I already read Bazin and want more

Sculpting in time by tarkovsky - more proof of tarkovskys genius. Hes effortlessly what every other artist tries so hard to be but instead they come off as pretentious. Andrei is a legit deep ass nigga and an amazing writer. I Dont really agree with much of his thoughts on films anymore but the book is just fire. Very insightful. Read dat

Casavettes by casavettes is awesome. You get to see how much of a nut dude was. And how real of a nigga he was too. Its kinda monotonous tho its not the writers fault. its just that his crowds back then were trash. All his movies were s***ted on on release yet years later they hop on bros nuts. It happened with every movie he made, like clockwork. and since the chapters are based on the movies he was making at that time in his life, every last few pages of every chapter is the basically the same until the end lmfao

david bordwell lowkey garbage but if u a real nerd he wrote a dope lil intro to film textbook for college lol. Its easy to find for free. I learned alot from it. He has some other books but i dont really like him so idk.

i heard that hitchcock//truffaut book was fire but i havent read it.

if you really wanna learn how to a***yze cinema than read Signatures of the Visible by Frederic Jameson

cassavettes a king for rosemarys baby alone

on god. legendary actor. and an even better director. always s***ting on the industry too

Yes about Tarkovsky and also his diaries are extremely insightful some of the things he wrote in there actually shifted some of my ideas about life

Exactly like you said he is one of the very few worthy of the term genius and he actually does have the philosophical depth to say the things he says without it being pretentious at all

frfr its as if that whole stereotype of a pretentious artist was based off niggas trying to imitate tarkovsky lmfao. its wild. i read once that he was known as a genius even before starting film school. he walked in and students were in shambles cause he was already known as a god without even making s*** lmfao.

bro was also a genius photographer so he was prolly known off that. its just wild knowing that a guy like tarkovsky actually existed. he was literally what every "deep and serious" artist wants to be and literally died for film.

legend

The introduction to Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye is one of the most interesting things I've read on film. (Also Deleuze's Cinema 1&2)

I made a list in the literature thread just yesterday

ktt2.com/literature-thread-523/9#latest

Page 9

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made and The Stanley Kubrick Archives are both great

I don't even know if I want the HBO show (if they're still developing it) not the same man

tbh nothing will come close to what Kubrick had planned

Yeah, we've seen that from previous attempts alright....

Great thread.

@sluttymary

and he actually does have the philosophical depth to say the things he says without it being pretentious at all

mekas

Review and essay collections by great critics. Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael are great starting points. A lot of Ebert’s reviews are online but not the case for Kael. I’d recommend checking out if your local library has any of her books. Kael’s takedown of Oliver stone movies platoon and born on the Fourth of July are more savage than any rap diss I’ve listened to. I also like david kerr’s when movies mattered. bazins what is cinema if you want to get into dark arts.

Jim emerson had two great blogs, cinepad and scanners but both are hard to access other than wayback machine. I’d look into his writings by googling him.

Making Movies - Sidney Lumet

On Directing Film - David Mamet

Bambi vs Godzilla - David Mamet. Written around time dude started to go off the rails. Lot of great funny insights but parts are also crazy. Try to read this on cocaine if you can. Dude makes a political or judaism connection every other paragraph.

Kid Stays in the Picture - Robert Evans. Life story of famed producer behind chinatown and godfather. Try to get audiobook and watch documentary of same name. Listen to patton oswalts standup bit on him and book too.

Film Art: An Introduction (eleventh edition kinda downgraded, go with tenth edition if you can)

Read screenplays of your fav movies then rewatch them, or do same for movies you want to see. You’ll pick up on a lot

why dont you like bordwell?

@mentallo

OP said they've read Bazin already so they might be looking for more substantial stuff than kael & ebert tbh

my b I tweaked and missed that they mentioned bazin. Wouldn’t say Ebert and Kael are less substantial just because they’re more accessible tho. Tons of great insights and takes to pick up on from them

Well I guess it depends on what they've read of Bazins really.

I'm hesitant to recommend Kael just cause of her generally unappealing view of film — comes across somehow both very insular yet one of her ambitions is relatability with average audience. The majority of what I've read from her is written from a perspective I'd consider toxic to film culture. And it didn't help any when she started traveling to Hollywood to report on in-progress productions, and basically became a full on industry shill for a while.

I'm all for reading various or contrasting critical perspectives, but I've drawn a line at spreading her work around more, especially when her name (and Ebert's) are still the two that are typically mentioned first and the most, and arguably out of habit and persona moreso for what they've written. (Not to mention that Kael is responsible for 2 pieces of criticism that arguably rank amongst the all time worst, with one of them likely being the worst.)

Ebert's work on the other hand has more consistency when it comes to making concessions and being generally self-aware. Though, as you said, his work is indeed a great jumping off point rather than a sacred text, which I feel like OP already jumped a while back since they mentioned Bazin haha

But I don't really have any harsh words for Ebert because he (mostly) operated in his lane, which was preaching Kael's "everyman" relatability but without the seething insecurity towards intellectualism, international film, or artistic endeavor. (Aside from his very rare bootlicking stints such as his responses to In Praise of Love, or his long but mostly empty defense of Bergman to Rosenbaum.) He's definitely got quite a bit of awful reviews — maybe more than anyone likes to admit — but he also has several gems of genuine insight (his thoughts on the end of Red Hook Summer come to mind, which I don't recall seeing any other review else suggest).

Perhaps most importantly when it comes to Ebert though, at least he actually and truly loved film, which is a hell of a lot more than what can be said about f***ing Siskel. Ebert's television and editing backgrounds might've hindered him when it came to writing more engaging criticism, but when sitting next to Siskel Ebert looks like f***ing Deleuze

Im def gonna check out one of the suggestions from this thread, I haven’t ever read a book on films so I don’t really know where to start, maybe something that can help me develop a deeper ability to a***yze a movie, idk. I always see Rasie Or other users articulating themselves so well in this section it makes me want to improve myself lmao

The most important thing to know IMO is hold on to that "wanting to improve" feeing forever — maybe later you might revise it to "wanting to expand" or something else — but the key idea remains: progression is always achievable regardless of how much you've learned.

I'll @ you again in a little while with some reading recommendations tho, especially since i havent given any ITT so far haha

Kinda obvious maybe but Story by Robert McKee