Xiaohe said: Youling Demon is a film culture worker and film critic in Shanghai, and I followed wang Xiaofeng's blog a long time ago because of his recommendation. Since 2009, he has selected the top ten Chinese film books on his blog every year at the end of each year, and it seems that there is no second person doing this work.
This article selected the 2011-2014 4 years of movie book recommendation of the demon teacher, published with authorization, if you need to reprint, please contact the demon teacher.
Some people will ask: if you can't watch movies, why do you have to read movie books?
Because, many movies that can't be seen are garbage, and a good movie book will help you tell what garbage is.
Top 10 Movie Books of 2014
▎ Pansi Cave 1927
One of the major events in the restoration of Chinese films in 2014 was the donation of "Pansi Cave" found and restored in Norway by the Norwegian National Library to the China Film Archive, a strange film produced in 1927 that has been saddled with the label of obscenity and theft in the history of Chinese cinema for many years and has long been considered lost. The book is passed on to fans who haven't had a chance to see the film yet, or who have seen it and want to learn more.
This book is the first book collection in the collection planned by the China Film Archive, and it is also the first time that the China Film Archive has combined the basic functions of the three major film archives of screening, research and education to make the first series of research books of the film archive with international standards in China. In addition to bringing together Chinese film history experts who are rarely sold on weekdays to carry out a new round of film history writing on "Pansi Cave" after seeing is believing, it also reproduces the precious special issue that was released with "Pansi Cave" in that year, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone.
▎ Look for gaps in cinema between Baroque and Zen
Wang Zhiqin, who claims to be a practitioner of cinematic writing, is a poetic title that implies his clear positioning of himself and the inevitability of not being categorized, in correspondence with his first officially published film book, Finding the Gap in Cinema Between Baroque and Zen. Fans who have previously read his hearty film articles online will gain more in this monograph about his two most admired directors, Yasujiro Ozu and Max Oberes.
The book is divided into three parts, the first part of the book touches on the characteristics of the two directors' techniques in a rambling manner, the middle editor puts forward the topic like the monologue of the Orpheus film, and the latter part is the thesis on "The Taste of Saury" and "The Fall of the Country and the Sea", as the highlight of occupying more than one-half of the book, this paper takes the picture, montage, narrative three steps layer by layer, making a very enlightening observation of the two films, the whole text is not a simple one-way reading of the film, but the film theory, aesthetics, philosophy and other lines go hand in hand, The patience and ambition of trying to pioneer the seminal analysis of Chinese writing that attempts to develop intensive film reading can hardly find a second among young Chinese film scholars.
▎ Hong Kong Movie 2013
In the nearly 20 years since its establishment, the Hong Kong Film Critics Association has published as many as 38 film books, and its quantity and quality have left various official or non-governmental film critic groups in China by several ranks. The annual publication of the "Hong Kong Film Review" series of books is its signature work, the quality with the replacement of the editor-in-chief up and down, this year's "Hong Kong Film 2013" (to remove the word "review" in the previous title) is to maintain a high degree of independence and autonomy, in the book binding and arrangement more ingenious, the form even appears with the film intention corresponding to the inverted and side-layout text, the content continues to adhere to the Hong Kong subjectivity, and thus in the film reading and interpretation of the different vision from the mainland, All this book has to do is try to open new windows for hong Kong movies, which many mainland media and critics turn a blind eye to.
▎ Ray Harryhausen's cinematic concept art
Perhaps it is the prosperity of the mainland film market, and related industries have begun to do something that they never thought they could do before, and "Ray Harleyhausen's Film Concept Art" published by the Houlang Film Series is such a strange book.
As the master of the visual effects generation that inspired Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, John Lasseter and other filmmakers, Harrison is a mysterious stranger in his own right, but he does not have a high reputation among ordinary audiences, and film concept drawings generally only appear in film production tidbits, so it takes great courage to introduce this luxurious album that introduces his film concept drawings, of course, to let readers understand unfamiliar filmmakers and things, which is also the duty of film book publishing.
