The Best Books About Film

[nowhereisaplace]

That’s disappointing. The kindle was reasonably priced, if you go for that sort of thing.

[mrb404]

I see that a newly expanded edition of Kier-la Janisse's House of Psychotic Women is coming out this week, with coverage of 100 additional films. I would be interested to know what the newly added titles are. I really like the first edition and I'm curious to know if this would be worth upgrading.

Having both editions, I checked and here's the list of the 104 additional films :

- Les Abysses (Nikos Papatakis, 1963, France)
- Alice, or the Last Escapade (Claude Chabrol, 1977, France)
- Alleluia (Fabrice du Welz, 2014, Belgium/France)
- Alone With You (Emily Bennett, 2021, USA)
- Always Shine (Sophia Takal, 2016, USA)
- Alyce Kills (Jay Lee, 2011, USA)
- American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012, Canada)
- The Babadook (Jennifer kent, 2014, Australia)
- Bacchanale (John and Lem Amero, 1970, USA)
- Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021, France/Belgium/Netherlands)
- Bestialita (Peter Skerl, 1976, Italy)
- Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004, UK/France/Germany/USA)
- Black Emanuelle No.2 (Albert Thomas [Bitto Albertini], 1976, Italy)
- A Black Ribbon for Deborah (Marcello Andrei, 1974, Italy)
- The Blackcoat's Daughter (Osgood Perkins, 2015, Canada/USA)
- Bleed With Me (Amelia Moses, 2020, Canada)
- Blood of Dracula (Herbert L. Strock, 1957, USA)
- Braid (Mitzi Peirone, 2018, USA)
- Breathe (Mélanie Laurent, 2014, France)
- Butterfly Kiss (Michael Winterbottom, 1995, UK)
- Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962, USA)
- Cemetery Sisters (Nick Philips, 1987, USA)
- Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021, UK)
- Darling (Mickey Keating, 2015, USA)
- Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev, 2006, USA/Germany/France)
- Death Game (Peter S. Traynor, 1977, USA)
- Dementer (Chad Crwaford Kinkle, 2019, USA)
- Il Demonio (Brunello Rondi, 1963, Italy/France)
- Deranged (Chuck Vincent, 1987, USA)
- Dorothy Mills (Agnès Merlet, 2008, Ireland/France)
- Dream No Evil (John Hayes, 1970, USA)
- The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014, UK)
- Dys- (Maude Michaud, 2014, Canada)
- Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016, France/Germany/Belgium)
- Estrela Nua (José Antonio Garcia + icaro Martins, 1985, Brazil)
- Excess Flesh (Patrick Kennelly, 2015, USA)
- Excision (Richard Bates Jr., 2012, USA)
- The Eyes of My Mother (Nicolas Pesce, 2016, USA)
- The Falling (Carol Morley, 2014, UK)
- Fashionista (Simon Rumley, 2016, USA)
- Frustration (José Bénazéraf, 1971, France)
- Gaslight (Georges Cukor, 1944, USA)
- Hagazussa (Lukas Feigelfeld, 2017, Austria/Germany)
- Honeycomb (Avalon Fast, 2022, Canada)
- I Blame Society (Gillian Wallace Horvat, 2020, USA)
- I Like Bats (Grzegorz Warchol, 1986, Poland)
- Identikit (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974, Italy)
- Knocking (Frida Kempff, 2021, Sweden)
