a history of narrative film fifth edition

It is remarkably thorough and dense for all it tries to cover and is well presented and smartly written, and liberally illustrated with stills. It was like filing a complaint with police internal affairs.īut anyway, I appreciate Cook's narrative of the history of the movie art a lot more now than I did at the time. I actually went to Arnold's office to complain about this guy, but Arnold stuck to the Masonic old-boy's club, no-snitch-teacher-protection-racket code, or some such.

All you had to say on the blue book quiz was 'social problems' 20 times to get an 'A.' As least he showed us some good (and at the time, rare) films.

The other, whose name I can't remember and wouldn't mention if I did, was a true idiot who seemed to be going senile and knew nothing about film aesthetics or style or philosophy or history and whose only criterion of film quality was if a film addressed 'social problems.' He was like a Bosley Crowther pedant freeze dried with the water sucked away. One, James Arnold, was outstanding: a published scholar in the field and a wonderful, personable guy. This was my primary reference for film courses when I attended Marquette U. A History of Narrative Film is enthusiastically recommended to anyone with a burgeoning interest in cinema. Uncontroversial, they mostly illustrate that film, which is often approached very personally or dogmatically in theory books, can be studied analytically: there truly is a visual language. Sometimes he does spend a page or two on a film, but these close-ups aren't the book's strength.

He also never leaves you questioning why a particular film is important, even if his explanation is just a single densely-packed sentence. Speaking of lists: yes, the internet is a better place for them than a printed book and you can find plenty of good film lists online (Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Essential Films is a great one), but Cook digs up titles you usually won't see elsewhere and he does it objectively, on a global scale and for over one hundred years of film production. Although it's a thick book and does contain paragraphs that are just lists of film titles, Cook's narrative proceeds smoothly and you can certainly read it cover to cover, skipping those paragraphs if you're uninterested. Like any atlas, it's an overview-you'll have to look elsewhere for topographic maps and street-level views of the Czech New Wave, Cinema Novo, French Poetic Realism or whatever happens to catch your eye-but it grounds every movement in the history of both its national cinema and the historical and technological development of film as a whole, giving you a practical sense of awareness in the great filmic scheme of things. If you want to explore the world of cinema, this is as good an atlas as you can have.

A history of narrative film fifth edition