The Best Film Books

The June issue of the British film magazine Sight & Sound includes a poll of international critics, asking for their top film books. While you'll need to pick up the issue to see all of the lists, you can see the magazine's top five selections here.

We thought it would be fun to gather lists from Wexner Center media arts curators, as well as a handful of OSU film studies staff, to see how our selections match up with the Sight & Sound poll. Apparently everyone was too self-conscious to include Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon.

Leave your favorite or favorites here or on our Wexner Film/Video Facebook page and be entered into a drawing with a chance to win a Janus Films T-shirt and a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray copy of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

David Filipi
Curator, Film/Video, Wexner Center 

• Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (Sergei Eisenstein, 1949 – translated by Jay Leyda)


• What is Cinema? (Andre Bazin 1967-71)


• French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Volume 1: 1907-1929 (Richard Abel, 1993)


• Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning (David Skal & Elias Savada, 1995)


• Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema (Glenn Myrent, 1995)


• David Lean: A Biography (Kevin Brownlow, 1997)


• Who the Devil Made it: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (Peter Bogdanovich, 1998)


• Truffaut: A Biography (Serge Toubiana & Antoine De Baecque, 1999)


• Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2002)


• The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing (Michael Ondaatje, 2004)


• Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (John Canemaker, Revised Edition 2005)

 

Ron Green
Professor, History of Art

• Agee on Film, Vol. 1 (James Agee, 1958)


• The Silent Clowns (Walter Kerr, 1975)


• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Stanley Cavell, 1981)


• Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (David James, 1989)


• Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (J. W. Williamson, 1995)


• On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (Bruce Jenkins, ed., 2009)


• The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (1994)


• The Devil Finds Work (James Baldwin, 1976)


• Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Branden Joseph, 2008)


• A Critical Cinema, Vols. 1-5 (Scott MacDonald, 1988 – 2006)

 

Bill Horrigan
Director, Media Arts, Wexner Center

• The Parade's Gone By (Kevin Brownlow, 1968)


• Godard on Godard (Jean Narboni & Tom Milne, eds., 1972)


• Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Peter Wollen, 1969)


• Commentaires I & II (Chris Marker, 1961, 1967)


• Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, Volume One (Callie Angell, 2006)

 

Judith Mayne
Distinguished Humanities Professor of French, French & Italian

• The Technique of Film Editing (Karel Reisz, 1953)


• Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Tere3sa de Lauretis, 1984)


• Stars & Stardom in French Cinema (Ginette Vincendeau, 2000)


• Paris au cinem (N.T. Binh & Franck Garbarz, 2003)


• Ziegfeld Girl (Linda Mizejewski, 1999)


• Questions of Cinema(Stephen Heath, 1981)


• Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representation (Patricia White, 1999)


• Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Amelie Hastie, 2007)


• Ma vie et mes films (Jean Renoir, 1974)

 

Mike Olenick
Studio Editor, Media Arts, Wexner Center

• Cahiers du Cinema: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (Jim Hillier, 1992)


• Cronenberg on Cronenberg (Chris Rodley, ed., 1997)


• The Film Sense (Sergei Eisenstein, 1942) and Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1949)


• First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (Gabriella Oldham, ed., 1995)


• Godard on Godard (Tom Milne, ed., 1972)


• In the Blink of an Eye (Revised 2nd Edition) (Walter Murch, 2001)


• La Jetee: ciné roman (Chris Marker, 2008 (second printing))


• How to Read a Film (James Monaco, 1977)


• The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (Joel Black, 1995)


• Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Atom Egoyan & Ian Balfour, eds., 2004)

 

Kris Paulsen
Assistant Professor, History of Art 

• The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Mary Anne Doane, 2002)


• Expanded Cinema (Gene Youngblood, 1970)


• Everything by Kaja Silverman


• Image Music Text (Roland Barthes, 1977)


• What is Cinema? (Andre Bazin, 1967-71)

 

Laura Podalsky
Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese

• The Skin of the Film (Laura Marks, 2000)


• The Subject of Semiotics (Kaja Silverman, 1983) or Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) (really, anything by her)


• Tradicion y modernidad en el cine de America Latina (Paulo Antonio Paranagua, 2003)


• Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Joanna Page, 2009)


• Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Phillip Rosen, 2001)

 

Dana Renga
Assistant Professor, French & Italian

• After Image: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Joshua Hirsch, 2004)


• The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (Tania Modleski, 1989)


• Cinema 2: The Time Image (Gilles Deleuze, 2005)


• Italian Cinema in the Light of Neorealism (Millicent Marcus, 1986)


• Visual and Other Pleasures (Laura Mulvey, 1989)


• The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Kaja Silverman, 1988)


• Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Teresa de Lauretis, 1984)


• Everything by Pier Paolo Pasolini, but especially "Il cinema di poesia"/"The Cinema of Poetry" (1965)


• Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Saul Friedlander, ed., 1992)

 

Chris Stults
Assistant Curator, Film/Video, Wexner Center

• What Is Cinema? (Andre Bazin, 1967-71)


• Notes on the Cinematographer (Robert Bresson, 1975)


• Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1980)


• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Stanley Cavell, 1981)


• Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (J. Hoberman, 1991)


• Poetics of Cinema (Raul Ruiz, 1995)


• The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century (Geoffrey O'Brien, 1995)


• The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Gilberto Perez, 1997)


• The Film of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (Tom Gunning, 2000)


• Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, Volume One (Callie Angell, 2006)