Film
The Best Film Books?
Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written? This was the question the British Film Institute asked 51 leading critics and writers, and their answers are printed here in full.
Those lists provided me with some new titles to check out. (I’ve just begun reading Stanley Cavell’s A World Viewed, which made it onto a good many of the lists.) At any rate, I’d love to learn about your favorite books on film. Here are my top five:
Gilles Deleuze — Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [&] Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Jean-Luc Godard — Godard on Godard
P. Adams Sitney — Visionary Film
Stan Brakhage — Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Film-Making
David Bordwell — Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
Tags: a world viewed, stanley cavell
I know, I know…I cheated by counting the two Deleuze books as one.
I really like bell hooks’s Reel to Real: Race, Sex & Class at the Movies.
I don’t remember the title but Kurosawa’s autobiography is very good. Mostly talks about how he spent all his money on beer.
A Cinema of Loneliness by Robert Kolker
Bordwell’s “Poetics of Cinema” is quite good.
I second Manny Farber and David Thomson from many of the lists linked to above.
Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer” so utterly transcends this category that I’d be ashamed to include it, or to leave it out.
Herzog on Herzog.
The fact that this list does not mention Sydney Lumet’s Making Movies makes this list kinda soft.
In the Blink of an Eye is also a pretty standard awesome book for film peoples.
The Tarkovsky book is pretty dope, as are the Truffaut interviews with Hitchcock
I know, I know…I cheated by counting the two Deleuze books as one.
I really like bell hooks’s Reel to Real: Race, Sex & Class at the Movies.
1. Final Cut by Stephen Bach; unusually well-written account of the Heaven’s Gate (the film, not the castrati cult responsible for the death of Uhuru’s brother) mess which sank the ship of United Artists. Dense with lore.
2. All I Need Is Love (original version of the English title, I think) by Klaus Kinski. Autobio from a sick, sick man with a better sex life than yours.
3. Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody. Kind of a velvet hatchet-job on Godard but good for that reason: more antihagiographic than Boyd on Nabokov… closer in temperament to Ellmann on Joyce (but less decorous, to match our era).
4. Honorary book: this guy (Rob Ager: http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining.html ) does an über-anal, frame-by-frame analysis of some Kubrick films and generates a Unified Field Theory of Kubrick that resolves all those niggling contradictions and doubts (eg, “Why is The Shining not very good as a horror film?” or “Why all these sloppy continuity errors in a director known to do 85 takes on scenes with no dialogue?”). Ager’s theories are as right/wrong as interpretation will be, but his approach is very fresh and will help you to read the images of this dead super-genius (in my opinion, in the chess game between Stanley and Vladimir, Stanley won) with new eyes.
Someone should probably mention Robert Evans’ autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. The movie’s even pretty OK and the audiobook is so good, they use it for background noise at schmancy Hollywood parties.
I don’t remember the title but Kurosawa’s autobiography is very good. Mostly talks about how he spent all his money on beer.
the lumet book is good for film students who have never made a film.
A Cinema of Loneliness by Robert Kolker
Herzog on Herzog (essentially anything Herzog-related. The new memoir of the Fitz filming is vivid and ridiculous. Kinski copulates with a lot of things in the auto-b Steven mentions)
Tark’s Sculpting in Time
Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad
Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
aaaand German sound artist Michael Lentz recently wrote a novel about Brecht in Hollywood called Pazivik Exil which is really really fantastic, thought not translated into the english yet.
http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2009/07/what-happens-when-you-take-the-greatest-writers-and-composers-of-europe-and-place-them-in-the-epicenter-of-american-pop-cultu.html
sheesh link.
Bordwell’s “Poetics of Cinema” is quite good.
I second Manny Farber and David Thomson from many of the lists linked to above.
Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer” so utterly transcends this category that I’d be ashamed to include it, or to leave it out.
Getting Away with It by Steven Soderbergh
Monster by John Gregory Dunne
Ozu by Donald Richie.
The fact that this list does not mention Sydney Lumet’s Making Movies makes this list kinda soft.
