Film Art: An Introduction

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As a postgrad studying aesthetics, I was enthralled to find an English-language philosopher who understood cinema!

Plus there’s a bunch of cast and staff tips scattered throughout these pages making this a time capsule into history.The book is really about nothing beyond the author’s own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style. The best novel I know on the film-making process, set in the 1930s and dealing (as if from the experience of ‘Christopher’ himself) with the career of Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann, whose genius is thrillingly evoked. A lot of visuals on the screen are designed in 2D first so the product designers pour over thousands of concept art pieces. Few people have done so much to revive interest in silent cinema and none has written so well about it as Brownlow. You’ll get to see tons of rare photographs from those days along with rare concept sketches and illustrations from Disney animators.

Has anyone else been quite so astute regarding the poetics of the shot/reverse shot (in Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons) or the uses of stasis (in Dovzhenko’s Earth)?A cut leads not to animated footage but to a shaky, fuzzy shot through a train window, with someone’s face and eyeglasses partially visible at the side in the extreme foreground.

The Parade’s Gone By is the most accessible of Brownlow’s great books about silent film, though I could as easily have picked The War, the West and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence. A story of crime, professional rivalry, personal jealousy, and grand aspirations, The Prestige sets itself a difficult task. This is as sharp, witty and lacerating as all his best pictures; Buñuel’s observing eye turned into an act of reflective writing on his own life. This massive 350-page art book celebrates the film’s 75th anniversary with a complete history of the film.This shot and most of the rest of the film are accompanied by the clacking, rhythmic sound of a train. There was only a handful of books on the cinema when I and my contemporaries (now aged 70+) became cinephiles after World War II: Paul Rotha’s seminal The Film Till Now (1930 and never updated by its author); Alistair Cooke’s lively anthology of criticism, Garbo and the Night Watchmen; several theoretical works (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Spottiswoode, Balázs, Arnheim); some dull sociological studies; and Manvell’s Pelican paperback Film.

Bresson’s slender collection of jottings and aphorisms (“The ejaculatory force of the eye”; “The terrible habit of theatre”; “Don’t run after poetry: it penetrates unaided through the joins”) is a witty example of the virtues of brevity. I treat Eisenstein as seeking to synthesize many artistic traditions, both avant-garde and academic. The shorter English version of this seminal collection of criticism and interviews may be only 292 pages, but Tom Milne’s translation and commentary are exemplary, and there’s no other volume of criticism from Cahiers du cinéma that has influenced me as deeply.In films like Day of Wrath, the questions we ask often do not get definite answers; endings do not tie everything up; film technique does not always function invisibily to advance the narrative.