The Best Books About Film

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Wes Moynihan · #176 Post by **Wes Moynihan** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 11:50 am

I posted a list of my film book collection on another board, if anyone is looking for something to read.

redbill · #177 Post by **redbill** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 3:27 pm

Can anyone suggest a Murnau book? Amazon & Ebay have nothing, and Borders lists everything as out of print.

ellipsis7 · #178 Post by **ellipsis7** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 3:40 pm

Lotte Eisner's 1973 book MURNAU (in University of California Eng trans edn) comes up @ $125 and up on abebooks... Sounds expensive? - there's a copy for $836.40 also for sale!

Cheaper and narrower in focus would be to pick up the bfi's monograph on SUNRISE which is currently in print.

Galen Young · #179 Post by **Galen Young** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 5:07 pm

I wrote the University of California Press about the Eisner MURNAU book and this was their response:

University of California Press wrote:Most-if not all- of our out of print books are out of print for a good reason: there is simply not enough of a market to keep them in print. The cost of used books is not always a good barometer for a large market demand; 100 people bidding up the price on 5 or 10 copies on the used market is quite different than the 3-4,000 people needed to profitably bring this book back to print. I'm afraid we have no plans to reprint this book.

I was able to buy a copy online for well under a hundred, just gotta keep watching. It makes me wonder though if MOC sells more than 3-4,000 copies of their Murnau dvd titles... Speaking of out of print titles -- like all those Faber & Faber Tarkovsky books -- has anyone here tried this "print on demand" service? (a link from the Faber & Faber website.)

ellipsis7 · #180 Post by **ellipsis7** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 6:05 pm

I got Ian Christie's ARROWS OF DESIRE on Powell & Pressburger as a Faber reprint... The reprint is fine - the book just the same as normal, except pictures are darker and more contrasting, leaving some detail hard to make out and repro not perfect...

It's an important service to support - it allows publishers to store the books electronically and print out one by one on demand and then bind as before... It counters the argument put forward by U Cal press, but of course Murnau would be precomputerisation so they would have to source the original material and would have to go to the cost of scanning it in etc...

Argonaut69 · #181 Post by **Argonaut69** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 12:27 am

Most-if not all- of our out of print books are out of print for a good reason: there is simply not enough of a market to keep them in print. The cost of used books is not always a good barometer for a large market demand; 100 people bidding up the price on 5 or 10 copies on the used market is quite different than the 3-4,000 people needed to profitably bring this book back to print. I'm afraid we have no plans to reprint this book.

Wow, excuses, excuses. I buy this reasoning for some books but don't believe that it would apply in the case of the Murnau bio. Do the people at UofC press really not believe that there are a few thousand people in the world who wouldn't snap up a reprint of the Murnau bio pronto when...

1) At least one of Murnau's films is in the IMDB Top 250 Film List as voted on by (the statistically young) user base.

2) Andrew Sarris lists Murnau in his Pantheon of the greatest directors in his classic American Cinema book.

3) Pauline Kael, David Thomson and other heavily read critics all lavish praise on his films in their writings. Roger Ebert has now written numerous pieces on Murnau films for his Great Movies series.

4) There is no other biography on Murnau available.

5) Many people would buy the bio for the screenplay of Nosferatu alone (the film which is currently in the IMDB Top 250).

UofC press published a biography of Jean Vigo back in the 70's around the same time as the Murnau book and let it go out of print as well. There it languished with no reprint in sight until Faber and Faber in the UK snapped up the rights and released a nice, updated paperback edition a few years ago. I suspect the same will happen with the Murnau bio eventually.

The UofC Press can sit around forever making up excuses but I believe a reprint of this particular bio would be a profitable enterprise. And the simple fact is that very few film books of any kind are ever going to reach 'blockbuster' sales levels and a nice, solid, moderately profitable title is about the best one can expect most of the time.

