I have been looking for non-fiction books about movie industry. I have found some, mostly biography's. If you have read a good book (there are plenty, but many of them are just hard to read) about movie making, live of an actor, director, make-up artist etc. I would be very interested in checking them out.
I can hopefully help you, being a film student myself, but you need to narrow down what you're asking What part of the industry are you interested in? We tend to separate the movie industry into four (this also goes for movie history); financial, esthetic, social and technological. Are you more interested in biographies? Are you looking to learn more about movies, either how they are constructed and how we analyze them at a very technical level, or are you more interested in theories about movies and different movements within movies, like theories on realism vs the formative tradition and so on? Narrow it down a bit and I'll see if I can help you
Thank you for those four. Social is what intrests me most but I would like to read about other three too. Biographies are interesting but they tend to have few issues. I'm not that interested in Holllywood personalities. Analyzing them at a techinical level is what I'm most interested in. Theories are less interesting but if you know a great book I'll take a look. Hopefully this made things clearer.
In terms of analyzing films I think Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson is a great place to start. It goes into great detail on film form, film style (which includes miss-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound), genres, critical analysis and a tiny bit of history and I like the amount of pictures they use to illustrate what they're on about at all times. It's really helpful. I have to warn you though that Bordwell in particular seems to think that the only film analysis worth spending time on is the very detailed analysis of the technical sides of a film, i.e. the different shots, lighting, sound, color and so on and the choices a filmmaker lands on when making his movie, and he seems to ignore any form of thematic analysis. I don't agree with him on this point because I believe all films convey themes worth analyzing so just keep that in mind. If you want a more thorough look at film history, I would recommend Film History: An Introduction by the same two authors. As far as I can remember it should give a thorough look at each of the four pillars of history although they don't necessarily separate them into four categories but the reason for that is that all four areas of history are (usually) important at any time in history even though one area might be more important than the others. Take Hitchcock's Vertigo for instance; financially it flopped – that's part of the financial history – but to understand why you need to look at the social history (it was released in a period where the number of television sets in private homes skyrocketed which meant that the whole families that used to go to the cinema together, ensuring high attendance at the cinema, now stayed at home while the new audience largely consisted of young adults and teenagers who weren't interested in an aging James Stewart), the technological history (it was released in the newly invented wide screen format and with colors, both technological progress, to offer the audience something that the television couldn't) and esthetic (being released in color meant Hitchcock could play with it and the use of color in Vertigo is very interesting). Part of Hitchcock's brilliance was realizing that the cinema had a new audience and releasing Psycho a few years later. Even in black and white it was a huge success When it comes to film theories there's one book that's above all else, what we call 'the Bible' Film Theory and Criticism edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. It's basically a collection of the most important articles by the most important film theorists of the last 100 years, divided into (I believe) 8 different categories. It's a book you don't read from cover to cover but look up whatever you fancy that day. It's one of my favorite books on film but it's a good idea to have Film History: An Introduction nearby to look up certain historical periods every now and then. I.e. it can be a good idea to read about the 1950's French new wave and Italian Neo-realism before reading André Bazin's theories on realism or read about the Soviet montage or German expressionism in the 1920's before reading the theories of the 1920's (Sergej Eisenstein and the like). Some of those theories can be hard to follow sometimes if you don't know too much about the history and what they tried to achieve and so on but a lot of them are easy to understand. Hopefully this helps and if you have any other questions or you wanna discuss André Bazin's theories on realism (which I spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around this spring ) let me know! (Wow, this became much longer than I anticipated. Sorry about that!)
I didn't mind at all about the length. I will check them out. Thank you for the tips and we'll see about that conversation once I get my head around those theories!
Ignore the title the seller has given it - this is supposed to be very good, although please note I haven't read it myself. Mmm, linking appears to be disabled. Anyway, search amazon books for 'Easy Riders Raging Bulls'