In the Blink of an Eye is also a pretty standard awesome book for film peoples.
The Tarkovsky book is pretty dope, as are the Truffaut interviews with Hitchcock
bell hooks kicks ass! Did not know she wrote a film book — will be picking that up asap. Thanks, Roxane.
I keep putting off the Brody book on Godard…not sure why. Probably should check it out. I liked Colin McCabe’s Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, and I also liked Wheeler Dixon’s The Films of Jean-Luc Godard…I’ll probably like the Brody…I’m pretty much a glutton for all things Godard.
1. Final Cut by Stephen Bach; unusually well-written account of the Heaven’s Gate (the film, not the castrati cult responsible for the death of Uhuru’s brother) mess which sank the ship of United Artists. Dense with lore.
2. All I Need Is Love (original version of the English title, I think) by Klaus Kinski. Autobio from a sick, sick man with a better sex life than yours.
3. Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody. Kind of a velvet hatchet-job on Godard but good for that reason: more antihagiographic than Boyd on Nabokov… closer in temperament to Ellmann on Joyce (but less decorous, to match our era).
4. Honorary book: this guy (Rob Ager: http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining.html ) does an über-anal, frame-by-frame analysis of some Kubrick films and generates a Unified Field Theory of Kubrick that resolves all those niggling contradictions and doubts (eg, “Why is The Shining not very good as a horror film?” or “Why all these sloppy continuity errors in a director known to do 85 takes on scenes with no dialogue?”). Ager’s theories are as right/wrong as interpretation will be, but his approach is very fresh and will help you to read the images of this dead super-genius (in my opinion, in the chess game between Stanley and Vladimir, Stanley won) with new eyes.
Someone should probably mention Robert Evans’ autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. The movie’s even pretty OK and the audiobook is so good, they use it for background noise at schmancy Hollywood parties.
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures
If only for its inclusion of the essay from SCREEN, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” without which that Bell Hook book doesn’t get written.
the lumet book is good for film students who have never made a film.
Herzog on Herzog (essentially anything Herzog-related. The new memoir of the Fitz filming is vivid and ridiculous. Kinski copulates with a lot of things in the auto-b Steven mentions)
Tark’s Sculpting in Time
Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad
Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
aaaand German sound artist Michael Lentz recently wrote a novel about Brecht in Hollywood called Pazivik Exil which is really really fantastic, thought not translated into the english yet.
http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2009/07/what-happens-when-you-take-the-greatest-writers-and-composers-of-europe-and-place-them-in-the-epicenter-of-american-pop-cultu.html
sheesh link.
For critical theory, Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema. For a just generally kickass book, David Thompson’s The Whole Equation.
Getting Away with It by Steven Soderbergh
Monster by John Gregory Dunne
Ozu by Donald Richie.
Maybe I don’t understand the comment, but I’ve always thought Boyd and Ellmann were as hagiographic as they come.
Agreed on Bazin
I love that they polled David Thompson and David Thomson, and Thompson named a book by Thomson. And of course Armond White named one of his own books.
Just to mention those not mentioned:
Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze gives sound interpretations of all the films and it’s not awash in trivia.
Antonioni: Poet of Images by William Arrowsmith, a classicist (but not a classist, I think) and translator, again sound interpretations often with classic texts as lynchpins to understanding.
The Magic Lantern – Bergman’s autobiography – not solely about film, the man directed many, many plays and had many, many wives
1/2 theory, 1/2 fun
Immortal Tales: European Sex and Horror Films 1956-1984 by Pete Tombs & Cathal Tohill
Eyeball Compendium ed. by Stephen Thrower
Film Is by Stephen Dwoskin
Poetics of Cinema 1 & 2 by Raoul Ruiz
Title TK by Thierry Kuntzel (even though I haven’t finished it)
Issues of Camera Obscura from the 70s and early 80s
I also have a penchant for the Creation Cinema books, even though they are mostly crap.
just as a note, possibly to be “provocative,” i will point out that it appears that i am literally the only person in the entire world who is totally “over” Herzog
if I had made it all the way through both the SCREEN readers, they would probably make my list
This is Called Moving: a Critical Poetics of Film by (the awesome filmmaker) Abigail Child
Herzog is the biggest sellout in cinema history, is all.
