an art form.

Ambiguity and Film Criticism: Reasonable Doubt by Hoi Lun Law

As the title suggests, Hoi Lun Law’s book makes a case for ambiguity on film and why it’s a vital concept to cinema. Broken into two parts, the book features seven chapters that include: “Difficulty of Reading, “Depth of Suggestion, “and “Threat of Insignificance.”

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The essay film.

Dialogue, Politics, Utopia

Edited by Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades

Wallflower Press

Pub Date: November 2016

ISBN: 9780231176958

Format: Paperback

List Price: $26.00 £22.00

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ISBN: 9780231176941

Format: Hardcover

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ISBN: 9780231851039

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List Price: $25.99 £22.00

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The long-awaited news flash foregrounded by The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia is that cinema studies has at last parted ways with moldy, genre-based epistemologies. The idea of film-thinking as a philosophia sui generis that opposes formalistic classifications has been there from the get-go—in the hearts and minds of groundbreaking film-heretics. Here we are finally offered a thoroughly researched and carefully thought-out contemplation of the primordial desires and wishful prospects of the art of filmmaking, a distinct form of human expression. This book heralds an advanced phase of maturation for cinema studies. Its straightforward willingness to destabilize its own epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions, generating authentic terms-of-being, perfectly matches the true spiritual and intellectual scope of the essay film as we know it—and, more critically, as we can never truly know its inherently unknowable stratum. The clarity of this book's statement provides a firm foundation for future revelations the essay film holds in store. Dan Geva, Haifa University, and documentary filmmaker

This exciting collection promises to be an important milestone for ongoing debates and discussions about the emergent medium of interactive and nonlinear documentary. Matt Soar, Concordia University

Winner, 2018 Best Essay in an Edited Collection, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

About the Author

• Film and Media Studies
• Film History, Theory, and Criticism
• Nonfictions

The Cowardice of Guernica

The literary magazine Guernica ’s decision to retract an essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals much about how the war is hardening human sentiment.

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In the days after October 7, the writer and translator Joanna Chen spoke with a neighbor in Israel whose children were frightened by the constant sound of warplanes. “I tell them these are good booms,” the neighbor said to Chen with a grimace. “I understood the subtext,” Chen wrote later in an essay published in Guernica magazine on March 4, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World.” The booms were, of course, the Israeli army bombing Gaza, part of a campaign that has left at least 30,000 civilians and combatants dead so far.

The moment is just one observation in a much longer meditative piece of writing in which Chen weighs her principles—for years she has volunteered at a charity providing transportation for Palestinian children needing medical care, and works on Arabic and Hebrew translations to bridge cultural divides—against the more turbulent feelings of fear, inadequacy, and split allegiances that have cropped up for her after October 7, when 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s assault on Israel. But the conversation with the neighbor is a sharp, novelistic, and telling moment. The mother, aware of the perversity of recasting bombs killing children mere miles away as “good booms,” does so anyway because she is a mother, and her children are frightened. The act, at once callous and caring, will stay with me.

Not with the readers of Guernica , though. The magazine , once a prominent publication for fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, with a focus on global art and politics, quickly found itself imploding as its all-volunteer staff revolted over the essay. One of the magazine’s nonfiction editors posted on social media that she was leaving over Chen’s publication. “Parts of the essay felt particularly harmful and disorienting to read, such as the line where a person is quoted saying ‘I tell them these are good booms.’” Soon a poetry editor resigned as well, calling Chen’s essay a “horrific settler normalization essay”— settler here seeming to refer to all Israelis, because Chen does not live in the occupied territories. More staff members followed, including the senior nonfiction editor and one of the co-publishers (who criticized the essay as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”). Amid this flurry of cascading outrage, on March 10 Guernica pulled the essay from its website, with the note: “ Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” As of today, this explanation is still pending, and my request for comment from the editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, has gone unanswered.

