It doesn’t involve a narrative but instead, like Ballet mécanique, develops according to principles of abstract form. A terrific piece of journalism and a landmark in the history of American non-fiction writing, this look at how John Huston made The Red Badge of Courage remains the ultimate Hollywood behind-the-scenes story. The last stretch of the book is more polemical, arguing that by now we have all mastered these skills and we ought to move toward cultivating others—chiefly those of scrutinizing form and style. We may know much more today about what really happened, but Leyda’s judgements were shrewd and his sheer enthusiasm is still infectious. Hollywood churns out the finest talent in visual arts and it’s the largest entertainment center anywhere in the world.

Not just one of the best film books, one of the best later 20th-century books of criticism of any medium. The Parade’s Gone By is the most accessible of Brownlow’s great books about silent film, though I could as easily have picked The War, the West and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence. A manifesto for a revolutionary cinema, this compact selection of talks with and essays by Jacques Rivette includes his seminal text on Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.As for Chinese film, well, this superb history, in which Zhang spotlights the teeming interplay between movies, photography and architecture in early 20th-century Shanghai, performs the function of all the best literature: it leaves you ravenous for more. Italian readers may wish to consult “La stilistica della scenografia nel tardo Ejzenstejn,” in Sergej Ejzenstejn: Oltre il cinema, ed. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. There’s a lot of magic in the Lucasfilm art department and you get a sneak peek into this world with The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Also, in French: Nul mieux que Godard, an anthology published by Cahiers du cinéma on Godard and edited by Bergala. However, votes for a particular title are collected together no matter what the edition (with the exception of Geoff Dyer’s voting for all five editions of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film).Working on The Movie, a multi-volume history of the cinema published in weekly parts at the start of the 1980s, I found the first four books on this list not only remarkable for their scholarship and practical use, but as sources of magic – Eisner’s not least because of the dread-heavy stills and the electrifying chapter on G.

For a reference book, am I allowed to put forward The Oxford History of World Cinema, despite being its editor (OUP, 1996)? I started reading about cinema in the late 1960s, the heyday of auteurism: the books that I read then formed my taste and have marked me as a certain kind of cinephile and, 40 years on, after the great adventure (or misadventure) of theory, that is still how I would define myself. Two essays from the 1940s are irreplaceable, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ and ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, both setting film in art’s longue durée. This effect results from the film’s concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal.There are tons of unique visuals including textures/renders from 3D modelers and paintings of the beats in the story. This is as sharp, witty and lacerating as all his best pictures; Buñuel’s observing eye turned into an act of reflective writing on his own life. S. books relied chiefly on films which had distribution here, forgetting that many outstanding films don’t get access to American audiences. No one else seems to get the point of film criticism as well as Rosenbaum, or to pursue it with such prickly independence.