Anonymous · #182 Post by **Anonymous** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 2:13 pm

Lotte Eisner also wrote THE book on german silent film, which includes very readable passages about Murnau. The german title is "Die dÃ¤monische Leinwand" (The demonic screen), but I donÃ‚Â´t know if it has been translated and published in english language. ItÃ‚Â´s hard to get it in Germany too, although they are planning a new edition for months now. On Kurosawa: there will be a new Kurosawa Book entitled "Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa" by Donald Richie and Kurosawas long-time script girl Teruyo Nogami, published by Stone Bridge Press. The book will be available at the end of October 2006.

Tom Peeping · #183 Post by **Tom Peeping** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 6:45 pm

Bonjour,

Here are some books I've been coming back to for years and years :

Danny Peary: Cult Movies, Cult Movies 2, Cult Movies 3, Guide for the Film Fanatic, Alternate Oscars (anything this guy wrote is exciting)

Jacques Lourcelles: Dictionnaire du CinÃ©ma, les films (french)

Amos Vogel: Cinema as Subversive Art

Clive Hirschhorn: The Hollywood Musical

Robert K. Klepper: Silent Films, 1877-1996

Any book of the series "The Films of..." from Citadel Press: Joan Crawford, James Cagney, Judy Garland, John Huston (you name it)

And then Murnau : to this day, I believe the most complete documentation about Murnau is a spanish 2-volume set (Etapa Alemana / Etapa Americana) by Luciano Berriatua: Los Proverbios Chinos de F.W.Murnau. It was published by Filmoteca Espanola in 1990. Amazing it was never translated in english. It is an absolute must for Murnau fans: 800 pages, insightful texts, huge iconography, each year & film of Murnau's carreer carefully researched. It is out of print but pops up from time to time on e-Bay or others.

There is also the catalog from the 2003 Murnau Retrospektive in Berlin : Murnau, ein Melancholiker des Films. It's almost all text (in german) and deserves a translation too.

HerrSchreck · #184 Post by **HerrSchreck** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 7:03 pm

NickyEyes wrote:Lotte Eisner also wrote THE book on german silent film, which includes very readable passages about Murnau. The german title is "Die dÃ¤monische Leinwand" (The demonic screen), but I donÃ‚Â´t know if it has been translated and published in english language. ItÃ‚Â´s hard to get it in Germany too, although they are planning a new edition for months now. .

Sure, it's available-- the famous THE HAUNTED SCREEN. Eisner is pretty stock in trade here in the US.. surprised it's not available in Germany. Then again, with the shortage of silent films on home video there, lemme rethink that....

With a number of books on Dreyer, Lang, Eisenstein, Griffith et al still in print here in US, the UCLA or whosis's excuse that there's no audience is a total fucking albatross in this day and age. If all the people who need to coalesce to come together to make a restored film/disc happen... internationally coordinated vault scouring, elements chugging jetting plane train & automobile to places like Paris Bologna Munich Hollywood Moscow... chemical baths, pretinting, preservation elements to dupe neg to fine grain... to fucking telecine costing hundred thousand bananas... to authoring compression & manufacturing of discs...

If the film world can spend all that money, expense, travel, all that logistic horror to service Murnau & silent film fans around the world with films & discs themselves, these bespectacled know-it-all-pinhead professors could prompt a cheap print run of existing plates/files on pulp paper which costs like .00003 cents a page for a book already written. Gimme a break nitwits.. you said you were professors-- you're supposed to be smart! This isn't a jojo the monkey comedy short from 1919 we're talkng bout. I've been starved for Eisners Murnau book forever and I just don't understand how this stupidity persists.

tryavna · #185 Post by **tryavna** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 8:24 pm

Not to excuse UC's excuses, but university presses nation-wide are facing significant financial difficulties right now. Most of the universities for which they're named have cut all financial ties with them and have been told in no uncertain terms that they must either make it on their own or not at all. On top of all that, they still have a major duty to perform in publishing new scholarship -- in order to keep the academic machine rolling along.