▎The film of Kio Naruse
Canadian scholar Kathleen Russell's Films by Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (2008) systematically sorts out the 67 surviving films made by Japanese film master Naruse Yoshio in his lifetime, and russell also points out that Naruse films are the key texts of Japanese modernity. The translation of the book published by Fudan University Press is under the Qingyunguan series edited by editor Huang Wenjie, which has previously had a reputation for books such as "Dialogue with Billy Wilder", and this year added Huang Wenjie's own translation of "No One is an Island: Hou Xiaoxian's Film World".
As the first monograph on Naruse in the Chinese world, this book not only has a reading of the film, but also contextualizes it into the level of cultural research, the translator Zhang Hanhui (net name Liancheng) has previously translated "Ozu", "Japanese Horror Movies" and other books, so he is quite familiar with Japanese films and culture, this year is also the outbreak year of his translation, in addition to this book, there are "Japanese Film Masters" and "Hu Jinquan and < Heroines >" two translations came out.
▎ Audiovisual
In 2013, Peking University Press published the famous book "Sound" by French scholar Michel Hindon, and this year the Houlang Film Academy series published another of his famous books, "Audiovisual". The book deals with how sound works and improves perception, Šion strips sound from the picture, and through the presentation of three listening modes, the audience realizes that many of the so-called images seen are actually illusions constructed from sound, the opening 7-minute montage in Bergman's Masquerade is used as a summative audiovisual analysis, and the five main points show a refreshing view of the film. The book is followed by 100 conceptual terms on hearing and vision that Chion wrote specifically for the new edition of the book.
▎ Middle-West wind horse cattle
In the past few years, we have met a mainland film scholar Qi Zhi (Wu Di) who insists on telling the truth through "People's Films of the Mao Zedong Era", "Jiang Wen's Past and Present Life: The Devil Is Coming", and "Exposing Chinese Films, Reading cultural revolution films" published in Taiwan. In March 2014, the Houlang Film Academy series released a 10th anniversary edition of the book, which brought it back to life.
Originally, the book recorded Keichi's travels while teaching overseas and his classroom experiences with foreign students when he offered the elective course "Chinese Culture and Chinese Cinema". The course is usually to show a domestic film (usually the main theme of the film), followed by discussions with students, and the two sides complete an interesting collision of Eastern and Western cultures in the east and west. There are many interesting passages and laughable points in the book, allowing readers to examine Chinese culture and Chinese films from an unintended perspective, and even these passages can be directly used as good material for short film shooting due to few characters, clever dialogue, and single space.
▎ Tolerant gray dawn
Four years ago, Li Yang, a ph.D. in film studies who returned from his studies at charles de Gaulle University in France, launched a collection of essays, "History of Lost Film Culture" and a translation of "Leone's Past"; four years later, he, who was the dean of the Faculty of Letters at Northeast Normal University, did almost the same thing, publishing a collection of essays, "The Ethics of The Eye," and a translation of the collection "The Grey Dawn of Tolerance." The latter, compiled by him with a group of his students at Northeastern Normal University, includes 18 articles on cinema by nine French philosophers, including Foucault, which include a philosophical experience, a discussion of the relationship between vision, movement and truth for a single work like Ecstasy, as well as interviews and dialogues, if there is an internal connection between them. That may be what Li Yang, as the editor-in-chief of this book, wants to achieve: film theory should not become an island in humanistic research, but should have a dialogue with philosophy and aesthetics, and integrate into the tide of contemporary thought.
▎ Dream Book
Fellini received five years of psychotherapy in the 1960s and developed the habit of recording his dreams, and the Dream Book is a collection of Fellini's various dreams. The publication of this book was full of twists and turns, it took ten years to solve legal problems before it was published in 2005, and in 2012, the Central Compilation And Publishing House published an 8-open original-size deluxe edition of "Dream Book", which was beautifully printed but did not Chinese translation, so it could only be read as a picture book. The Chinese translation of the ordinary 32 folio published in January 2014 solves this problem, or completes the Dream Book, allowing readers to peek into Fellini's unique and imaginative dreams through words, but the paintings are also blurred by the shrinking layout, so for Fellini fans, the "Dream Book" is as straight as Big Joe and Little Joe, which is indispensable.
