Video Production Books

Covering the full range of modern American filmmakers from established auteurs to first-time directors, this is an amazingly well researched and informed book that sets out to paint a picture of US cinema in all its varied forms. Of particular interest is the information on directors normally excluded from mainstream film encyclopedias - indie directors, pop video makers, first-timers, art-house filmmakers etc. - making for a book which gets to the parts other books just can't reach.

Set out as an alphabetical encyclopedia, each entry includes a complete filmography, contextual and biographical information on each filmmaker, and a specially commissioned critical article which discusses themes, styles and issues central to their work. The range of writers, from film journalists to PhD students to lecturers, makes for an unusually varied and lively authorial tone, though the best entries are the ones which move beyond the constraints of straight film criticism into proper articles. The critical article and full filmography make for a really complete account of the development of each director's career.

An indispensable reference tome whether you're a film writer or just your average movie goer, this book really delivers an informed and interesting read. The publishers say there will be subsequent volumes on British, European and World directors. If they're all as well done as this, I'll be buying every one.

Robin Allan's Walt Disney And Europe: European Influences On The Animated Feature Films Of Walt Disney is carefully based on archival research and extensive interviews with those who worked closely with Walt Disney. Concentrating on the classic animated feature films produced under Walt Disney's personal supervision, Walt Disney And Europe examines the European influences on some of the most beloved Disney classics from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to "The Jungle Book". With its painstaking attention to detail and meticulous research, Walt Disney And Europe will prove to be of immense interest to students of cinematic history in general, and the work of the Disney Studios in particular.

well done photobook, great candid pictures and unique commentary, if you dig Herzog, get it, you wont be dissapointed, and yes it is in English

This book has wonderful photographs including John Wayne on horseback at what is now Sorrel River Ranch Resort in Moab, Utah, a luxury hotel on the Colorado River. John Ford filmed many of his movies right in the Moab area and it is every bit as spectacular today at it was in John Wayne's time. There are incredible views to be had there and you can see photos online...

This book is very necessary to clue you in on some of the extra things you need to break or might miss - you do want to bankrupt that nasty company don't you?
And of course it offers locations of those sometimes hard to find yellow orbs so you know where you're going while you're tracking all over areas you've previously been.
Not to mention the extreme cuteness of Redmond and pal weasel photos.

until I took his class - now this book goes further into a connection that you will continue to think about everytime you watch Kubric's movies. Read it...watch the movies again ...then read the book... it has literally changed the way I view movies!

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood's constructions of spectatorshhip, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for these women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asain women filmmakers. In this illustrated work, she also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitiled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian Filmmakers.

Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, Ngosi Onwurah, Julie Dash, Pratibha Parmar, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Mira Nair. She sees Davis as "one of the growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing 'an oppositional gaze,' a term bell hooks uses to describe films that look through/at African-American female experiences through a Black les. " her films "Seek to reclaim female subjectivity through (re)construction of time, the body, and an exploration of spacial configurations."

Like Davis, British filmmaker Onwarah deals with time and space, embracing "Heterogeneity and multiple sites of subjectivity." Challenging the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema, she insists that the "body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse."

Dash, too, reconsiders time and space as she celebrates the Black body and African-American cultural diversity. Her Daughters of the Dust "challenges Hollyood's narrative techniques that typically ignore African-American history, particularly Black women's history.

Palmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker, is concerned with issues of representation, identity, cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity. She demands that women no longer be invisible, silent ad supressed.

Vietnamese born Minh-ha revolutioized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker." Ethnographic filmmaking, she argues, does not "objectively represent the Third World subject."

Nair, a Black Indian woman filmmaker, concentrates of racial identity. A pioneer in both narrative and documentary films, her challenging, celebratory work includes the recent productions Mississippi Masala and The Perez Family.
--- from book's back cover

I have to say that I haven't read any book that gets to the heart of Woody Allen's movies like this one does. Each of his films is analyzed and the different philosophical issues that are tackled in each film are discussed. This book will open your mind up to the whole world of philosophy and the struggle with how we should live that is at the heart of Woody's films. I not only learned a lot about these films so that I can appreciate them even more(which I didn't think was possible considering how much I liked them before this book)but I also learned a lot about philosophy and life. I cannot highly enough recommend this book. I wish I could give it twenty stars!

The author weaves a full thematic description of each Woody Allen's movie, with information on shooting locations and casts, along with movie costs and box office receipts in both the US and abroad. This book presents the most informative and interesting story of Woody Allen- genius American/New York filmmaker- I have ever read. The book was first published in Great Britain in 1996. David Rosenblatt Auburn University Archives Auburn, Alabama DROSENBL@LIB.AUBURN.EDU

Being a teacher developing a new Video Production course at our school, this book has proven itself to be very beneficial. It takes the video process and breaks it down into steps that the students understand. It really makes the video process easy!