You will like the Brody (which isn’t to say that the last third of it won’t depress you)
My oldest friend is friends with Bruno S (the star of the best of Golden Age Herzog) and I was on the premises when Bruno emerged from the WC stating (with a convincing blankness of facial expression), “I’ve just f—d your toilet.”
at least somebody’s willing to say it
Oh, there’s a fair amount of dirt in Ellmann’s Joyce (if only in how he doesn’t flinch in showing the suffering JJ could inflict on those who loved him enough to lend him money) and a little in Boyd’s Nabokov (eg, the cheating on Vera).
oh my god
i forgot the second most essential film book in the world
:::::::::
Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel
In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch’s book on film editing, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations, his book of interviews with Murch about film and sound editing.
Also Hitchcock/Truffaut.
Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Silver & Ward (also useful are the related Film Noir Readers, of which there are at least three).
I am very bad at this:
Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression
by Martine Beugnet (Hardcover)
Is the most relevant thing I’ve read recently.
bell hooks kicks ass! Did not know she wrote a film book — will be picking that up asap. Thanks, Roxane.
I keep putting off the Brody book on Godard…not sure why. Probably should check it out. I liked Colin McCabe’s Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, and I also liked Wheeler Dixon’s The Films of Jean-Luc Godard…I’ll probably like the Brody…I’m pretty much a glutton for all things Godard.
HOLLYWOOD BABYLON
David Weddle: If They Move Kill Em’…The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah
Lillian Ross: Picture (a book about the making of The African Queen)
Joseph Lanza: Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films
Persistence of Vision Series Volume 6: Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorwosky
Andrew Sarris: The American Cinema
The Ross book is about the making of The Red Badge of Courage. Where’s my head at today?
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures
If only for its inclusion of the essay from SCREEN, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” without which that Bell Hook book doesn’t get written.
http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/the-endless-thread-6-0/#comment-3432
Oh, my goodness yes. How could I forget about Anger?
i want to read a book on ken russell
For critical theory, Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema. For a just generally kickass book, David Thompson’s The Whole Equation.
eh, i am not a big fan of books about film theory. fucking snoreville.
sorry.
but books about the people who make film i dig.
here are my picks:
the diaries of hitchcock (big fucking book)
scorcese on scorcese (there is a small piece on loneliness in it that has always stayed with me)
rebel without a crew- robert rodriguez (specifically the 15 minute film school portion in the back)
feature filmmaking at used-car prices
breakfast with sharks (good for screenwriting introduction)
quentin tarantino: shooting from the hip (read this book back in ’96. the end of the book has a list of tarantino’s fav films. that list started my quest for film. lot of good shit in it.)
and one book i saw at a local rare books store here in hollywood:
this book is a film
it was all visual font tricks..
i would like to read that book on rohmer listed on that site.
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies by Ray Carney
If They Move . . . Kill ‘Em!: The Life and Times Of Sam Peckinpah by David Weddle
second
Maybe I don’t understand the comment, but I’ve always thought Boyd and Ellmann were as hagiographic as they come.
oh and shit, HOLLYWOOD by buk
he sums up the hollywood bullshit nicely.
love that book. if you get the chance (because it’s very hard to find), watch trinh t. minh-ha’s reassemblage; it is practically (though not actually) a book on the perils of ethnographic film.
Herzog is still awesome. Did you see his documentary about ‘Antarctica’? He discovers probably his greatest subject: suicidal penguins.
Agreed on Bazin
Shocking Representation.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13247-3/shocking-representation
“In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors’ films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas.”
I love that they polled David Thompson and David Thomson, and Thompson named a book by Thomson. And of course Armond White named one of his own books.
THAT WAS MY FAVOURITE MOVIE OF WHATEVER YEAR THAT CAME OUT
Just to mention those not mentioned:
Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze gives sound interpretations of all the films and it’s not awash in trivia.
