The Best Books About Film

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Rayon Vert
Green is the Rayest Color
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1101 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Jun 27, 2020 9:30 pm

Yeah I'm sorry. I just "wrote" it (sometimes directly lifted stuff word for word) for myself when I started a deep dive in classic Hollywood, and as a way of organizing the most interesting info in a more coherent and summarized way - Mordden, the other two books I mentioned earlier, the Neal Gabler book An Empire of Their Own, Wikipedia and other stuff online is what I remember I used mostly.

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senseabove
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1102 Post by senseabove » Sun Jun 28, 2020 4:02 am

Didn't intend that to be a criticism! But the suggestions are definitely welcome—I see the Gabler book used all the time, so I'll have to finally pick it up, and hunt down the other three.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1103 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:32 am

Has anyone read The Hollywood Film Musical by Barry Keith Grant? I’ve got Altman and Feuer’s books and this seems to be the *other book on musicals I can find that is somewhat popular, but don’t believe it’s been mentioned here

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domino harvey
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1104 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:50 am

I haven’t read it, but like Altman, Keith’s output is focused on questions of genre, so I imagine it’s in the same wheelhouse

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YnEoS
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1105 Post by YnEoS » Sat Jul 11, 2020 6:10 pm

Haven't read the Barry Keith Grant, but if you're generally looking for books on musicals I really liked A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film by Richard Barrios, if you want to go super deep on the least liked era of american film musicals.

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Red Screamer
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1106 Post by Red Screamer » Mon Aug 03, 2020 9:44 pm


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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1107 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Aug 16, 2020 12:30 am

Has anybody read Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd's book on Leos Carax?

It seems to be the only one out there on him exclusively, and sounds interesting, but pretty hushed conversation on the internet.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: The Best Books About Film

#1108 Post by feihong » Sun Aug 16, 2020 3:18 am

hanshotfirst1138 wrote:
Tue Jun 02, 2020 7:20 pm
Grand Wazoo wrote:
Orson Kane wrote:
Sun May 24, 2020 7:45 pm
I'd like to learn more about cult cinema from an East Asian perspective (South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong) with a mix of horror, thriller, comedy, action and SF and other genre films.

Any books that are worthwhile? Need something beyond "Oldboy" and "Hard Boiled"
Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan and Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film by Chris D are pretty good primers for their respective countries.
Apparently David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong is quite good too.
This has always been a very controversial stance of mine, for some reason, but the books by Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser––Asian Cult Cinema (on Hong Kong films) and the three volumes of their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia (the generalized edition, the Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror edition, and the Sex Films edition) are better at cataloging the real cult material from Hong Kong and Japan. The other books present a more straightforward overview, but the capsule review structure of the Weisser books, if you can read through it, provides tons of interesting avenues of cult film to pursue. There are movies in there so rare I still have never been able to track them down, like "I Hear the Whisper of the Ammonite," and "I Never Had a Flying Dream." And you get to discover films like Beauty Evil Rose. The books are out of print now, but cheap enough to be cover price used on Amazon.

As far as Hong Kong, my go-to was always Sex and Zen and A Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong's Mind-bending Films, by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins. Very focused on 80s and 90s films (with a small section on Shaw Bros.), and it was published before the HK handover, so it mostly leaves out Johnnie To, and the later career of Tsui Hark, but very straightforward and a good intro to the sort of meat of the various genres of HK New Wave movies. They also have a lot of fun with it, including bio cutouts and a nice section collecting hundreds of mangled subtitles from HK movies and explaining a bit of how the English titles end up so distorted.

For Japanese movies from a Japanese perspective, offering theory and interpretation, Currents in Japanese Cinema, by Tadao Sato, seems to me to be a pretty important book. Sadly, it looks like the cheapest copy on Amazon right now is $280. That is crazy! Of course, Amazon insists the book was published back in 1873, so maybe the prices are typos, too?

Patrick Macias' Tokyoscope was a good book on Japanese cult cinema, with a very particular slant; Macias liked and really emphasized Toei films, Kinji Fukasaku, and Takashi Miike. He hardly touched on Nikkatsu movies, and he specifically didn't like Seijun Suzuki, so there wasn't much of them (I can't recall if he wrote about the Stray Cat Rock movies or not, though he did write up some of the grungy Toei girl biker movies). I don't think he wrote much about Hideo Gosha, either. The Toei yakuza movies get the deepest profile in the book. After the book came out, Macias came to the screening a group I was with held of Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy, and he told me in conversation that the films were really changing his perspective on Suzuki for the better. But the book was over and done with by that time. Nonetheless, it's a cool book.