Read: Beware the language that erases reality

Blowups at literary journals are not the most pressing news of the day, but the incident at Guernica reveals the extent to which elite American literary outlets may now be beholden to the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature. After the publication of Chen’s essay, a parade of mutual incomprehension occurred across social media, with pro-Palestine writers announcing what they declared to be the self-evident awfulness of the essay (publishing the essay made Guernica “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness,” wrote one of the now-former editors), while reader after reader who came to it because of the controversy—an archived version can still be accessed—commented that they didn’t understand what was objectionable. One reader seemed to have mistakenly assumed that Guernica had pulled the essay in response to pressure from pro-Israel critics. “Oh buddy you can’t have your civilian population empathizing with the people you’re ethnically cleansing,” he wrote, with obvious sarcasm. When another reader pointed out that he had it backwards, he responded, “This chain of events is bizarre.”

Some people saw anti-Semitism in the decision. James Palmer, a deputy editor of Foreign Policy , noted how absurd it was to suggest that the author approved of the “good bombs” sentiment, and wrote that the outcry was “one step toward trying to exclude Jews from discourse altogether.” And it is hard not to see some anti-Semitism at play. One of the resigning editors claimed that the essay “includes random untrue fantasies about Hamas and centers the suffering of oppressors” (Chen briefly mentions the well-documented atrocities of October 7; caring for an Israeli family that lost a daughter, son-in-law, and nephew; and her worries about the fate of Palestinians she knows who have links to Israel).

Madhuri Sastry, one of the co-publishers, notes in her resignation post that she’d earlier successfully insisted on barring a previous essay of Chen’s from the magazine’s Voices on Palestine compilation. In that same compilation, Guernica chose to include an interview with Alice Walker, the author of a poem that asks “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews,” and who once recommended to readers of The New York Times a book that claims that “a small Jewish clique” helped plan the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust. No one at Guernica publicly resigned over the magazine’s association with Walker.

However, to merely dismiss all of the critics out of hand as insane or intolerant or anti-Semitic would ironically run counter to the spirit of Chen’s essay itself. She writes of her desire to reach out to those on the other side of the conflict, people she’s worked with or known and who would be angered or horrified by some of the other experiences she relates in the essay, such as the conversation about the “good booms.” Given the realities of the conflict, she knows this attempt to connect is just a first step, and an often-frustrating one. Writing to a Palestinian she’d once worked with as a reporter, she laments her failure to come up with something meaningful to say: “I also felt stupid—this was war, and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naive … I was inadequate.” In another scene, she notes how even before October 7, when groups of Palestinians and Israelis joined together to share their stories, their goodwill failed “to straddle the chasm that divided us.”

Read: Why activism leads to so much bad writing

After the publication of Chen’s essay, one writer after another pulled their work from the magazine. One wrote, “I will not allow my work to be curated alongside settler angst,” while another, the Texas-based Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah, wrote that Chen’s essay “is humiliating to Palestinians in any time let alone during a genocide. An essay as if a dispatch from a colonial century ago. Oh how good you are to the natives.” I find it hard to read the essay that way, but it would be a mistake, as Chen herself suggests, to ignore such sentiments. For those who more naturally sympathize with the Israeli mother than the Gazan hiding from the bombs, these responses exist across that chasm Chen describes, one that empathy alone is incapable of bridging.

That doesn’t mean empathy isn’t a start, though. Which is why the retraction of the article is more than an act of cowardice and a betrayal of a writer whose work the magazine shepherded to publication. It’s a betrayal of the task of literature, which cannot end wars but can help us see why people wage them, oppose them, or become complicit in them.

Empathy here does not justify or condemn. Empathy is just a tool. The writer needs it to accurately depict their subject; the peacemaker needs it to be able to trace the possibilities for negotiation; even the soldier needs it to understand his adversary. Before we act, we must see war’s human terrain in all its complexity, no matter how disorienting and painful that might be. Which means seeing Israelis as well as Palestinians—and not simply the mother comforting her children as the bombs fall and the essayist reaching out across the divide, but far harsher and more unsettling perspectives. Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons. If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.

