Film Studies: A Select Bibliography

Film appreciation as a course is offered in many western universities. In India also FTII, Pune offers such a course. There are many books specifically designed for such studies. However, there are many seminal books on this subject which are considered below.

The first & most important is the two volume set of "What is Cinema?" by Andre Bazin, published by the University of California Press. As Pauline Kael, another iconic film critic wrote, "What is Cinema" joins that small company of books on movies that do not exploit interest in movies but intensify it."

Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" (from the same publisher as above) puts forward the provocative thesis that the peculiar virtues of film as art, derive from an exploitation of the limitations of the medium.

"Film: A Montage of Theories" edited by Richard Dyer MacCann is a selection of essays by Pudovkin, Hitchcock, Bergman, Zavattini et al on various aspects of film craft arranged theme-wise.

V.F.Perkins, in his "Film as Film", shows how a synthetic theory can shape raw cinematic experience & create a framework for constructive criticism. Also, most importantly, he points out the limits of criticism.

A more comprehensive volume than the above is "The Cinema as Art" by Ralph Stephenson & J. R. Debrix, which applies the philosophical concepts of time-space continuum & the nature of reality in analysing films, with over 300 examples taken from world cinema.

Notable film critics include Pauline Kael & Bosley Crowther (whose magisterial reviews in the New York Times could make or mar a film.)