▎ History of world cinema
A History of World Cinema, co-authored by David Podwell and Kristen Thompson, is an authoritative work on film history and a critically acclaimed college film textbook. In February 2014, Peking University Press published a new translation of the second edition of the original book (this edition made extensive revisions to the first edition and added a world film profile from the 1980s to the 21st century). Edited by Zhou Bin, who has edited important film books such as "Revisiting Hitchcock" and "Film Poetics", as the responsible editor and translated by Professor Fan Bei of Chongqing University, the whole book is thousands of pages thick, and the translations, illustrations, annotations, etc. have been comprehensively upgraded, which can be called the blockbuster work in the 2014 film book.
Top 10 Movie Books of 2013
▎ Conversation with Billy Wilder
It's a movie book full of wit and laughter, with witty passages on every page. Billy Wilder has won two Oscars for best director and three for best screenplay, in conversation with Cameron Crowe, who wanted him to make a cameo appearance in his film Mr. Sweetheart, and after a year-long dialogue with Wilder, Crowe himself became the Oscar for best screenplay. Although the book was originally intended to be in the form of "Truffaut Dialogue Hitchcock", Crowe did not ask questions according to Wilder's life timeline, the advantage of trolleybus is that there are surprises at any time, and some questions Croti is more cunning, such as saying that he recently read the biography of Humphrey Bogart's son about his father, mentioning that Bogart once commented that Audrey Hepburn said that "she is good, just let her shoot 26", ask Wilder what he thinks about this, Wilder can still answer humorously, Wilder's 11 golden rules about screenwriting in the book should be pasted on the office wall of every Chinese screenwriter.
▎ Demystify Chinese films and read cultural revolution films
Qi Zhi, a professor at the China Film Art Research Center who wrote "1949-1966: People's Films in the Mao Zedong Era" and "Jiang Wen's Past and Present Life: The Devil Is Coming", most of the articles in the book were either killed or abridged in the mainland, so they were the same as his two previous works, using the method of publishing the full version in Taiwan. The first part of the book is a discussion of film history, from "The Legend of Martial Arts" to the influence of the 1996 Changsha Conference, and other topics to talk about the history of Chinese cinema, and the second part of the film review is a specific reading of cultural revolution films such as "Golden Light Avenue", "Sunny Days", "Spring Miao", and "Rupture". As Keiki mentions in the preface that some of the scholars he met at some film academic conferences were neo-cynical ("taking personal gains and losses as the center, taking the benefits inside and outside the system as the radius, and doing uninterrupted circular movements without offending the powerful"), he was able to always choose to tell the truth in one work after another, and his courage and practical spirit were admirable.
▎ Pasolini biography
There are too few books about Pasolini in Chinese books, although there have been a few, but there are certain limitations in translation and vision, and Naomi Green's "Heretical Cinema and Poetics", which focuses on Pasolini's films, has only been published in Taiwan and has been out of print for many years, so this two-volume biographical masterpiece, which is nine hundred pages long, has become a timely rain. In addition to a detailed description of Pasolini's life, including his separation and union with Fellini and others and his tragic private life, the book also allows readers to understand the transformation of his political and creative ideas through a large number of Pasolini's poems, or that he is an outlier from the beginning, and film is only one of his tools to change hands.
▎ Introduction to Classical Film Theory
Although this book was written nearly forty years ago, it does not seem outdated to read today, on the contrary, it may be one of the most well-organized, most elaborate and most understandable film theory readings that I have ever read, and the author Dudley Andrew has spent less than two hundred pages sketching out for the reader the representatives of the two largest camps since the birth of film theory and the theoretical essence of the new camp, and at the time of introduction, he also compared it with the unified four factors, which not only broke through the theoretical barriers of various factions. It also inspires readers to make self-explanatory comparisons. If someone has carefully read this book, then when he sees Feng 7, he will feel that the arguments behind these words are full of loopholes and are not worth refuting.
