Film making is inevitably based on collaboration and often bogged down by compromise, yet the achievements of the great directors leave no doubt that the cinema is a supreme art form of the 20th century. Detailed analyses of scenes from well-known films, many of them Hollywood classics like "Psycho", show how film makers can tell a story and interpret the events at one and the same time. It is only when we understand the dual role of the camera as a ruthlessly realistic eye and creator of illusions that rational film criticism becomes possible.

Film as Film

Humor & Entertainment

Perkins, V.F.

Movies

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies

Penguin??Books

"Without fuss, this stimulating book enlarges the ways in which we can look at and listen to the screen."--Foster Hirsch, from his introduction Here at last is an introduction to film theory and its history without the jargon. Noted film scholar V. F. Perkins presents criteria for expanding our understanding and enjoyment of movies. He employs commonsense words like balance, coherence, significance, and satisfaction to develop his insightful support of the subtle approach and of the unobtrusive director. Readers will learn why a scene from the humbler movie Carmen Jones is a deeper realization of filmmaking than the bravura lion sequence in the classic Battleship Potemkin. Along the way Perkins invites readers to re-experience with clarity, directness, and simplicity other famous scenes by directors like Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. Perkins examines the origins of movies and embraces their use of both realism and magic, their ability to record as well as to create. In the process he seeks to discover the synthesis between these opposing elements. With the delight of the fan and the perception of the critic, Perkins advances a film theory, based on the work of Bazin and other early film theorists, that is rich with suggestion for debate and further pursuit. Sit beside Perkins as he reacquaints you with cinema, heightens your awareness, deepens your pleasure, and increases your return every time you invest in a movie ticket.

Film As Film: Understanding And Judging Movies

Grand Central Publishing

This work presents the author's own insight to Orson Welles's film "The Magnificent Ambersons". Second only to "Citizen Kane" in work, this film can never be seen as he intended it after being heavily cut by RKO. However, it remains a remarkable picture of dynastic ruin and social change.

The Magnificent Ambersons (BFI Film Classics)

British Film Institute

This study relates the history of Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) to the profundity and originality of its form. The film is analyzed as an anguished comedy whose characters are all, in Renoir's words, "dancing on a volcano"and are unable to resist the slide towards catastrophe.

La Regle du jeu (BFI Film Classics)

"MOVIE is a long-venerated journal of serious film criticism, founded in 1962 by four young British criticsUamong them Ian Cameron and V.F. PerkinsUwho are still active members of the editorial board. The magazine set out to promote the idea of the director as effective author of the filmUa view that would become known as auteur theoryUand to communicate an enthusiasm for American cinema, which was at that time largely scoffed at by serious critics. Since then the journal's criticism has grown to combine detailed stylistic analysis with a focus on the socio-historical contexts and political implications of the films at hand. MOVIE 36 continues MOVIE's role at the forefront of writing about cinema. The centerpiece of this issue is an extended study by Douglas Pyle of the concept of point-of-view in the cinema, a notion often invoked by critics but rarely given thorough interrogation. The issue also includes two articles on masculinity in films like Lethal Weapon and Terminator 2, two essays on Max Olphus, and 'Pleasure and Excess,' about the horror films of Vincent Price."

Movie 36

Thomas, Deborah

Russell, David

Hunt, Leon

Pye, Douglas

Cameron Hollis

El lenguaje del cine

Editorial Fundamentos

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