Are you reading something about film, relating to film etc.?

In the latest upheaval of stuff (I'm getting in some new furniture) I fished out The Devil thumbs a ride and yes, I'll post the movies Gifford writes about, by and by... (I hope that will make it easier to "let the book go" eventually...)

I'm reading only about the movies I've seen. It's mostly description and expressions of personal enthusiasm. Books like these would have been essential before the internet...

I was prompted to buy this two-volume book, American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films 1913-1929 last year after an exchange in The Weird Tradition group. Maybe it would have been better if I'd slept on it: the two books cost over £100.

It attempts to gather together whatever information is available, or failing that make educated guesses as to plot synopses, etc., for all the movies within the limits of its remit. There's an air of the small press/fan press about some of the entries, something of the joshing tone of Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland. If it's not the most elegantly written of film books, still it must represent an enormous amount of research on the part of the four authors. Illustrations are fairly scarce as one would expect, and film posters and Vitagraph covers outnumber stills.

>2 housefulofpaper:

Oh, my, that looks splendid! Two volumes--and that's US only?! Onto the wishlist it goes...

I've just read the only film-book on my TBR shelf:

With Eisenstein in Hollywood A chapter of autobiography. Including the scenarios of Sutter's gold and an American tragedy (1967) by Ivor Montagu (UK, 1904-1984)

 

Ivor Montagu (English left-wing director/producer/journalist, table-tennis impresario, etc.) sounds very interesting in himself, the more so since he and his wife shared a house with Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse in Beverly Hills for six months in 1930, working on a couple of scripts that never got produced and rubbing shoulders with Chaplin, Fairbanks, Garbo and the rest. Plus the fascinating La Sarraz conference in 1929.

Full review in my CR thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/321969#7218167

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I loved Montagu's comment that Eisenstein had so many books in his Moscow flat that he never bothered searching for them: if he needed a particular book it was quicker to go out and got a new copy.

Hollywood: The Pioneers by Kevin Brownlow (pictures John Kobal)

This book is the tie-in to the 13-part TV series from 1979. I've never seen it and apparently it isn't currently available on DVD because of "rights issues" - although it seems to be up on YouTube at the moment.

It's quite light on text, being designed to showcase the stills which are mainly from John Kobal's collection.

I picked this up around 1985 in a remaindered/discount bookshop, sold as damaged stock.



The only thing wrong with it: the front endpaper (Buster Keaton from Sherlock, Jr) is upside down.



Here's a cute posed photo chosen for the frontispiece; although in fact the sign is real - von Sternberg wouldn't put up with the noise of carpenters hammering, other companies shooting nearby, etc.



Here's Rudolph Valentino. The last still is from Monsieur Beaucaire.





In an age before digital remastering I think this book was the first inkling I had of how beautiful the silent films looked in their prime. Not only that, although heavlly weighted towards the images, the essays at the head of each chapter and the texts accompanying the pictures told the story of Hollywood's development from the birth of the industry to sound, as well as an idea of the sophistication of the storytelling (when I mistakenly thought it to be nothing but physical comedy and melodrama).

>4 thorold:

That one's a classic! I've learned a little about the Montagu-Eisenstein adventures with the Viva Mexico project, but I'll leave your review for after I find my book.

>5 housefulofpaper:

Wonderful pictures, thanks so much for posting them.

how beautiful the silent films looked in their prime

*sigh* yes! And imagine, people were willing to sit and absorb them, no sound necessary...

Heh... could the Keaton endpaper be a gag? I'm almost sure if anyone is to be found hanging off a "ceiling" in early film, it would be Keaton.

I'm currently reading Camera Man, Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. It's not a standard bio, but more like a series of essays that puts Keaton in a cultural context, and shows what was going on at particular moments in his performing life. For example, she talks about the emergence of film criticism. The book can be quite digressive (is that a word?) but I don't mind someone going off topic if it's interesting. It's arguable that her chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a really tenuous connection to Keaton (they both had problems with alcohol and worked at MGM at the same time although there's no evidence they ever met) doesn't belong in the book but I don't care. I didn't know Keaton worked as a gag writer for, among others, The Marx Brothers, although the two comedy styles didn't gel well.

There's also a new, standard bio about Keaton out by James Curtis called Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life.

Thanks for the heads-up on new Keaton books. I have an older bio of his but haven't read it yet.

I'm reading Felicitas Hoppe's recent novel Die Nibelungen: ein deutscher Stummfilm, which turns out to be a sort of backstage story engaging with a stage performance of the Nibelungenlied (in Worms, naturally) that is itself engaging with Fritz Lang's film. As usual with Hoppe, borders of fiction and journalism are smudged. I'm about half way through and I think I'm just beginning to make sense of what she's up to, but I could be wrong. In the meantime, plenty of excuses to watch Paul Richter prancing around in a skimpy kilt.

>9 thorold:

Foamy! (as we used to say back in the Buffy days)

I'm reading two books about film, both of the "short introduction" type: Sebastian Heiduschke's 2013 East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (wow, a touchstone) and the unlikely-ever-to-be-translated "Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma" (WOW, A TOUCHSTONE!) (Introduction to the history of Croatian feature film) by one Nikica Gilić from 2011.

But I'll post more about them in my Club Read thread, to keep it all in one place.

Nice appreciation of Michael Powell's beginnings, by Imogen Sara Smith (and extra points for the top photo of Conrad Veidt with Valerie Hobson in The Spy in Black):

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Powell Before Pressburger