▎ Tok Ki-fung and Hong Kong action movies
The current Hong Kong film research, in fact, is mainly Du Qifeng film research, the previously published "Galaxy Image , unimaginable" and other books have all kinds of regrets, Singapore Nanyang Technological University Radio and Film Research Department Director Zhang Jiande's English book "Du Qifeng and Hong Kong Action Movies" and these books The biggest difference is that it is a fairly rigorous academic work, the research methods used are also Western-style, because the book was written in 2007, so the analysis of Du Qifeng's film stops at "Banishment", even so, The book is also fascinating, such as Zhang Jiande's belief that Du Qifeng's work can be called "Kowloon film noir", and then through the author's self-realization, it reacts to genre films and the Hong Kong film industry. The translator of this book is Huang Yuan, a translator familiar to fans, who has translated many well-known film books such as "It's Just a Movie: Hitchcock", "Truffaut: The Movie of My Life", "Exploiting Hollywood", "Waking Up in the Dark: Forty Years of Roger Ebert", etc. Out of his love and professional standards for Du Qifeng's films, this book is also read under his translation as if it were written directly in Chinese, full of reading pleasure.
▎ Introduction to Film Studies
The book covers film and society, film texts, other genres, films and identity peoples, and covers almost all the important topics of film studies. Through detailed introductions, rich macroscopic side quotations, and a path to introduce the most important theoretical tools and critical methods applied to the field of film research, each chapter has a detailed film as an example, and the book even uses the tidbits of the DVD as a kind of citation for the extension of the author's theory, which makes people think big. Since a number of well-known foreign scholars have been invited to write, the whole book is also guaranteed to the greatest extent possible to absorb a variety of different views and provide readers with their own comparisons.
▎ My beloved René, Fellini and others
Taiwanese film critic Li Youxian (i.e. Li Youxin, renamed in 2006) has a film criticism career of forty years, and the "Cannes-Venice Film Festival" written that year was once a sunflower treasure book for film fans, this book is his first film review collection in twenty years, 691 pages thick, 9 categories, is a representative summary of Taiwanese film criticism, which crosses the era of experience makes this book particularly meaningful. In the past 20 years, Taiwanese films have been at a low ebb for a long time, and there are only a few film critics who have left behind and whose articles deserve to be carefully read, and Li You's parrot quail is the guardian who never abandons. The book has both monographs on the master Yang Dechang and others, as well as film reviews of the new director's works painted for a few days, Li Youparrot Quail's film criticism is unique in both sides of the strait and three places, not only because he does not shy away from his comradehood, in the text repeatedly talk about personal interests and surprising past events, and his film criticism can eventually go around his favorite Fellini, Renai, Audrey Hepburn films, even if you completely disagree with some of his views, you can get a variety of unexpected gains from the text. And his real insight can indeed convince the director himself in just a few words, just like his intention to write the opening scene of "The City Again", and the director Chen Chuanxing is also impressed.
▎ Sound
Cinema is the art of picture and sound, and this magnificent work allows the reader to understand how sound acts on literature, music, and film through the analysis of sound phenomena. The unobtrusive depictions of sound in literary masterpieces and the use of sound in films have all become a science under the unique analysis of the author Michel Sion. For example, the sound passage at the beginning of "Once Upon a Time in the West" has a wonderful discussion in the book, and when you watch the film, do you realize that the flies stuck in the barrel of the gun are also listening to us at some point?
▎ Film, form and culture
This book is not only a practical textbook tool for analyzing the form and structure of the film, but also hopes that through the basic introduction of the film, the reader can think about the film as seriously as if he were thinking about literature, so it is also a book about content and context, history and business, even if the reader feels that the movie is an entertainment commodity, it is also important to understand its mechanism, because after reading it, you will understand what kind of movie can entertain you.
The book has previously been published in Chinese edition, and this time it is the latest Chinese translation of its third edition. The previous edition had only six chapters, and this edition expands to nine chapters, adding new technological and aesthetic changes from the digital age, adding chapters on shots, editing, genre studies, and an analysis of three melodramas, almost equivalent to a new book. In addition, the companion discs included with the book have also been updated extensively, so the capacity has been expanded from CD to DVD. The translator of the book is Dong Shu, and perhaps his screen name "Murder TV" is more well known.