Antonioni: Poet of Images by William Arrowsmith, a classicist (but not a classist, I think) and translator, again sound interpretations often with classic texts as lynchpins to understanding.
The Magic Lantern – Bergman’s autobiography – not solely about film, the man directed many, many plays and had many, many wives
herzog is so BOOOOOOOORRING to me now (said in Herzog voice)
i like him in harmony korine movies BETTER THAN I LIKE HIS OWN MOVIES.
aguirre is boring, even dwarfs is boring, heart of glass is boring but cool due to the hypnosis shit, woyzeck i just completely and utterly didn’t care about (even though I like kinski a lot, he’s better in terayama & zulawski films), fata morgana (which i watched because one of my favorite movies is a spanish movie also titled fata morgana) was completely underwhelming, 70s short documentaries are entertaining, kaspar hauser is actually pretty good but that has little to do with herzog, that has more to do with THE MOVIE ITSELF (i go back and forth on a full engagement with auteur theory), anything else i’ve tried to watch i didn’t bother finishing, but OH WELL AT LEAST HE’S BETTER THAN TARANTINO RITE GUYS!?
that seems interesting in concept, but i imagine i would have two bones to pick with it
1) why do 95% of academic texts on horror film focus on literally the same “canonical” movies? (I suppose I answered my own question there)
2) i can’t figure out from the description whether Lowenstein is presupposing these post-war horror films as allegory or if the cathartic, experiential nature is posited as how tehse are “confronting historical narratives.” if it’s the latter, i’m interested.
(these are, of course, purely speculative, as I haven’t read it)
1/2 theory, 1/2 fun
Immortal Tales: European Sex and Horror Films 1956-1984 by Pete Tombs & Cathal Tohill
Eyeball Compendium ed. by Stephen Thrower
Film Is by Stephen Dwoskin
Poetics of Cinema 1 & 2 by Raoul Ruiz
Title TK by Thierry Kuntzel (even though I haven’t finished it)
Issues of Camera Obscura from the 70s and early 80s
I also have a penchant for the Creation Cinema books, even though they are mostly crap.
just as a note, possibly to be “provocative,” i will point out that it appears that i am literally the only person in the entire world who is totally “over” Herzog
damn, since the introduction is titled “the allegorical moment” i’m guessing it’s the former. that’s annoying.
if I had made it all the way through both the SCREEN readers, they would probably make my list
YOU DIDN’T WATCH FITZCARRALDO???
i recommend giving it a shot. it may not exactly be mindful of the obscure, but the sections focusing on onibaba, deathdream, and shivers are particularly interesting. w/r/t your second question, it’s both.
i had bought the herzog/kinski boxset and made it halfway through and by that point i didn’t even care and i have literally no motivation to watch it. would you like to know why? here is why:
as evidenced above, I have actively found 4+ herzog movies “boring,” and boring, in my head, is equivalent with “not worth watching.” why should i waste time watching every herzog movie ever, just so i can continue to have the same opinion, when i could come up with a list of, seriously, 750 movies that i actively want to see? life is short, canons are dumb, the end.
i don’t actually think the idea of canons are dumb when they are presented as aesthetically consistent collection, i think THE canon, the hegemonic canon as it stands, is dumb
if it’s both i would probably find it problematic to be honest. this is due to the fact that i basically hate horror as “pure” allegory (case in point: the monumentally shit-tastic film adaptation of stephen king’s monumentally shit-tastic short story THE MIST), and also can’t see how allegory can be consistent with experience, outside of purely subjective response i guess.
and i guess i should clarify, i’m not necessarily asking that [books on horror film] be more mindful of the obscure, i just wonder what the necessity of only writing about 15 different films over a period of 40 years is. i kinda feel like it also generally devalues theoretical position, because if the same 15 movies are used as textual support for like literally EVERY THEORETICAL POSITION YOU CAN TAKE then that screams “YOU ARE READING TOO FAR INTO THIS” and makes me less likely to willingly eat up some idea. whereas when unique movies are used then i feel like “oh this author actually came to this idea from watching the film instead of coming to an idea and forcing a film that everybody is okay with talking about within academia to fit the idea”
This is Called Moving: a Critical Poetics of Film by (the awesome filmmaker) Abigail Child
The Stanley Kubrick Archive
Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis by Mario Falsetto
Herzog is the biggest sellout in cinema history, is all.
