Film Art: An Introduction

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Hollywood churns out the finest talent in visual arts and it’s the largest entertainment center anywhere in the world. 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.

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. These were the most inspirational books to me as a film student (as was Truffaut’s The Films in My Life). full sizeIt was inevitable, once my old friend Noël Carroll came to Madison’s philosophy department in 1991, that we’d wind up collaborating. In contrast to smooth Hollywood narrative animation, Robert Breer’s 1974 film Fuji looks disjointed and crudely drawn.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. In this case, three familiar stars, Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck, all appear, each working in a different part of the huge clock tower. Though in need of updating, Robinson’s History is unequalled as a single-volume narrative primer on cinema’s evolution. 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.

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.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. 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. I also include the Instructor's Manual (0072388218) - NOTE : there are newer editions, be sure this is the one you want. 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.