In addition to translating the book in 2013, he also published the blog collection "Mummy Anti-Corrosion Guide", founded the film network video teaching program "Film Public High Class", participated in two other groups of film podcasts with different forms, opened a film column in the "Southern Metropolis Daily", wrote a film review in the "Oriental Morning Post", did part of the review work for the Shanghai International Film Festival, and operated the ivoviegoer website to provide content for the fan film network, almost all-round, which can be called the 2013 film critic of the year. In order to allow readers of Film, Form and Culture to have a more comprehensive understanding of the contents of the DVD included in the book, he also specially produced a graphic pdf description for the convenience of readers.
▎ Revisit Hitchcock
Hitchcock's transformation from an entertainment craftsman to an author in English-speaking world critics is to thank Truffaut in conversation with Hitchcock in the 1960s and Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Film (which begins with an argument as to why Hitchcock should be taken seriously), who, in particular, played a prophetic influence on the rehabilitation of Ecstasy. Also because several of The Hitchcock's works discussed by Robin Wood were copyrighted and not seen again until he was bought by Universal after his death in the 1980s, Wood's book was first and foremost recommended in the 1970s when critics revisited hitchcock classics. In his book, Wood demonstrates the virtues of a good film critic: defending the authors he admires with an elegant style, and providing multiple ways to read and understand films with insightful perspectives. And that's just the first half of the book Revisiting Hitchcock.
The next part of the book includes articles written by Wood more than a decade later about Hitchcock's films, evaluating Hitchcock from a fresh perspective. According to himself, at the time of writing the first part he is a petty-bourgeois intellectual without political consciousness, while in the next he is a humanist baptized in Marxism, feminism and psychoanalytic theory. Thus, Revisiting Hitchcock not only constitutes a systematic analysis of Hitchcock's films, but also a testimony to the self-evolution of a film critic. The Chinese edition of the book, translated by Xu Zhanxiong, who had translated Film Noir, is exemplary like the film reviews in the book. If I only recommend a movie book published in 2013, this one is.
2012 18th Film Book
The publication of Chinese film books in 2012 was more vigorous than in previous years, and some books that were almost unimaginable before were published and will be published, which made people feel a kind of drunkenness before the boom and bust. Coupled with the fact that Teacher Magasa launched his top ten benefit books, some of which duplicate the author's choice, and the author's original top ten actual statistics have 11 books selected, so, considering that this year may be a special inflection point for Chinese film books, the original top ten has been expanded to the eighteenth, sixteen of the eighteen books are not ranked, and the last two listed are the most recommended of the year.
▎ Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Filling gaps and reflections
Luo Yijun, honorary president of the China Film Critics Association, former deputy editor of Film Art magazine and other positions, is 86 years old this year. Because his book "Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Filling gaps and reflections" could not be published for three years (involving sensitive figures), Luo Lao published the book in Hong Kong at his own expense and was willing to give it to domestic readers for free (as long as you pay the postage, ask for it).
▎ Director Yasujiro Ozu
Japanese film scholar Shigehiko Hayashiko wrote Ozu Yasujiro's important works from a new perspective, and the translator Zhou Yiliang had previously translated the critically acclaimed book "Ozu Yasujiro's Journey", plus Zhou Bin, the best film book editor in China, as the editor-in-charge, and the quality assurance.
▎2011 Hong Kong Movie Review
One of the series of books in the Hong Kong Film Critics Association, one book per year, this retrospective series has reached a dead end in 2006 and 2007, but it has come back to life since 2010, and in 2011, this one has greatly excited the author, mainly because of the confidence that he found Hong Kong subjectivity. I think of the southern metropolis newspaper's "Chinese Film media awards" 2011 annual review book is not published in paper edition, but only sold on the app store...
▎ Cinema and the modernity of culture
This is a book that re-examines cinema, and the author understands and interprets cinema in the larger framework of cultural modernity.