You will like the Brody (which isn’t to say that the last third of it won’t depress you)
My oldest friend is friends with Bruno S (the star of the best of Golden Age Herzog) and I was on the premises when Bruno emerged from the WC stating (with a convincing blankness of facial expression), “I’ve just f—d your toilet.”
i think the difference is that i don’t hate horror as allegory. i think allegory is interesting. i like the mist as a story. i liked martyrs. and, though i haven’t given it a lot of thought, can allegory not be consistent with experience even it concerns istelf the idea of a “national” identity, or a “national” experience? do these things even exist?
at least somebody’s willing to say it
Oh, there’s a fair amount of dirt in Ellmann’s Joyce (if only in how he doesn’t flinch in showing the suffering JJ could inflict on those who loved him enough to lend him money) and a little in Boyd’s Nabokov (eg, the cheating on Vera).
oh my god
i forgot the second most essential film book in the world
:::::::::
Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel
In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch’s book on film editing, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations, his book of interviews with Murch about film and sound editing.
Also Hitchcock/Truffaut.
Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Silver & Ward (also useful are the related Film Noir Readers, of which there are at least three).
I am very bad at this:
Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression
by Martine Beugnet (Hardcover)
Is the most relevant thing I’ve read recently.
martyrs is one of my favorite films of the decade, but i think pushing it as allegory is totally limiting its scope/what it does. if a, for example, french filmmaker makes a film and it can be read as concerning itself with the idea of a french identity, how is that allegory? doesn’t that just mean that the filmmaker or the production team responsible for the film is at least subconsciously engaged with a politic? and i’ve always understood allegory to be some stringent intentional by-the-author thing… i will be the first to shout that it’s the audience writing the text, but does that still work with allegory?
i’d be interested to hear more of your thoughts on martyrs, mike. i am conflicted by it. guest post?
yeah, i think i’d really just like to hear what you make of martyrs, because i think we may have had very different viewing experiences. and jesus, i would never want to limit the scope of anything. i’m not trying to fit something. for some reason, when i was thinking about allegorical film, martyrs popped into my head. that’s probably saying something about me…
to me, allegory is any message being conveyed through “representation,” something other than the literal “this is what is happening.” so yes, i agree with you that it’s an “intentional by-the-author” thing, but i also think allegory is something that can be found by the viewer, reader, based on pre-existing life experiences (nationality, gender, etc.) *this* kind of allegory is what really fascinates me.
‘Martyrs’ was an incredible film, but I want to forget it. Fucking hell.
HOLLYWOOD BABYLON
@blake
i’ve been “working on” an essay on martyrs for a long-ass time (and by working on i mean i have lots of notes on it and i save documentation of all the arguments i’ve gotten into about it and intend on finally putting some form to it) that i will one day finish, but david already called it for transductions (and then it will end up on esotika, of course), but if he’s cool with it going up multiple places then i’d be down with posting it here too.
@david
refer to blake comment, heh. i’ve watched it three times now, and need at least one more viewing before i can actually put pen to paper i guess, but basically the second viewing was to confirm that how i felt after the first viewing was valid, and then the third viewing was to actually start cementing a critical interpretation, so i need one more to sort of “verifying” my notes and shit. i will say ahead of time there is a lot of bataille’s “depense” (an accent goes somewhere in that word but i don’t remember where) via the accursed share in my notes so far. there were also actually two more books i wanted to finish reading before the essay was completed.
w/r/t allegory, that’s not really how i define allegory at all, so i suppose that’s how we diverge. i just encountered this romain gary quote about his novel the roots of heaven, but it seems apt here regarding my ideas of allegory:
But, I will say, that I’m curious as to how you read Martyrs as allegory?
uh, i’m a little reluctant to say anything, because i’m seriously questioning why i read martyrs as allegory, or what allegory even is now, but i’ll just say that i spent a few years reading anything and everything related to the algerian war.
