The form of the film depends on devices of parallelism that point up how the women are actually somewhat alike. But even better are the hundreds of storyboards, concept paintings, character illustrations, and design schematics used for each film during production. The field had become defined by anthologies claimed that poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and multiculturalism was where the action was—a Big Theory that was best qualified to explain cinema. Towards the book’s end, Melville says, “I estimate the final disappearance of cinemas to take place around the year 2020. It leaves out Phyllis Calvert and includes Audie Murphy, which enrages me, but I read it from cover to cover.

The Art of Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie shares a ton of artwork from the entire series like raw comic art, character sketches, concept designs, background paintings, and general visual development work from the film. A terrific piece of journalism and a landmark in the history of American non-fiction writing, this look at how John Huston made The Red Badge of Courage remains the ultimate Hollywood behind-the-scenes story. Day of Wrath, a tale of witchcraft and murder set in seventeenth-century Denmark, offers a good test case.

A masterpiece of stills photography that captures the world behind the movie camera, culminating in her extraordinary on-set pics of Marilyn and The Misfits.

So, in a quite different but unforgettable way, did Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon (J.There’s a lot of magic in the Lucasfilm art department and you get a sneak peek into this world with The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As for Chinese film, well, this superb history, in which Zhang spotlights the teeming interplay between movies, photography and architecture in early 20th-century Shanghai, performs the function of all the best literature: it leaves you ravenous for more.

After much internal debate, I’ve opted for this essential collection over the far heftier Farber on Film because this includes the lengthy and indispensable interview Farber and Patricia Patterson gave to Richard Thompson in 1977, whereas the other volume, even though it sports the almost accurate subtitle The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, contains only excerpts from it. e. disinterested in spheres like documentary cinema, the avant garde, sponsored films, amateur praxis, etc, which we consider all equal in importance and interest. A lot of visuals on the screen are designed in 2D first so the product designers pour over thousands of concept art pieces. Like most people in the unique position of foreknowledge of what others have said, I have avoided the choices that now seem obvious in this survey. English-language film cultures have kept pace with French aesthetic philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, but forgot to check where film analysis itself went in France after the heyday of semiotics.

First published in 1979, this is by some way the best, most wide-ranging single-volume reference book on the cinema ever written.

Some of these books are more recent while others date back a few years, but they all feature incredible concept pieces and inspiring behind-the-scenes resources. In that context, even Thomson’s diminishing interest in cinema – or current cinema at any rate – becomes a source of fascination. First published in 1988, and thus the only one of my choices not first published in the 1960s (showing my age). The question of whether we should believe our eyes (or any of our senses) is dramatised in a setting that uncannily predicts cinema.Employing a strategy common in slapstick shorts, it sets up a situation and then has the characters perform a series of nearly self-contained skits or gags, building up as the film goes along. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters examines the psychological traits and interactions among a group of characters. If debarred, then the 2000 edition of the Time Out Film Guide, being less bulky than it has since become.