By the BOOK

Morgan Parker Says ‘Poetry Is Under Everything’ She Writes

Crafting the arguments in “You Get What You Pay For,” her first essay collection, “felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy,” says the author of “Magical Negro.”

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What books are on your night stand?

The craft anthology “How We Do It,” edited by the great Jericho Brown, and Shayla Lawson’s astounding “How to Live Free in a Dangerous World.”

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Probably on the smoking patio of a wine bar at happy hour on a sunny day, with a pencil in my hand and Dorothy Ashby or Ambrose Akinmusire playing through noise-canceling headphones. Or just a quiet morning on my couch with coffee, so engrossed I forget to flip the record.

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

“Erasure,” by Percival Everett . I picked up a used copy at Shakespeare & Company recently — after seeing Cord Jefferson’s brilliant adaptation , “American Fiction” — and even on a reread, it made me laugh out loud from the first page.

The last book that made you cry?

Weird or obnoxious if I say my own? Before that, it was probably Y.A.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

That category’s filled to the brim and beyond by reality TV.

How do you organize your books?

Loosely or not at all. This is much to the horror of my Virgo pals, and while I used to take pride in navigating my shelves on familiarity alone, it’s something I’ve vowed to work on. Still, I doubt I’ll ever be an alphabetical type, and clearly I find genre segregation constricting. I do group things thematically, or even interpersonally — music biographies, Black Panthers, Harlem Renaissance; Jessica Hopper is next to John Giorno, and Chase Berggrun’s “R E D” is next to “Dracula”; Julie Buntin’s “Marlena” is beside her husband Gabe Habash’s “Stephen Florida”; Alison C. Rollins is next to her partner Nate Marshall is next to his bestie José Olivarez. At some point Hilton Als’s “White Girls” ended up next to “Male Fantasies,” and I don’t think I’ll ever separate them.

Which genres do you avoid?

There’s an essay in “You Get What You Pay For” where I mention reading a self-help book (as recommended by my now-former psychiatrist). I’d never read one before and have not since.

How does your poetry relate to your essay writing?

The truth is that poetry is under everything. It’s the lyric and sensory backbone. It’s what drives the sound, pace and imagery. (Everyone knows the best prose writers write and read poetry.) But while a poem strives for precision of language, the essay strives for precision of thought, even argument. In a poem, you can build (or approximate) an argument by plopping two images next to each other. It persuades by pointing. Writing these essays felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy — I found myself reiterating a lot of what I’ve already expressed in poems, so it almost became a project of stretching out each poetic line, breaking down each concept to its root. The process is about asking, pondering, searching — and letting language take part in the answering.

You have a knack for terrific book titles. How did you name your new collection?

Thank you! I love a good title, but I also acknowledge the high bar I have set for myself. With this one, I struggled a bit, I think because it took me a while to understand the book myself, let alone how to introduce it to the world. The essays encompass a lot of seemingly disparate themes and even tonal registers, so framing the overall collection was daunting. I’d been tossing around a couple of options, including “Cheaper Than Therapy,” which appears as an essay title, when Jay-Z made the choice for me. I was in Italy at a residency, grieving the recent loss of my aunt and watching the “Big Pimpin’” video over and over as I worked on an essay about it for the book. I’d left my heavily tabbed copy of “Decoded” at home in Los Angeles, but was scrolling a PDF for details about the video shoot when I came across the line: “If the price is life, then you better get what you paid for.”

You describe yourself as foolish for believing “words could be the pathway to empathy and writing an active resistance against hate.” Might publishing this book change your mind?

Honestly? It’s my only hope.

What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

“Heavy,” by Kiese Laymon, to my mom; Blair LM Kelley’s “ Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class,” to my dad; and “A Is for Activist,” to my 8-month-old cousin.

What do you plan to read next?