David Weddle: If They Move Kill Em’…The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah
Lillian Ross: Picture (a book about the making of The African Queen)
Joseph Lanza: Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films
Persistence of Vision Series Volume 6: Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorwosky
Andrew Sarris: The American Cinema
The Ross book is about the making of The Red Badge of Courage. Where’s my head at today?
to tie things back to lowenstein’s book:
http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/martyrs_historical/
SORRY MIKE I JUST MEANT THAT’S USUALLY WHERE PEOPLE START. WHY DID YOU BUY THE BOX SET IF YOU HADN’T WATCHED HIM BEFORE???
http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/the-endless-thread-6-0/#comment-3432
Oh, my goodness yes. How could I forget about Anger?
i want to read a book on ken russell
despite my avowed francophilia i am still pretty historically ignorant, particularly in regards to the algerian war, so can’t argue with you there. also, thanks for the offscreen article, i haven’t checked offscreen for a while and the last time i was looking for critical articles on martyrs i found absolutely nothing
i was sixteen and was spending all of my money on dvds and knew that he was harmony korine’s favorite director (and had seen even dwarfs… and heart of glass and i guess was convinced that i “liked them” at the time). so i had watched him before.
eh, i am not a big fan of books about film theory. fucking snoreville.
sorry.
but books about the people who make film i dig.
here are my picks:
the diaries of hitchcock (big fucking book)
scorcese on scorcese (there is a small piece on loneliness in it that has always stayed with me)
rebel without a crew- robert rodriguez (specifically the 15 minute film school portion in the back)
feature filmmaking at used-car prices
breakfast with sharks (good for screenwriting introduction)
quentin tarantino: shooting from the hip (read this book back in ’96. the end of the book has a list of tarantino’s fav films. that list started my quest for film. lot of good shit in it.)
and one book i saw at a local rare books store here in hollywood:
this book is a film
it was all visual font tricks..
i would like to read that book on rohmer listed on that site.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Moving Place and Placing Movies are favorites. As is The Maya Deren Reader. Her essays on film are brilliant early dissections on possibilities of the medium.
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies by Ray Carney
If They Move . . . Kill ‘Em!: The Life and Times Of Sam Peckinpah by David Weddle
second
oh and shit, HOLLYWOOD by buk
he sums up the hollywood bullshit nicely.
love that book. if you get the chance (because it’s very hard to find), watch trinh t. minh-ha’s reassemblage; it is practically (though not actually) a book on the perils of ethnographic film.
Herzog is still awesome. Did you see his documentary about ‘Antarctica’? He discovers probably his greatest subject: suicidal penguins.
Shocking Representation.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13247-3/shocking-representation
“In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors’ films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas.”
THAT WAS MY FAVOURITE MOVIE OF WHATEVER YEAR THAT CAME OUT
lol at the morons above hating on Herzog.
herzog is so BOOOOOOOORRING to me now (said in Herzog voice)
i like him in harmony korine movies BETTER THAN I LIKE HIS OWN MOVIES.
aguirre is boring, even dwarfs is boring, heart of glass is boring but cool due to the hypnosis shit, woyzeck i just completely and utterly didn’t care about (even though I like kinski a lot, he’s better in terayama & zulawski films), fata morgana (which i watched because one of my favorite movies is a spanish movie also titled fata morgana) was completely underwhelming, 70s short documentaries are entertaining, kaspar hauser is actually pretty good but that has little to do with herzog, that has more to do with THE MOVIE ITSELF (i go back and forth on a full engagement with auteur theory), anything else i’ve tried to watch i didn’t bother finishing, but OH WELL AT LEAST HE’S BETTER THAN TARANTINO RITE GUYS!?
that seems interesting in concept, but i imagine i would have two bones to pick with it
1) why do 95% of academic texts on horror film focus on literally the same “canonical” movies? (I suppose I answered my own question there)
2) i can’t figure out from the description whether Lowenstein is presupposing these post-war horror films as allegory or if the cathartic, experiential nature is posited as how tehse are “confronting historical narratives.” if it’s the latter, i’m interested.