- Kotoko (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2011, Japan)
- Ladyworld (Amanda Kramer, 2018, USA)
- Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964, USA)
- Lizzie (Hugo Haas, 1957, USA)
- Lost Gully Road (Donna McRae, 2017, Australia)
- Luna (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979, Italy/USA)
- Lyle (Stewart Thorndike, 2014, USA)
- Madeleine, Anatomy of a Nightmare (Roberto Mauri, 1974, Italy)
- Magic Magic (Sebastian Silva, 2013, USA/Chile)
- The Midnight Swim (Sarah Adina Smith, 2014, USA)
- Monique (Jacques Scandelari, 1978, France/USA)
- Morgiana (Juraj Herz, 1972, Czechoslovakia)
- The Night, The Prowler (Jim Sharman, 1978, Australia)
- Nina Wu (Midi Z., 2019, Taiwan/Malaysia/Myanmar)
- Oda Sa Wala [Ode to Nothing] (Dwein Baltazar, 2018, Philipines)
- Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997, USA)
- Olivia (Ulli Lommel, 1983, USA)
- Phobia (Pawan Kripalani, 2016, India)
- Las Poquianchis (Felipe Cazals, 1976, Mexico)
- Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016, UK)
- Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020, UK/USA)
- Proxy (Zack Parker, 2013, USA)
- Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015, USA)
- Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016, France/Belgium/USA)
- A Reflection of Fear (William A. Fraker, 1972, USA)
- Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978, USA)
- Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022, USA)
- Run (Aneesh Chaganty, 2020, USA/Canada)
- Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019, UK)
- The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, 1959, USA)
- See the Sea (François Ozon, 1997, France)
- Silip (Elwood Perez, 1985, Philipines)
- Sissy (Hannah Barlow + Kane Senes, 2022, Australia)
- Sister, Sister (Bill Condon, 1987, USA)
- Sister Tempest (Joe Badon, 2020, USA)
- Spencer (Pablo Larrain, 2021, UK/Germany/USA/Chile)
- Starry Eyes (Kevin Kolsch, 2014, USA)
- The Strings (Ryan Glover, 2020, Canada)
- The Stylist (Jill Gevargizian, 2020, USA)
- Sun Choke (Ben Cresciman, 2015, USA)
- Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis, 2019, USA/France)
- The Swerve (Dean Kapsalis, 2018, USA)
- Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017, Norway/France/Denmark/Sweden)
- Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley, 2017, USA)
- Trompe-l'œil (Claude d'Anna, 1975, France/Belgium)
- Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, 2018, USA)
- The Untamed (Amat Escalante, 2016, Mexico)
- Violation (Dusty Mancinelli, 2020, Canada)
- Voices (Kevin Billington, 1973, UK)
- Die Weibchen (Zybnek Bynych, 1970, West Germany/France/Italy)
- The Well of Deprivation (Kamal El Sheikh, 1969, Egypt)
- White Reindeer (Zach Clark, 2013, USA)
- The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018, USA)
- A Woman's Torment (Roberta Findlay, 1977, USA)
- Woodshock (Kate and Laura Mulleavy, 2017, USA)
- You'll Like My Mother (Lamont Johnson, 1972, USA)