Phillip B. Williams’s “Ours” was just published, and I’ve been excited about it for literally years. Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” came out the same day as my book, so I plan to make that my tour read.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin — but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t get just as much fun and fulfillment from a night with Angel Nafis, Danez Smith and Saeed Jones.

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‘The Blues Brothers’ was gloriously dumb. It still matters.

A new book delves into the crazy true story behind the making of a film that became a cult classic and turned john belushi and dan aykroyd into screen legends.

Does “The Blues Brothers” deserve a book? In the pantheon of gloriously dumb movie comedies derived from “Saturday Night Live” and The National Lampoon, the 1980 John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd R&B farce sits a notch below “Animal House,” “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters.” Maybe two notches. An absurdist demolition derby of a film, it’s most memorable for spotlighting soul-music legends like Aretha Franklin and James Brown and providing a loving portrait of Chicago at its smoggiest and seediest.

But is it book-worthy? Arguably not. Still, Daniel De Visé makes the case in his subtitle, “The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic,” that his book isn’t just about a movie.

It’s a triple-helixed biography of the main contributors to the counterculture comedy revolution of the post-’60s: “SNL,” the Lampoon and the Second City comedy troupe in all its stage and TV iterations. It’s a tale of Hollywood excess — both budgetary and pharmaceutical — that beggars belief. And, at its essence, it’s the story of a great American bromance, a partnership that was kept alive by one man’s creative discipline before crashing on the rocks of another man’s addictions.

De Visé, a journalist and the author of books on B.B. King and Greg LeMond, leans heavily on previously published group biographies: Bob Woodward’s 1984 Belushi bio “Wired,” Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s 2002 “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” and two books by Belushi’s widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, among others. But De Visé has gone back and talked to many of the principals as well as the secondary and tertiary figures, and he’s read and listened to every interview. This is a well-researched book.

Better, it’s a well-told story, one that rarely loses it focus on the larger picture — the many forces that came together to create comedy by the baby boom generation for the baby boom generation — while engaging the reader in a close-up view of two very different, very funny men.

“The Blues Brothers” goes back to its star-duo’s beginnings: Belushi’s Chicago childhood as the class-clown son of Albanian immigrants and Aykroyd’s early years in Ottawa, Ontario, where Tourette’s Syndrome made him the target of bullies. Both men rose through local comedy groups to star in their respective Second City outposts of Chicago and Toronto, but Belushi was tagged early on as a comic force of nature. By the time he met Aykroyd, he was scouting Second City Toronto for “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” where he’d already become a breakout talent. On their first meeting, Aykroyd told a radio interviewer, he felt “the jump you get when you see a beautiful girl. It was a pit-of-the-stomach feeling.”

Belushi brought the manic slapstick to the first “SNL” cast, and Aykroyd brought the inspired weirdness — remember the “Bass-o-Matic”? — and a deep, abiding love for American R&B, which he quickly imparted to his new best friend. By the time “The Blues Brothers” movie came together in 1979, Belushi had become a movie star by way of “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” the two had debuted their fedora-and-shades R&B alter egos, Jake and Elwood Blues, on “SNL,” and Belushi’s intake of cocaine and other substances had swollen to frightening proportions.

Indeed, everything about the “Blues Brothers” shoot, which forms the detailed heart of De Visé’s book, seems staggering even today. Originally budgeted at $5 million, under director John Landis the production ballooned to over six times that much. Shooting the car chase through the shopping mall alone cost nearly a million dollars. The film set a record for the number of automobiles destroyed in a single film: 103.

Was it worth it? Your mileage may vary. For the most part, critics in 1980 hated “The Blues Brothers,” but audiences embraced it, and it remains a peculiar artifact of Hollywood overkill, funny in its baffling too-muchness. The musical numbers are still the best part, and De Visé is wise to address the accusations, then and now, that the movie and the accompanying Blue Brothers concert tours and hit records represented White cultural appropriation of Black music at its most blithely entitled. But he also reminds readers that the careers of Franklin, Brown, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway were all in serious decline, and that the film gave them new audiences and renewed success that lasted well beyond the film.