So the real problem is that UC press probably hasn't even begun to think about reissuing out-of-print secondary books (as opposed to umpteenth reissues of canonical primary sources) because there's no financial incentive to do so, especially since most of the primary customers (university libraries) probably bought the first edition when they came out decades ago. The vagueness of the response Galen got seems to support this supposition.

Maybe when university presses finally sort themselves out in the new economic climate they'll begin following the sort of model that Ellipsis is talking about. But realistically, I don't see it happening for another five or ten years. In the meantime, however, maybe a few more publishers like Faber will come along and fill in the gap.

Argonaut69 · #186 Post by **Argonaut69** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 2:06 am

Tom Peeping wrote:Danny Peary: Cult Movies, Cult Movies 2, Cult Movies 3, Guide for the Film Fanatic, Alternate Oscars (anything this guy wrote is exciting)

Yes, I certainly miss new releases by Mr. Peary, perhaps the critic (along with Stanley Kauffmann) who I agree with more often than any other. While browsing in Powell's Bookstore in Portland Oregon recently I came across a mint copy of Guide for The Film Fanatic which I purchased to replace my somewhat beat up copy at home. While looking the two over I noticed that the price on the copy I bought at Powell's was listed as $1 more than my original copy and upon flipping through it found an added section at the back where many films that had mistakenly not been included in the original printing (Bonnie and Clyde, Blue Velvet, A Room With a View, My Life as a Dog, 8 1/2, Salo, etc.) were added. It's all on page 522. I'd always wondered what Peary would have made of many of these films and now I know! The ISBN# is the same on both books so you can only tell you have the later printing if the price is listed as $13.95 and there is the extra page 522 at the back.

gubbelsj · #187 Post by **gubbelsj** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 5:37 am

I haven't seen this book mentioned yet, but I recently finished Robert Kolker's third edition of A Cinema of Loneliness, his study of contemporary American cinema (from 1964-2000). Big chapters with juicy analyses on Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Speilberg and Altman. He removed the original chapter on Coppola a number of years ago and slipped Stone into the Penn section. Plenty to debate about his choices and his conclusions, but really excellent, deep analyses throughout, and the chapter on Kubrick is quite well done - I found his observations to be very insightful. The Spielberg chapter is more of a critique of post-1975 American film culture and trends in general, and one I found very convincing - Rambo, the revenge genre, post-Vietnam issues. He really comes down hard on Spielberg, too. Overall, quite an enjoyable study.

a.khan · #188 Post by **a.khan** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 12:47 pm

Thoughts on Ebert's upcoming collected works?

Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert, David Bordwell (Foreword)

Note I like the man, read his stuff on the web but have never thought of buying his books (Great Movies series or the Yearbooks). So any comments would be welcome.

Also: I've come to really favour Peter Bogdanovich. In my childishness I'm beginning to look up at him as the Truffaut of American cinema.

Can someone here please recommend good books ON and BY Peter Bogdanovich? I like him both as a director and filmmaker.

seferad · #189 Post by **seferad** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:47 pm

Roger Ebert's books 'The Great Movies' I and II are very good in my opinion. He isn't pretentious at all, and his choices include films as diverse as 'Floating Weeds', 'Un Chien Andalou' and 'Women of the Dunes' as well as resolutely non 'arty' films such as 'A Christmas Story' and 'Planes Trains and Automobiles'. He has a personal style which is quite affable, although I often disagree with his opinions (particularly about Kiarostami). Coming from England, I've never seen his show, but I think its very good that the most powerful and famous critic in America with such a large audience might introduce so many people to Ozu and Bresson.

Jonathan Rosenbaum seems to be completely differnt, catering to a much smaller audience and consequently focusing on much more isoteric films. I've only read 'Essential Cinema' so far but it had a huge influence on me as a cinephile and aspirant filmmaker. Since reading it I now see Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao Hsien as possibly the two most original and brilliant directors working today, coming up to the same level as Godard and Antonioni. I'm sure many people don't share this opinion!