(these are, of course, purely speculative, as I haven’t read it)
“lol”
the plurality is just me, basically
damn, since the introduction is titled “the allegorical moment” i’m guessing it’s the former. that’s annoying.
YOU DIDN’T WATCH FITZCARRALDO???
i recommend giving it a shot. it may not exactly be mindful of the obscure, but the sections focusing on onibaba, deathdream, and shivers are particularly interesting. w/r/t your second question, it’s both.
i had bought the herzog/kinski boxset and made it halfway through and by that point i didn’t even care and i have literally no motivation to watch it. would you like to know why? here is why:
as evidenced above, I have actively found 4+ herzog movies “boring,” and boring, in my head, is equivalent with “not worth watching.” why should i waste time watching every herzog movie ever, just so i can continue to have the same opinion, when i could come up with a list of, seriously, 750 movies that i actively want to see? life is short, canons are dumb, the end.
i don’t actually think the idea of canons are dumb when they are presented as aesthetically consistent collection, i think THE canon, the hegemonic canon as it stands, is dumb
if it’s both i would probably find it problematic to be honest. this is due to the fact that i basically hate horror as “pure” allegory (case in point: the monumentally shit-tastic film adaptation of stephen king’s monumentally shit-tastic short story THE MIST), and also can’t see how allegory can be consistent with experience, outside of purely subjective response i guess.
and i guess i should clarify, i’m not necessarily asking that [books on horror film] be more mindful of the obscure, i just wonder what the necessity of only writing about 15 different films over a period of 40 years is. i kinda feel like it also generally devalues theoretical position, because if the same 15 movies are used as textual support for like literally EVERY THEORETICAL POSITION YOU CAN TAKE then that screams “YOU ARE READING TOO FAR INTO THIS” and makes me less likely to willingly eat up some idea. whereas when unique movies are used then i feel like “oh this author actually came to this idea from watching the film instead of coming to an idea and forcing a film that everybody is okay with talking about within academia to fit the idea”
The Stanley Kubrick Archive
Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis by Mario Falsetto
i think the difference is that i don’t hate horror as allegory. i think allegory is interesting. i like the mist as a story. i liked martyrs. and, though i haven’t given it a lot of thought, can allegory not be consistent with experience even it concerns istelf the idea of a “national” identity, or a “national” experience? do these things even exist?
I keep looking at the top photo; I want that in my house. The colorful chairs, white walls…
martyrs is one of my favorite films of the decade, but i think pushing it as allegory is totally limiting its scope/what it does. if a, for example, french filmmaker makes a film and it can be read as concerning itself with the idea of a french identity, how is that allegory? doesn’t that just mean that the filmmaker or the production team responsible for the film is at least subconsciously engaged with a politic? and i’ve always understood allegory to be some stringent intentional by-the-author thing… i will be the first to shout that it’s the audience writing the text, but does that still work with allegory?
i’d be interested to hear more of your thoughts on martyrs, mike. i am conflicted by it. guest post?
yeah, i think i’d really just like to hear what you make of martyrs, because i think we may have had very different viewing experiences. and jesus, i would never want to limit the scope of anything. i’m not trying to fit something. for some reason, when i was thinking about allegorical film, martyrs popped into my head. that’s probably saying something about me…
to me, allegory is any message being conveyed through “representation,” something other than the literal “this is what is happening.” so yes, i agree with you that it’s an “intentional by-the-author” thing, but i also think allegory is something that can be found by the viewer, reader, based on pre-existing life experiences (nationality, gender, etc.) *this* kind of allegory is what really fascinates me.
‘Martyrs’ was an incredible film, but I want to forget it. Fucking hell.
@blake
i’ve been “working on” an essay on martyrs for a long-ass time (and by working on i mean i have lots of notes on it and i save documentation of all the arguments i’ve gotten into about it and intend on finally putting some form to it) that i will one day finish, but david already called it for transductions (and then it will end up on esotika, of course), but if he’s cool with it going up multiple places then i’d be down with posting it here too.