For a lot of later Japanese film, like the indie pictures of the 80s and 90s, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film is a nice book, with a mix of filmmaker profiles, interviews, genre overviews, and capsule reviews. It has a lot of different material, including different interviews, from what used to be available on the Midnight Eye website.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1109 Post by domino harvey » Mon Sep 21, 2020 3:06 am

Almost surely not one of the best books about film, but nevertheless

Image

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soundchaser
Leave Her to Beaver
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1110 Post by soundchaser » Mon Sep 21, 2020 3:09 am

Ah yes, who could forget the famously unmixed messages of Out of the Past, and the brave and noble characters in Secret Ceremony?

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Pavel
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2020 2:41 pm

Re: The Best Books About Film

#1111 Post by Pavel » Mon Sep 21, 2020 3:26 am

The Night of the Hunter is about a religious, decent man, who wants to find a family and help a single mother raise her tempestuous children. A fine example for men, and a portrait of now-forgotten chivalry. Mandatory viewing for children who want to know what it means to be a man.

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Gregory
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1112 Post by Gregory » Mon Sep 21, 2020 4:05 am

The book's methods work! My son is just seven years old and is already well on his way to becoming an insolent, sardonic, narrow-eyed loner. He learned a thing or two about persistence from Max Cady in Cape Fear.

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soundchaser
Leave Her to Beaver
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1113 Post by soundchaser » Fri Oct 02, 2020 11:17 am

Has anyone read Jeanine Basinger's The Movie Musical!? I'm working my way through A Song in the Dark, Richard Barrios's book about very early musicals, and I think I've got the genre bug again. (I've already read and thoroughly enjoyed the Altman book.)

beamish14
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1114 Post by beamish14 » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:07 pm

I'm really enjoying Paul Hirsch's very well-written and extremely comprehensive memoir A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far Far Away.
The only other autobiographies by editors I've encountered are Jim Clark's Dream Repairman and Ralph Rosenbloom's When the
Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins
, and those are excellent as well.

Hirsch is known for his long working relationship with Brian De Palma, but the book is notable for having some fascinating insights into
working with John Hughes on his two best films, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Hughes
comes across as being a very mercurial person who, like Stanley Kubrick, abruptly ended professional and personal relationships for no discernible reason.

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senseabove
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1115 Post by senseabove » Mon Dec 07, 2020 9:08 pm

Wayne State's got a 45% off sale going through January 10th.

I've already got Wood's Hawks book and the new V. F. Perkins collection in my cart.

Any recommendations?

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Red Screamer
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1116 Post by Red Screamer » Sat Dec 26, 2020 1:46 am

It's not "about" film per se, but Michael Snow's mind-blowing photography book Cover to Cover has been reissued (in a limited edition) by Light Industry after spending many years out of print. It plays with space and montage in a very cinematic way and is essential viewing/reading, especially for anyone interested in structural film.

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senseabove
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1117 Post by senseabove » Sat Dec 26, 2020 2:41 am

I'm eagerly awaiting my copy!

Also not "about" film per se...but they co-(re)published that with Primary Information, who also recently republished Yvonne Rainer's Works 1961-1973, which is mostly about her early dance work, but has a wide array of stuff, from memoirs on the late-60s/early-70s NYC art scene to dance "scripts" to letters and newspaper clippings and flyers to travel journals... And that includes some thoughts on her short films, and scripts for the first full-length film she made and the performance from which her second film (the brilliant Film About a Woman Who...) derives.

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hearthesilence
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1118 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Dec 26, 2020 3:30 am

Red Screamer wrote:
Sat Dec 26, 2020 1:46 am
It's not "about" film per se, but Michael Snow's mind-blowing photography book Cover to Cover has been reissued (in a limited edition) by Light Industry after spending many years out of print. It plays with space and montage in a very cinematic way and is essential viewing/reading, especially for anyone interested in structural film.
I noticed it was a paperback so I thought "I wonder if there's a hardcover edition?" Of course that would have to be the first edition which apparently starts at well over $1000. (A cheaper first edition paperback can be found for about $750.) So yeah, $30+ for a reissue ain't bad at all!