[J Wilson]

Roberto Curti recently published a critical history of the Giallo. I haven’t read it yet, but his previous work on Italian genre cinema makes me think this will be the reference guide to the genre.

Annoyingly, it's priced for libraries. Even as a paperback it's 100 dollars.

Only $75 at Amazon, and it's part of a buy 3 items for the price of 2 promotion. What a deal!

[ianthemovie]

Having both editions, I checked and here's the list of the 104 additional films :

Thank you so much for compiling this!

[Ann Harding]

Just tooting my own horn a little. My book about 'Continental Films' just came out in English from University of Wisconsin Press:
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5918.htm
I just got my first (good) review from the Shepherd Express:
https://shepherdexpress.com/film/i-hate ... the-nazis/

[DarkImbecile]

Congratulations! Happened to have recently read a brief passage on this topic in a book on occupied Europe that piqued my interest, so I just ordered a copy for myself

[Matt]

Congratulations! I’m eager to read it

[soundchaser]

Looks great! Congrats — this is an all-too-underdiscussed period.

[MichaelB]

Ooh, that looks rather good.

[tenia]

I read the French version when it was released here - it's a tremendous book.

[ianthemovie]

I wonder if anyone else here has taken a look at Jeanine Basinger's Hollywood: The Oral History yet. Surprisingly I haven't heard much talk about it online and didn't even know about its existence until I saw it on the New Non-Fiction shelf at a bookstore last weekend. It's a mammoth book, culled from what must be hundreds of first-person accounts by filmmakers from the silent era to the present. I only had a chance to page through it, but I love the idea of telling the history of the Hollywood film industry largely through first-person accounts and anecdotes as opposed to a more traditional approach to the same subject like Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System (a highly intelligent book that I nonetheless couldn't finish). I'd be curious to hear from others who may have read more of it.

[nowhereisaplace]

Funny I was just hoping such a recommendation (or lack thereof) would appear here for this book as well. I Also love the concept, but haven’t had a chance to dive in and I’m interested in hearing about the content.

[J Wilson]

There's a lengthy review of the book in the 12/5 New Yorker by Adam Gopnik; he generally likes it, but notes that "most stories here are positive, most people decorous, most collaborations happy." Being that the interviews were taken from AFI public seminars over 50 years, people were generally presenting their best face. A lot of the negativity and truly brutish behavior gets swept under the rug. As Gopnik writes, "Notorious bullies, thugs, and couch-casters like Darryl Zanuck and David O. Selznick emerge as good company men, 'rough' and 'tough,' perhaps, but also 'confident and bold' executives devoted to making good movies." He writes that the reader also gets a sense of how important every job was to the assembly line of movie-making, as everyone is allowed to speak. I've just checked out a copy from my local library, so I'm looking forward to digging into it myself.

[Maltic]

Charles Barr gives a short introduction to his British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction

[Albie08]

Any recommendations for critical books on Scorsese, other than the following:

Scorsese on Scorsese
The Cinema of Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver: BFI

[Matt]

Scorsese by Ebert, maybe? It includes Ebert’s critical appraisals and interviews. I saw Ebert and Scorsese in an extended conversation in 1997. Ebert was an astute interviewer, and Scorsese was as animated, enthusiastic, and bursting with the love of cinema as ever.

And possibly Glenn Kenney’s book on the making of Goodfellas?

The available scholarly books—though I haven’t read any of them—all look dreary

[bottlesofsmoke]

The book isn’t solely about him, but the best writing I’ve read on Scorsese is in Robert Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness.

[Dr Amicus]

The Sight and Sound collection on Scorsese collates most (all?) of the articles and reviews on the films from both Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin.

[ianthemovie]

Leighton Grist's Films of Martin Scorsese is fairly well-written and well-researched. I wouldn't call it dreary, exactly, but it is definitely written for an academic audience so bear that in mind.

Second the Kolker recommendation. I haven't read Glenn Kenny's book on GoodFellas yet but his writing is always solid. His book on Robert De Niro also contains four chapters focused on Scorsese films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy). Interesting that between those two books and contributing one of the essays to the recent Criterion Raging Bull Kenny has become something of a go-to guy with regard to Scorsese.

[Rayon Vert]

I’ll second the Kolker.

[Maltic]

I’ll second the Kolker.

Me too, although the formatting is frustrating, as I recall. Like, 60 page chapters with barely any paragraphs/sections, even though content-wise he's basically doing film-by-film analysis. I wrote my own expanded table of contents on the title pages with a pencil. Also, there's a useless appendix with filmographies (basic imdb stuff) taking up 1/4 of the book, even in this edition which came out in the 2000s.

/rant

[ianthemovie]

Does anyone happen to know of any books that discuss Delmer Daves' The Red House in depth?

[diamonds]

Does anyone happen to know of any books that discuss Delmer Daves' The Red House in depth?

There are a few pages on it in the ReFocus American Directors book on Daves. The chapter analyzes it along with a few of his other films in the context of post-war social progress. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for?

[ianthemovie]

Does anyone happen to know of any books that discuss Delmer Daves' The Red House in depth?

There are a few pages on it in the ReFocus American Directors book on Daves. The chapter analyzes it along with a few of his other films in the context of post-war social progress. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for?

Anything fairly substantial that's been written on the film is helpful, really, since it's a fairly neglected work. I'll check out that recommendation--thank you.

[domino harvey]

Anyone read Bordwell’s new book, Perplexing Plots?