Reading Movies Meme

Courtesy of MovieMan at The Dancing Image, this meme has been floating around all week and has been quite great to see. Those tagged were asked to pick the 10 most influential film books to their development as writers, scholars, and cinephiles of all sorts. I was thrilled to be tagged in MovieMan's initial post and since then Brandon was tagged by another friend – Jeremy Richey of the always wonderful Moon in the Gutter. Not wanting to cut ourselves short on things that have led this site to its fruitful existence, Brandon and I have each chosen ten books with, kind of surprisingly, no overlap.

I can't speak for Brandon (perhaps he will comment on this post with more explanation on his choices if anyone is curious) but this was especially difficult for me as I feel like my views are in a constant state of flux. With very little access to Films growing up, film books didn't enter the equation for me until late high school and early college when I really got going. But even since then, having just gone through grad school in film studies, I had to decide what makes these books influential. So, this really ends up being a mixed bag of things that first got me interested in studying movies and more scholarly works that have really influenced my own current writing and thoughts towards cinema as I look towards more schooling and an academic career. Its a tough call on all accounts, so I hope this is representative of some of my influences and may explain, as MovieMan hoped for, where some of my experimental/genre slant comes from. Who knows. Nonetheless, here are the books. I'll leave further explanation and discussion for what I hope is a lively comment section.


Brandon Colvin's Reading Movies Meme Selections

Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson
Film Theory and Criticism edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971 by Jonas Mekas
Lynch on Lynch by Chris Rodley
Everything by David Bordwell, especially Poetics of Cinema
Terrence Malick by Lloyd Michaels
Godard on Godard by Jean-Luc Godard
The film criticism of Jim Emerson, Roger Ebert, Manohla Dargis, and everyone who has ever written for the Village Voice
Tarkovsky edited by Nathan Dunne
Film Comment


James Hansen's Reading Movies Meme Selections

Cinema 2 by Gilles Deleuze
The Cinema, Or The Imaginary Man by Edgar Morin (translated by Lorraine Mortimer)
Dogme Uncut by Jack Stevenson
Film As Subversive Art by Amos Vogel
Hard Core by Linda Williams (and mostly everything else by Linda Williams too)
The Magic Hour by Jim Hoberman
Manifestoes of Surrealism by Andre Breton
Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol Clover
Nathan Lee (duh)
Roger Ebert's 1990 Movie Companion (most notably the discussion of Lynch's Wild At Heart entitled, if I'm recalling correctly, "The Case Against David Lynch")

More recent additions to my repertoire that would be on this list if I had a little more time to absorb them:
Change Mummified by Philip Rosen
Cinema of Attractions Reloaded edited by Wanda Strauven
Collecting Visible Evidence edited by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov
Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
The Most Typical Avant Garde by David James

(Update!) Chuck Williamson's List
THE PARADE'S GONE BY by Kevin Brownlow
MOVIE-MADE AMERICA by Robert Sklar
WHAT IS CINEMA? by Andre Bazin
BABEL AND BABYLON: SPECTATORSHIP IN AMERICAN SILENT FILM by Miriam Bratu Hansen
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES by Laura Mulvey
CINEMA AND SPECTATORSHIP by Judith Mayne
CINEMA, OR THE OTHER MAN by Edgar Morrin
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE CINEMA by Richard Neupert
POST-THEORY: RECONSTRUCTING FILM STUDIES by David Bordwell
EARLY CINEMA: SPACE, FRAME, NARRATIVE ed. by Thomas Eisaesser and Adam Barker
FILM COMMENT

Thanks again to MovieMan and Jeremy for calling upon us to make these lists! Hope they share something about ourselves and maybe give some of you something to check out.
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