Other great books on film, and especially ones which take a selection of films as their focus, are Derek Malcolm's 'A Century of Films', Gilbert Adair's 'Flickers, 'Film: The Critic's Choice' (edited by Geoff Andrew) and (if you can find it) 'The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Films', a mammoth, profusely illustrated volume in a series which contains several hundred essays on a huge variety of important films from around the world by several essayists.

Antoine Doinel · #190 Post by **Antoine Doinel** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 3:54 am

Does anyone know what the best "making of" Citizen Kane book is out there? I'm not yet ready to dive into Simon Callow's opus about Welles, but I just finished watching Citizen Kane tonight for the first time in about a decade and as you might guess, I was blown away.

kinjitsu · #191 Post by **kinjitsu** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:21 am

Carringer's The Making of Citizen Kane. You might browse the selection of Kane books at Amazon.

Antoine Doinel · Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:10 pm

Great, thanks for the tip! I'll definitely track that book down.

gubbelsj · #193 Post by **gubbelsj** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 12:14 am

adnankhan wrote:Can someone here please recommend good books ON and BY Peter Bogdanovich? I like him both as a director and filmmaker.

The best books related to Bogdanovich are the handful he's written about other directors. Many of them are more along the lines of interview compilations, and are wonderful resources for info on many of the greats. This Is Orson Welles, Who The Devil Made It, and Who The Hell's In It I and II are all worth reading. As far as Bogdanovich's actual writing, you might like Peter Bogdanovich's Movie Of The Week, which features fifty-two reviews (it really is one for each week) listed through the calender year. Kind of fun. I haven't read The Killing of the Unicorn, the book he wrote about Dorothy Stratten, but I have heard it's interesting. As if it couldn't be, given the history.

kinjitsu · #194 Post by **kinjitsu** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 6:37 am

Not forgetting Boggy's book on John Ford.

a.khan · #195 Post by **a.khan** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 3:47 pm

Thanks, guys, be interesting if another writer could pay homage and do a book on Bogdanovich's life/career.

IMDb says he's got "Roman Nights" and "The Broken Code" in prep.

redbill · #196 Post by **redbill** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 2:31 pm

ellipsis7 wrote:Lotte Eisner's 1973 book MURNAU (in University of California Eng trans edn) comes up @ $125 and up on abebooks... Sounds expensive? - there's a copy for $836.40 also for sale!

Cheaper and narrower in focus would be to pick up the bfi's monograph on SUNRISE which is currently in print.

Thanks for the suggestion, after about giving up because of the price. I remembered that Libraries exist, and should be able to get a copy from a local college.

Anonymous · #197 Post by **Anonymous** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:25 am

Always a favorite and a real treat: "Herzog on Herzog", edited by Paul Cronin. Quote: "Whenever you take a shower, always make sure the curtain is inside the tub". Contains Herzogs unbeatable definition of truth-illuminating filmmaking: "aethletics over aesthetics"

Anonymous · #198 Post by **Anonymous** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:13 pm

Does anyone know any good books about the paranoid cinema of the 1970's? Has a book ever been written specifically about the paranoia thrillers that were being released around this time?

Galen Young · #199 Post by **Galen Young** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 5:40 am

I stumbled across an amazing book by actor Hanns Zischler titled Kafka Goes To The Movies; it focuses on diary entries made by Franz Kafka where he talks about films he has seen. Covering the period from 1908-1923, Zischler managed to hunt down the films and even the cinemas that Kafka saw them in -- the book is profusely illustrated with film stills, posters, advertisements and images of the cinemas themselves. Quite obsessive in wonderful way, far better than I'm making it sound. Here's an excerpt from the publisher's website. Apparently he made a television documentary out of the subject in 2002, anyone by chance know if it's available on DVD?

davebert · #200 Post by **davebert** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 12:15 am

I just learned my school library has a copy of the much-talked about Murnau bio (actually two, but one is due in 2007). Would it be too unquestionably illegal to scan that sucker into a big PDF file for everyone, seeing as how the UC Press has made it pretty official it stays out of print?

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The Best Books About Film