What books about film should I read?

The only two I've read are "How to Read a Film" and "In the Blink of an Eye", both of which I enjoyed. Especially interested in golden era criticism (Kael, etc.), genre, and potentially historical accounts of earlier eras.

manny farber's negative space

As much Kael and Kauffmann as you can, Reeling and Figures of Light to start. Negative Space, yes, and--even though I think his arch-enemy Kael was superior--Sarris's The American Cinema. I like John Simon's collections a lot; many consider him an insufferable prig. I loved Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution from last year. J. Hoberman's The Dream Life, Phillip Lopate's Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Harlan Lebo's The Godfather Legacy...For biographies, two of my favourites are Richard Shickel's Elia Kazan and Bill Landis's Anger. I don't think many people remember it, but William Bayer's The Great Movies was one of the first film books that really made an impression on me 30 years ago.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x0/x4927.jpg

Kael isn't just a great film writer -- she's one of the great stylists of the twentieth century. Read her like you'd read Trilling, Eliot, Wilson, Jarrell, etc.

I second the Philip Lopate nomination. Also: David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, James Harvey's fantastic Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh, and James Agee.

my favorite kaels are the first couple books -- "i lost it at the movies" and "kiss kiss bang bang" especially. one of these days i'm going to try to dig up all the ones no one ever reprinted -- her review of "shoah," the famous one of "sound of music" that got her fired from mccall's.

i'm quite fond of joe adamson's biography of all four marx brothers. very funny and evocative of that time.

Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror is one of the most through and well written in depth views of the artistic side of things I've ever run across.

Bordwell/Thompson's Film Art. Seriously.

Has anyone read Money Into Light by John Boorman? Have had it in my unread pile for a few months now, and am thinking of packing it for a trip.

Thanks for all the great rec's, everyone!

I'm 50 pages into a much-lauded history of the Studio Era, The Genius of the System by Thomas Schatz, from '88. He's openly hostile to auteurism, but he's rich with the details on the growth of MGM with Thalberg coming on board, and the production supervisors carefully vetting everything from conception to release (and Thalberg instituting post-preview retakes as the norm for big films).

I love Thomson's The Whole Equation--one of those books that made me want to write a book. Will check out Schatz.

I really like:

Hitchcock by Truffaut

Fassbinder Filmmaker, by Ronald Hayman

Midnight Movies, by J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle

Not sure if these are what you're looking for, but the titles are pretty self explanatory.

very idiosyncratic, but i enjoyed the luckiest bastard you ever saw, which is soderbergh's mid-90s diary mixed in with his interviews of richard lester

reading Pictures at a Revolution right now actually; haven't got v far into it yet though...

André Bazin - What is Cinema?

^want to read this too, but am thinking may just go for Bazin at Work instead...

PatR is fantastic so far...

can anyone speak up for City of Nets? (Hollywood in the '40s)

I found this excerpt the other day:

http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2011/06/anecdote-of-week-thats-just-not-orgasm.html

There just doesn't seem to be a groundswell of excitement for Siegfried Kracauer. (That's a joke.)

Big fan of City of Nets, wish I still had my copy.

city of nets is great, so is the one about germany in the 30s that precedes it.

I looked up Kracauer (the remnants of my film-study days) on Wikipedia, and was reminded of this great Kael bit:

"Siegfried Kracauer is the sort of man who can't say 'It's a lovely day' without first establishing that it is day, that the term 'day' is meaningless without the dialectical concept of 'night,' that both these terms have no meaning unless there is a world in which day and night alternate, and so forth. By the time he has established an epistemological system to support his right to observe that it's a lovely day, our day has been spoiled."

Speaking of Kracauer, that Dudley Andrew book on film theory was useful once upon a time, don't know what you would read nowadays instead.

Actually, I've got an inherent respect for pretty much anyone who attempted to write seriously about film when Kracauer did (his Caligari to Hitler book was published in '47). There just weren't that many people doing it. And I imagine that if you had the patience to navigate his prose--I tried a couple of times way back when--he'd have interesting things to say. The title alone makes you want to try.

I remember the Dudley Andrew book, and may have it downstairs somewhere. We used Mast & Cohen as the primary text.

Jack Cardiff's memoir, Magic Hour. See also new Doc about him, what a sweetheart.

Cardiff book is good. And who knew about him and Sophia Loren?

if you're going to read bazin get the... recent edition, not 'what is cinema?' which is a longstanding joke. the one i mean is published in canada or somewhere.

Looks like there is a very recent book about Bazin, apparently trying to rescue Bazin from his pigeonhole, to rehabilitate him I guess, called Opening Bazin, edited by Dudley Andrew and an unfamiliar French name.

there's another one co-edited by the dreadful colin maccabe and someone else

he's hotter than ever atm iirc

So does that mean we should shun him or jump on the bandwagon?

well he's part of 'the curriculum' already, so i guess neither

good answer

Matt Seitz put together this incomplete list of 14 critical books, a favorite of mine being this:

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/21/film_criticism_101_the_essential_library/slide_show/4/

oh yeah. i read that joe adamson book so many times my copy fell apart. classic just for the story of margaret dumont asking groucho what he meant by the line 'remember, we're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did.'