The one thing the author fails to address — and it’s hardly his blind spot alone — is how Belushi was allowed to destroy himself while the entertainment industry watched and fans cheered. The “Blues Brothers” set was awash in cocaine — it literally arrived packed in film-reel canisters — and while the studio hired a former Secret Service agent to babysit Belushi, the comedian had plenty of star-struck crew members and hangers-on to bury him in blow. The picture De Visé paints is of a comic genius hurtling toward oblivion as fast as he can, fueled by misery, drugs and enablement. Many times in this book a reader may pause to wonder why production on “The Blues Brothers” wasn’t simply halted while John Belushi got the help he needed. The unwritten answer is that this would have jeopardized the profitability of the movie and its struggling star. The story here isn’t just about a film, a friendship and a comedy generation. It’s about a man who became a commodity until it killed him. But that’s another book.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List.

The Blues Brothers

An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic

By Daniel De Visé

Atlantic Monthly Press. 400 pp. $28

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Five of the Best Books About the Oscars to Read Ahead of This Year’s Academy Awards

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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The 96th Academy Awards are almost here, marking the final night of an eventful award season and potentially offering a definitive answer on whether 2024 was the year of the “Barbie” or…the atomic bomb. Both films, of course, are headed to the Oscars as winners in their own right, boasting eight and 13 nominations, respectively. Check out the full list of nominees here.

Ahead of film’s biggest night, we rounded up a few of the best books about the storied awards ceremony — from recent bestsellers such as Michael Schulman’s “Oscar Wars” to gorgeous coffee table books such as “Red Carpet Oscars.”

50 Oscar Nights by Dave Karger

Released last month, Dave Karger’s “50 Oscar Nights” offfers an exclusive look behind the scenes of the Academy Awards as top stars and filmmakers discuss their Oscar wins and tell never-before-told tales of Hollywood’s biggest night. Some interviews bring to light fun stories like why Hilary Swank decided to celebrate her Academy Award at the Astro Burger in West Hollywood, or insight into the work as Elton John explains why he was convinced he won his Best Original Song award for the wrong tune.

Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

In his most recent book, award-winning writer Michael Schulman offers a lively history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the brutal battles, the starry rivalries, and the colorful behind-the-scenes drama of the most famous award ceremony.

The Academy and the Award by Bruce Davis

For “The Academy and the Award,” Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy for over twenty years, was given unprecedented access to its archives, and the result is a revealing and compelling story of the men and women, famous and infamous, who shaped one of the best-known organizations in the world. Davis writes about the Academy with as intimate a view of its workings, its awards, and its world-famous membership.

Red Carpet Oscars

As the title suggests, “Red Carpet Oscars” is a comprehensive, chronological history surveying over ninety years of fashion on the Oscars red carpet. From homemade and preloved dresses to ready-to-wear and haute couture, it tracks the style evolution of Hollywood’s leading stars, the commercialization of the red carpet, the emergence of stylists and the radical shifts that reshaped formal dressing.

Oscar Night Sessions by Mark Seliger

If you can’t get into the ultra-exclusive and star-studded Vanity Fair Oscar Party, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, then this coffee table book offers the second-best thing. For the past decade, photographer Mark Seliger has set up an elaborate pop-up studio inside the annual after-party , producing exquisite portraits of Hollywood’s A-list personalities in the immediate afterglow of cinema’s biggest event of the year. This book gathers the best of these portraits, along with a foreword by Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones and an afterword by actor Alan Cumming.

Oscar Awards Quiz by Ben Wells

Once you’ve gotten through the above texts, you can put your Oscars knowledge to the test with this handy trivia book. Go through the questions and answers as a way to hone your memory of the nominees and winners, or use the workbook as a trivia game with friends during an Oscars watch party on Sunday.

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