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Maltic
Joined: Sat Oct 10, 2020 1:36 am

Re: The Best Books About Film

#1119 Post by Maltic » Tue Dec 29, 2020 9:03 am

feihong wrote:
Sun Aug 16, 2020 3:18 am
hanshotfirst1138 wrote:
Tue Jun 02, 2020 7:20 pm
Grand Wazoo wrote:
Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan and Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film by Chris D are pretty good primers for their respective countries.
Apparently David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong is quite good too.
This has always been a very controversial stance of mine, for some reason, but the books by Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser––Asian Cult Cinema (on Hong Kong films) and the three volumes of their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia (the generalized edition, the Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror edition, and the Sex Films edition) are better at cataloging the real cult material from Hong Kong and Japan. The other books present a more straightforward overview, but the capsule review structure of the Weisser books, if you can read through it, provides tons of interesting avenues of cult film to pursue. There are movies in there so rare I still have never been able to track them down, like "I Hear the Whisper of the Ammonite," and "I Never Had a Flying Dream." And you get to discover films like Beauty Evil Rose. The books are out of print now, but cheap enough to be cover price used on Amazon.

As far as Hong Kong, my go-to was always Sex and Zen and A Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong's Mind-bending Films, by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins. Very focused on 80s and 90s films (with a small section on Shaw Bros.), and it was published before the HK handover, so it mostly leaves out Johnnie To, and the later career of Tsui Hark, but very straightforward and a good intro to the sort of meat of the various genres of HK New Wave movies. They also have a lot of fun with it, including bio cutouts and a nice section collecting hundreds of mangled subtitles from HK movies and explaining a bit of how the English titles end up so distorted.

For Japanese movies from a Japanese perspective, offering theory and interpretation, Currents in Japanese Cinema, by Tadao Sato, seems to me to be a pretty important book. Sadly, it looks like the cheapest copy on Amazon right now is $280. That is crazy! Of course, Amazon insists the book was published back in 1873, so maybe the prices are typos, too?

Patrick Macias' Tokyoscope was a good book on Japanese cult cinema, with a very particular slant; Macias liked and really emphasized Toei films, Kinji Fukasaku, and Takashi Miike. He hardly touched on Nikkatsu movies, and he specifically didn't like Seijun Suzuki, so there wasn't much of them (I can't recall if he wrote about the Stray Cat Rock movies or not, though he did write up some of the grungy Toei girl biker movies). I don't think he wrote much about Hideo Gosha, either. The Toei yakuza movies get the deepest profile in the book. After the book came out, Macias came to the screening a group I was with held of Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy, and he told me in conversation that the films were really changing his perspective on Suzuki for the better. But the book was over and done with by that time. Nonetheless, it's a cool book.

For a lot of later Japanese film, like the indie pictures of the 80s and 90s, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film is a nice book, with a mix of filmmaker profiles, interviews, genre overviews, and capsule reviews. It has a lot of different material, including different interviews, from what used to be available on the Midnight Eye website.

Along with Planet Hong Kong, Stephen Teo's history of Hong Kong cinema is invaluable, as are his books on individual directors (Wong Kar-wai, King Hu, Johnnie To). Most of them came out in the 1990s/2000s, though, and therefore aren't "up-to-date" (and can be hard to find). Like Bordwell, he focuses mainly on the auteurs... Chang Cheh, Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, John Woo etc, so it depends on how "cultish" it has to be, I guess.

Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2019, ed. Bettinson and Martin) covers a lot of ground, though it's a bit on the scholarly side.

I find Bey Logan pretty useless (mostly gossip and imdb facts), but that's just a personal preference.

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feihong
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1120 Post by feihong » Thu Dec 31, 2020 7:17 am

Yeah, I never got enough out of the Bey Logan book to want to buy it. I would leaf through it at bookstores back in the day, but I didn't see anything extra I wasn't getting in other books and magazines. I missed out on the Bordwell book when it was in print––probably because I leaned more towards cult films.

