Books and Tony McKibbin

The Faber Book of New South American Cinema - Demetrios Matheou

1 Sep 2010

“This book is very much concerned with personal filmmaking”, Demetrios Matheou insists in the introduction to New South American Cinema, a book of interviews with various filmmakers from the region. But South American film seems as close to the Korean…

Don’t Look Now - Ed. Paul Newland

16 Jun 2010

(Intellect Press) Don’t Look Now is a work of low-key persuasion; it wants to convince us that seventies British cinema wasn’t an aesthetic dire strait, but a forking path of numerous possibilities. The decade may have given us film versions of On…

The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film - Laura Rascaroli

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) The Personal Camera is an engaging, sometimes illuminating and well-grounded look at basically what people have for years now been calling the essay film. “The object of study of this book is sited at the intersection of documentary, art…

Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre - James Kendrick

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) James Kendrick’s short volume isn’t at all an ambitious book; and that is perhaps as much down to the nature of the commission as it is to the limitations of the writer. This is one of Wallflower publishing’s Short Cuts. The books are…

The International Film Guide - Ed. Ian Haydn Smith

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) The International Film Guide is an institution. An important annual detailing the events of world cinema, nation by nation, it is the place to go to find info about the state of the film industry everywhere, including Egypt, Cuba…

Denis Robert - Happiness

11 Jun 2009

EROTIC NOVELLA Published in France around the same time as Catherine Millet’s international hit, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, Denis Robert’s Happiness has waited much longer to make it to the English language world. As a married writer starts an…

Rod Stoneman - Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

27 Nov 2008

POLITICAL STUDY On its release in 2003, a documentary that fortuitously caught the coup ousting Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez for all of a weekend, caused a furore in that country and elsewhere for its apparent bias. Rod Stoneman was the executive…

Film Books Round-up

17 Jul 2008

In terms of wealth of research and weightiness of tome Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything is Cinema (Faber) ••••, should be a masterpiece. Yet for all its detail Godard remains an enigma, and this seems neither for want of research…

Film Books Round-up

19 Jun 2007

In Talking Movies (Wallflower, 4 Stars) Jason Wood interviews more than 30 contemporary filmmakers including Carlos Reygadas, Richard Linklater, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, Elia Suleiman and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Wood’s project is wonderfully…

Film books

Screen Stories

26 Oct 2006

David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It (University of California Press - 4 stars) is a very impressive look at recent American cinema’s fascination with ‘impact aesthetics’ and intensified continuity. Bordwell, the author of classic film…