▎60 fashion
The film criticism section of China Student Weekly has influenced half of the Hong Kong film industry, and this book collects and publishes these 1960s film critics, although some film critics have the limitations of the times, but it is really a hot-blooded, naïve, passionate, innocent film critic era.
▎ From allegorical peoples to genre republics
Ma Ning is a low-key film scholar, and this book is a collection of essays that he translated his English film papers back into Chinese, and it is also the most solid Chinese film treatise of an overseas Chinese scholar that I have ever seen.
▎Image of compound eye
Hashimoto wrote Rashomon in 1950, Desire for Life in 1952, and Seven Samurai in 1954, and it took only four years to become one of the greatest screenwriters of world cinema. The book is his memoir about the days he worked with Akira Kurosawa. In November 2011, the traditional Chinese version was first published in Taiwan, and in 2012, the mainland simplified chinese version was released.
▎ The screen of the Empire
Books on Japanese cinema during the 1931-1945 war of aggression cover policy, film, aesthetics, important historical events, and other aspects, a film book that fills in the gaps.
▎ Knife and stars
The film criticism collection directed by Xu Haofeng ("The Trail of Wu Kou") is also the best Chinese film criticism collection that I have read in 2012.
▎ Movies or imaginary people
The famous book of the French philosopher Edgar Moran discusses cinema from an anthropological point of view.
▎Light, shadow, movement
The memoirs of the German film master Schlöndorff, well written and informative.
▎ Goodbye Yang Dechang
The commemorative work of the fifth anniversary of Yang Dechang's death is a retrospective book of interviews, just like 2011's "Twenty Years through the City of Sorrows". The book was only planned in February 2012, and it became a book in November. On the mainland, there are exactly the same topics planned at the same time, but at the end of the year it is still blank.
▎ Film semiotics questioned
The film theorist and historian Jean Mitri's late-life magnum opus analyzed and rethought film semiotics.
▎ Film Aesthetics and Psychology
Jean Riemet's brilliant tome, one of the most important works in the history of film theory, the Taiwanese film critic Fei Nei said that he reads every day, and any page inspired him, and the domestic film critic LOOK Ju said that it and "What Is Cinema" constitute the Old Testament of Cinema.
▎ Technology and time
The third volume of the french philosopher Bernard Stigler's masterpiece, the first two volumes have little to do with cinema, this one is devoted to cinema.
▎ You do not belong
Although many people have already bought it at the November 2011.11 film festival "You Don't Belong", the book was published in January 2012. This is the most enlightening film book I have read this year, and it is still being re-read repeatedly, many of the ideas in the book have a daigo-inspiring effect, and the author even understands how the Shanghai International Film Festival has come to this point through one of the articles.
▎ Wake up in the dark / Great movie
Both books are written by the same person: the American film critic Roger Ebert. The content of the two books is basically not repeated, although some of the titles are repetitive but written in different ways. These two books provide a kind of film criticism example, which is suitable for the general audience, so that the audience understands what good film criticism can do for their movies, and it is suitable for ordinary film critics, literary film critics and red envelope film critics (as well as the domestic film publicity personnel who pay them), which can make them realize the sentence in the book: happiness is to be able to tell the truth and ensure that it does not hurt anyone (of course, this sentence is not Ebert said).
Top 10 Movie Books of 2011
▎ Andrei Tarkovsky
There are three of Tarkovsky's Chinese works that have been outstanding before: The first is naturally "Carving Time" in the Series of Books of the Yuanliu Film Museum in Taiwan, which is a collection of essays written by Tarkovsky himself, which is a beacon for a generation of film youth. The second book is "Seven and a Half: Tarkovsky's Film World" by China Film Publishing House, and the biggest advantage of this book is that it contains another Tarkovsky monograph "The Trajectory of Time and Space" by the Yuanliu Film Museum, and is supplemented by other expository articles. The third is Guangxi Normal University Press's Time in Time: Tarkovsky's Diary, and for many fans who regard Tarkovsky as a saint, the publication of this book has made them aware of Tarkovsky's other side.