Undine Far East has published a book called King Hu In His Own Words, which is quite strange. It is full of interviews and translations of published essays and film treatments Hu wrote. It even has a few scenes of the script to The Battle of Ono. It has costume drawings and scene studies Hu created (really cool). But I think as to the artistic identity of the auteur, you end up leaving with more questions than when you arrived. Friends who are translators tell me that scholarship in Chinese is very different in its approach to English-language scholarship, but I was not prepared for how different Hu's writing would seem to me. What comes through most prominently is that, while Hu seems very certain what should be in a movie, he doesn't seem to consider his stories very deeply. Most of the interviews come from late in his life, and the artist they portray is someone strikingly behind the times, struggling to string a rangy series of projects together. There is some explication of a movie Hu wanted to make prior to Come Drink with Me about a Chinese businessman who devoted his life to building a monorail. It's a weird-sounding project; it's not especially clear from how he talks about it what elements of the story interest Hu so much. It becomes clear reading on that, especially later on in his life, Hu becomes caught up in lengthy, demanding projects that don't come to fruition––many of which sound less than promising in their presentation. An 80s thriller involving theft of computer discs in Pasadena and toxins derived from fish sounds very strange, and a proposed movie about an Italian priest sounds like it would have been very strange. Sadder still, the script excerpt from The Battle of Ono is really quite good. It promises rollicking high adventure and charismatic roles for Chinese actors. I can imagine how hard a sell it was in Hollywood during the 80s, with a largely Chinese cast and big helpings of Chinese culture on screen, but the way David Henry Hwang wrote it and Hu visualized it made for a level of excitement and intrigue that I think would have been at home with other films of that era, from Indiana Jones to Shanghai Surprise. Anyway, the book is interesting, but very sad, and the interviews with Hu are quite repetitive.

A comparable book to the Bey Logan, but with a bit more of an interesting perspective, is Fredric Dannen's Hong Kong Babylon, which has a host of original interviews with Hong Kong filmmakers and actors. This came out a little after the Hong Kong handover, so the timing is very interesting. I remember an interesting interview with Chow Yun-Fat, where he asks Dannen if Dannen has seen the Bond film with Michelle Yoeh yet. Dannen says yes, and that he thought it was a disappointment. Chow remarks how silly he thinks it is that, after Yoeh is a super-competent agent all the way through the movie, Bond still ends up saving her at the end. Not astounding, but illuminating nonetheless. You get all these characters at this very pivotal point in their careers. Tsui Hark sounds very pessimistic in his interview (he's is very stung from being rejected to direct the Hollywood Godzilla movie). It's a little like reading a Rolling Stone magazine full of info on the big players in Hong Kong cinema as the ground is shifting underneath them.

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Maltic
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1121 Post by Maltic » Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:18 pm

feihong wrote:
Thu Dec 31, 2020 7:17 am
Yeah, I never got enough out of the Bey Logan book to want to buy it. I would leaf through it at bookstores back in the day, but I didn't see anything extra I wasn't getting in other books and magazines. I missed out on the Bordwell book when it was in print––probably because I leaned more towards cult films.

Undine Far East has published a book called King Hu In His Own Words, which is quite strange. It is full of interviews and translations of published essays and film treatments Hu wrote. It even has a few scenes of the script to The Battle of Ono. It has costume drawings and scene studies Hu created (really cool). But I think as to the artistic identity of the auteur, you end up leaving with more questions than when you arrived. Friends who are translators tell me that scholarship in Chinese is very different in its approach to English-language scholarship, but I was not prepared for how different Hu's writing would seem to me. What comes through most prominently is that, while Hu seems very certain what should be in a movie, he doesn't seem to consider his stories very deeply. Most of the interviews come from late in his life, and the artist they portray is someone strikingly behind the times, struggling to string a rangy series of projects together. There is some explication of a movie Hu wanted to make prior to Come Drink with Me about a Chinese businessman who devoted his life to building a monorail. It's a weird-sounding project; it's not especially clear from how he talks about it what elements of the story interest Hu so much. It becomes clear reading on that, especially later on in his life, Hu becomes caught up in lengthy, demanding projects that don't come to fruition––many of which sound less than promising in their presentation. An 80s thriller involving theft of computer discs in Pasadena and toxins derived from fish sounds very strange, and a proposed movie about an Italian priest sounds like it would have been very strange. Sadder still, the script excerpt from The Battle of Ono is really quite good. It promises rollicking high adventure and charismatic roles for Chinese actors. I can imagine how hard a sell it was in Hollywood during the 80s, with a largely Chinese cast and big helpings of Chinese culture on screen, but the way David Henry Hwang wrote it and Hu visualized it made for a level of excitement and intrigue that I think would have been at home with other films of that era, from Indiana Jones to Shanghai Surprise. Anyway, the book is interesting, but very sad, and the interviews with Hu are quite repetitive.
That's interesting. I was aware he was something of a "scholar" (and visual artist), but I haven't read much of anything he wrote. The unfinished project of his that seemed most promising was perhaps the film about Chinese railway workers in the American West. If it had gotten off the ground (if he hadn't died prematurely), it might've been of great interest today (the immigrant perspective, the US-China rivalry, and so on).

