“By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.”
--André Bazin, What is Cinema?

“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”
--John Le Carré

Film is the youngest of the fine arts, but it has captured our imagination to such an extent that individual films can today cost the GDP of small countries to produce. Many generations now couldn’t imagine a world without film. The social convention of “dinner and a movie” is ubiquitous for a variety of relationships: friends, family and lovers.

We all watch films today and we all have opinions on them.

On a trip to Africa in the early 1990s, I spoke with village elders in a Bushmen settlement who had all seen “The Gods Must Be Crazy”—local Dutch aid workers had strung up a white sheet and shown it with a portable projector—and they all loved the film.

Movie reviews and criticism (of widely varying quality) has becomeBrowse our Victoriana Catalogue. prevalent all over the web. Anyone with a blog and ten minutes to spare seems to want to write a film review.

In fact, the earliest writing (and books) about film almost coincide with its invention. Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) wrote The Birth of the Sixth Art in 1911 only 17 years after Thomas Edison and Auguste and Louis Lumière separately invented the first motion picture systems. Canudo was followed over the years by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer—all pioneers in defining the language of film and analyzing its aesthetics.

The next major landmark in Film theory and criticism was André Bazin’s writings, which originally appeared in Cahiers du cinema, a magazine he co-founded in 1951. In addition to editing Cahiers until his death, a four-volume collection of his writings was published posthumously from 1958 to 1962 and titled What is Cinema?—which, incidentally, were the first books I was required to read in my intro to film classes at Concordia University in 1989.

Bazin’s ideas continued to be developed by his peers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard in the pages of Cahiers. Both men were also directors and giants of the French New Wave of the 1960s. Truffaut was the first to articulate the “Auteur Theory” of film in an article in Cahiers. The Auteur Theory holds that the director (or occasionally producer) of a film is most often a primary author of either an individual or body of work in film. This theory not only provided justification for Truffaut, Goddard and their contemporaries to create highly personal and idiosyncratic films; it also rippled through the world of film (both theory and practice) to today. The concept of a director as the author of a film is now assumed to always be the case, regardless of the actual production methods and history. Contemporary critics and audiences alike now all enter into the theatre expecting (at least on some level) to be going to see the personal vision of a director.

In the wake of Cahiers’ influence, a whole host of film critics appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world. These were often hacks looking for easy work, but some rose to the top as dedicated film thinkers such as Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and Rex Reed.

In addition to the film writing of critics and film makers themselves, a number of novelists wrote extensively on film; Graham Greene, JamesBrowse our Victoriana Catalogue. Agee and today’s postmodern wonder boy David Foster Wallace leap to mind. Novelists have long been drawn into the world of film, as novels have always been a prime source of content for screenwriters. Part of our Film catalogue at Cornellbooksellers.com includes books that have been adapted into films or vice versa.

In parallel with all of this intellectualizing about film, numerous biographies, behind the scenes exposés, encyclopaedias of genres, and photoplays exist as vast network of books on film.

To me, Kenneth Anger’s groundbreaking (rule breaking) Hollywood Babylon nicely captures the possibilities of film books. Hollywood Babylon is, all at once, a salacious “tell-all” gossipy biography of old Hollywood; an amazing collection of behind-the-scenes photographs; a historical record of films and actors that are falling out of the public consciousness; and an insider’s view of the corruption of the star system. Many with weaker constitutions consider it to be trash, but to me it represents both the heights that film can achieve as art and the depths it can reveal to the artists (and con-artists) ensnared in its commerce.

We hope you enjoy browsing the Film catalogue at Cornellbooksellers.com. If you have any questions regarding our collections, or are looking for a particular book, please don’t hesitate to contact us.