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