Of course, even Big Trouble in Little China flopped in America in the 1980s :D


A comparable book to the Bey Logan, but with a bit more of an interesting perspective, is Fredric Dannen's Hong Kong Babylon, which has a host of original interviews with Hong Kong filmmakers and actors. This came out a little after the Hong Kong handover, so the timing is very interesting. I remember an interesting interview with Chow Yun-Fat, where he asks Dannen if Dannen has seen the Bond film with Michelle Yoeh yet. Dannen says yes, and that he thought it was a disappointment. Chow remarks how silly he thinks it is that, after Yoeh is a super-competent agent all the way through the movie, Bond still ends up saving her at the end. Not astounding, but illuminating nonetheless. You get all these characters at this very pivotal point in their careers. Tsui Hark sounds very pessimistic in his interview (he's is very stung from being rejected to direct the Hollywood Godzilla movie). It's a little like reading a Rolling Stone magazine full of info on the big players in Hong Kong cinema as the ground is shifting underneath them.
There's an interesting chapter in the updated (pdf-)edition of Bordwell's book, about HK directors in the decade after the handover, when much of the HK industry was swallowed by the Mainland. Of course, published in 2010, that too is outdated at this point... even WKW has made a "big" period film in the Mainland since then

https://www.davidbordwell.net/books/planethongkong.php

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Maltic
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1122 Post by Maltic » Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:29 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:
Sat Jun 27, 2020 6:08 pm
I love this kind of stuff and this reminds me that using those books and other sources, I created this 78-page document about exactly this thing you're interested in, mostly point-form, with cool pictures! I did a pretty good job if I say so myself.

I just recovered the Word document, transferred to pdf, and uploaded it HERE for free for those interested. (Regarding studios' modern-day developments, I stopped updating this around 2011 or so as you'll notice.)

This is great, thanks a lot!

BTW, Andrew Sarris' You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet has some interesting anecdotes and perspectives about different Hollywood players - including a bit about the various house styles. Of course, it's not nearly as wide-ranging and systematic as some of the other works that have been mentioned here
Last edited by Maltic on Tue Jan 05, 2021 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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senseabove
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1123 Post by senseabove » Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:41 pm

Primary Information is having a 50% off sale, so if you're interested in the Snow or Rainer books mentioned recently in this thread, now's the time to get them!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Best Books About Film

#1124 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 05, 2021 7:05 pm

Thanks for the head's up! I just watched Snow's Wavelength for the first time last night so I'll eagerly jump on that one. Your description of the Rainer book upthread sounds intriguingly unique.. would you recommend a blind-buy just based off its singularity or should I dip into her work first for a taste?

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senseabove
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:07 am

Re: The Best Books About Film

#1125 Post by senseabove » Tue Jan 05, 2021 8:02 pm

Most (all?) of her features are up on Kanopy if you have access to it, or on back channels if you don't. Privilege was the first I saw, and though it's not covered in this book, it was a good place to start, I think.

Her writing (if not her dance "scripts") is much easier to digest than her films, but if you don't already have a penchant for her style or an existing interest in late modernist/early pomo dance and art world shenanigans, I don't know how interesting this particular book would be entirely on its own, so I would recommend watching something first... (On the other hand, if you're intrigued enough to take a flyer on it, limited edition art books can get scarce quick. Wait a year or three and I'd be surprised if you couldn't get at least your $20 back from a used bookstore in a college town.)

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