@david
refer to blake comment, heh. i’ve watched it three times now, and need at least one more viewing before i can actually put pen to paper i guess, but basically the second viewing was to confirm that how i felt after the first viewing was valid, and then the third viewing was to actually start cementing a critical interpretation, so i need one more to sort of “verifying” my notes and shit. i will say ahead of time there is a lot of bataille’s “depense” (an accent goes somewhere in that word but i don’t remember where) via the accursed share in my notes so far. there were also actually two more books i wanted to finish reading before the essay was completed.
w/r/t allegory, that’s not really how i define allegory at all, so i suppose that’s how we diverge. i just encountered this romain gary quote about his novel the roots of heaven, but it seems apt here regarding my ideas of allegory:
But, I will say, that I’m curious as to how you read Martyrs as allegory?
uh, i’m a little reluctant to say anything, because i’m seriously questioning why i read martyrs as allegory, or what allegory even is now, but i’ll just say that i spent a few years reading anything and everything related to the algerian war.
to tie things back to lowenstein’s book:
http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/martyrs_historical/
SORRY MIKE I JUST MEANT THAT’S USUALLY WHERE PEOPLE START. WHY DID YOU BUY THE BOX SET IF YOU HADN’T WATCHED HIM BEFORE???
despite my avowed francophilia i am still pretty historically ignorant, particularly in regards to the algerian war, so can’t argue with you there. also, thanks for the offscreen article, i haven’t checked offscreen for a while and the last time i was looking for critical articles on martyrs i found absolutely nothing
i was sixteen and was spending all of my money on dvds and knew that he was harmony korine’s favorite director (and had seen even dwarfs… and heart of glass and i guess was convinced that i “liked them” at the time). so i had watched him before.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Moving Place and Placing Movies are favorites. As is The Maya Deren Reader. Her essays on film are brilliant early dissections on possibilities of the medium.
lol at the morons above hating on Herzog.
“lol”
the plurality is just me, basically
I keep looking at the top photo; I want that in my house. The colorful chairs, white walls…
Didn’t bother to really absorb the names. Saw magick mike and a shorter name which turns out to be mike and I guess they’re probably the same person. And some guy calling him a sell-out but that could be a joke. Either way, lol.
“Born in Flames” by Howard Hampton.
It’s more than just film, but consider the stray bits about Wire, Anthony Braxton, Walter Benjamin, and Phoebe Gleckner as a bonus.
Didn’t bother to really absorb the names. Saw magick mike and a shorter name which turns out to be mike and I guess they’re probably the same person. And some guy calling him a sell-out but that could be a joke. Either way, lol.
“Born in Flames” by Howard Hampton.
It’s more than just film, but consider the stray bits about Wire, Anthony Braxton, Walter Benjamin, and Phoebe Gleckner as a bonus.
mid-period Pauline Kael
mid-period Pauline Kael
Hello, I’m just a high school student but I would love to familiarize myself with the thematic arts- I just came across this discussion looking for the best film books and I was wondering;
Out of ALL the books on the market and the ones above, for a beginning film maker, what is the best out there?
The most eye-opening autobiographies/detailed directing books would be super helpful.
I’d like to start shooting some things but to get at least some knowledge prior to be most prepared
Thank you all!
PS: Are the ones on amazon helpful?
Hello, I’m just a high school student but I would love to familiarize myself with the thematic arts- I just came across this discussion looking for the best film books and I was wondering;
Out of ALL the books on the market and the ones above, for a beginning film maker, what is the best out there?
The most eye-opening autobiographies/detailed directing books would be super helpful.
I’d like to start shooting some things but to get at least some knowledge prior to be most prepared
Thank you all!
PS: Are the ones on amazon helpful?
[…] month I initiated a discussion about film books. Now I’m wondering about music books. Following the template of the question from last […]
[…] month I initiated a discussion about film books. Now I’m wondering about music books. Following the template of the question from last […]