documents – reading

Ronald Bergan's Book List

This short list of film books might be interesting and/or useful for any film critic, young or old. It is presented by Ronald Bergan, the British biographer, film historian and critic who wrote books on Jean Renoir (Projections of Paradise. Bloomsbury), Sergei Eisenstein (A Life in Conflict. Little Brown) as well as biographies of Anthony Perkins, Katharine Hepburn, Dustin Hoffman and The Coen Brothers.

Bergan: "I have omitted books on individual filmmakers, because there are too many, but I can recommand Hitchcock (by Francois Truffaut) and Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard (edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, and introduced by Richard Roud)."

Film Art, An Introduction
by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (McGraw Hill)

Imagining Reality
by Mark Cousins and Kevin McDonald (Faber and Faber)

What is Cinema?
by André Bazin (University of California Press)

The Parades Gone By
by Kevin Brownlow (Knopf)

From Caligari to Hitler
by Siegfried Kracauer (Princeton University Press)

The Films In My Life
by Francois Truffaut

Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works
by Richard Taylor (editor) (BFI Publications)

Film Language, A Semiotics of the Cinema
Christian Metz (Oxford University Press)

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968
by Andrew Sarris

The Oxford History of World Cinema
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (editor) (Oxford University Press)

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
by Peter Wollen (Indiana University Press)

How to Read a Film: the World of Movies, Media, Multimedia - Language, History, Theory
by James Monaco

Film Theory and Criticism, Introductory Readings
by Leo Baraudy and Marshall Cohen (editors)
(Oxford University Press)

The Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema
by David Thompson

An Introduction to World Cinema
by Aristides Gazetas (McFarland & Company)

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