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Title: Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard Film Studies)
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| Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard Film Studies) by Harvard University Press Important Collection | Cahiers Du Cinema most far and away the most important film magazine during the 50's and 60's. It contained the film theories of Bazin, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and all the other pioneers who forged the New Wave. This collection contains excellent and extensive intellectual essays on Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Mann, Hitchcock, and many other directors who made the 50's such an extraordinary and rich period of cinematic creativity. Jacques Rivette has a magnificent essay on the dimensions of cinemascope, and Godard has such an enthusiastic piece on Nicholas Ray, it probably contributed to his belated stardom as an auteur.
This is an important collection for any serious film student. | | Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard Film Studies) by Harvard University Press A Must for Real Film Buffs. | What a wonderful collection of essays written by one of the most intelligent groups ever to write (and some direct) about film. This book includes the staff of Cahiers du Cinema polemically discussing aesthetics, what creates an auteur, and debating the best directors of their time. (Each writer has their personal favorites of course, Bazin-Anthony Mann's westerns) All the essays are incredibly intellectual and strong knowledge of films of the 50s is necessary to even comprehend what they are speaking about. If you are familiar with the works of Renoir, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Joseph Mankiwicz, Vittorio De Sica, Vincente Minnelli, Alan Resnais, Hawks, and Hitchcock, here is the place to find trenchant analysis into their works.
Some of the most brilliant essays, of course, comes from Andre Bazin, whom in certain circles is contested as the father of film theory (my favorites from Bazin in this collection are 'On the politique des auteurs' and his defense of Kurosawa's Living, following Luc Molluet's thorough trashing of the now considered classic).
Also this volume can contribute to your 'movies to see' lists for those real film buffs out there (if you can find them). The back of the book contains the Cahiers annual Best Films Listing from 1955-59.
For all the French-film lovin', director wannabees, artsy fartsy, snobbish, 'they don't make 'em like they use to' people like me this is a great book to pick up anytime. Just to read sober, intelligent essays on the art of filmmaking, and what these directors where trying to achieve decades ago. I personally read these essays with a smile, getting simple pleasures out of the high-brow ideologies these young writers/directors once had, and how they went on to change the face of cinema, forever.
This is truly a historical collection of essays. 5 out of 5. | | Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard Film Studies) by Harvard University Press Product Description | Cahiers du Cinema is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue. The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing mise en scéne as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, auteur, a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film. |
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