David Sterritt Jump Cuts, Tracking Shots, and Scherzos is a thrilling immersion in five decades of sharp, witty, and deeply informed writing by one of America’s most adventurous film critics, David Sterritt. With bracing insight and unflagging curiosity, Sterritt moves effortlessly from Kurosawa to Malick, from Kiarostami to Coppola, from Norman Mailer to Philip Glass,…
Esfir’ Il’iinichna Shub Translated and Edited by Keith Sanborn. My Life is the Cinema brings to English readers for the first time the memoirs and selected writings of Esfir Shub, the pioneering Soviet filmmaker whose archival works transformed the practice of documentary cinema. A comrade of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, Shub was among the…
Peter Markham The Zen of the Director explores the art of filmmaking as a journey of self-awareness. Moving beyond technical instruction and “how-to” manuals, and drawing inspiration from Robert Bresson’s conviction that “The point is not to direct someone, but to direct one’s self,” author Peter Markham invites directors, and all creative practitioners, to look…
Gerald Peary A sharp, funny, and deeply engaging memoir, A Reluctant Film Critic traces Gerald Peary’s unlikely journey from a bookish, movie-obsessed boy in small-town America to one of the country’s most distinctive critical voices. Told in vivid, fast-moving vignettes, it’s a story of curiosity, rebellion, and discovery—of a life spent both inside and outside…
Julian Upton Black-and-white cinema effectively died out almost overnight in the mid-1960s. But in the face of a decade of serious competition from colour and widescreen — not to mention visual fads like 3D — black-and-white cinematography remained innovative and even experimental as it reached what looked like its endpoint. The evidence from a host…
Luke McKernan What do moving images mean? How and why do they work? In sixty short, engaging essays film archivist, curator, historian and writer Luke McKernan looks at 140 years of a bewitching medium, focussing on the importance of stories and form in shaping the moving images on our screens. Here for the table of…
Caveh Zahedi With his characteristic candor, wit, and steadfast belief in radical honesty, this collection of personal essays, critical reviews, and selected diary entries from Caveh Zahedi takes the reader on an itinerant tour through subjects as varied as his own artistic and spiritual journey, his trials and tribulations in the indie film world, encounters…
Ross Lipman How do classic films remain alive and authentic amidst the shifting sands of time, societal upheaval, and technological advance? The Archival Impermanence Project is a unique work integrating detailed film restoration case studies from the dawn of cinema to present day, in the framework of an organic theory of practice. Growing from the multi-decade career…
Ian Christie “Immersion” is everywhere in entertainment today. But this promise didn’t start with digital media — it was over two hundred years ago that Georgian London became the world centre of such immersive spectacles as the Leicester Square Panorama, the Eidophusikon’s magical moving pictures with music, and a hundred years later, cinema itself was…
Nat Segaloff Between 1934 and 1968, no Hollywood studio could make a movie without the permission of and a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration. The Production Code was Hollywood’s official censor. Screenplays, books, plays, costumes and even story ideas and songs had to be okayed by the Code before they could be…