The Cahiers du Cinema has played a major role in establishing film theory and criticism as an essential part of the late twentieth century culture. This is the only source where Cahiers is systematically represented in English.

The Cahiers du Cinema has played a major role in establishing film theory and criticism as an essential part of the late twentieth century culture. This is the only source where Cahiers is sytematically represented in English.

The Cashiers du Cinema has played a major role in establishing film theory and criticism as an essential part of the late twentieth century culture. The volumes reprinted here contain articles from 1951 through to 1972. This is the only source where Cashiers is systematically represented in English.

From the coming of sound to the 1960s, the musical was central to Hollywood production. Exhibiting - often in spectacular fashion - the remarkable resources of the Hollywood studios, musicals came to epitomise the very idea of 'light entertainment'. Films like "Top Hat" and "42nd Street, Meet Me in St. Louis" and "On the Town, Singin' in the Rain and Oklahoma , West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music" were hugely popular, yet were commonly regarded by cultural commentators as trivial and escapist. It was the 1970s before serious study of the Hollywood musical began to change critical attitudes and foster an interest in musical films produced in other cultures. Hollywood musicals have become less common, but the genre persists and both academic interest in and fond nostalgia for the musical shows no signs of abating. "100 Film Musicals" provides a stimulating overview of the genre's development, its major themes and the critical debates it has provoked. While centred on the dominant Hollywood tradition, "100 Film Musicals" includes films from countries that often tried to emulate the Hollywood style, like Britain and Germany, as well as from very different cultures like India, Egypt and Japan. Jim Hillier and Douglas Pye also discuss post-1960s films from many different sources which adapt and reflect on the conventions of the genre, including recent examples such as "Moulin Rouge " and "High School Musical, " demonstrating that the genre is still very much alive.

Film noir's popularity with cinema audiences, enthusiasts and scholars has remained unabated since post-war French critics began discerning a new trend in American film with the release of such stylish and atmospheric crime features as Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet. Many of Hollywood's greatest directors such as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak are now closely associated with film noir's psychologically acute observations of the darker contours of the American urban landscape. Thanks to evocative cinematography, sharp writing and powerful performances, these films have had an enduring influence on international visual culture. 100 Film Noirs provides an authoritative overview of film noir past and present by examining its core films and themes and providing an accessible introduction to critical debates. The book goes beyond the classical canon to examine the ways in which noir continues to have a diverse influence on American cinema. It demonstrates the way that noir has intervened in other more established Hollywood genres and also considers numerous lesser-known examples of the field. Importantly, 100 Film Noirs has a strong international dimension and provides new and revealing insights into film noirs from France, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico and beyond.

From the coming of sound to the 1960s, the musical was central to Hollywood production. Exhibiting - often in spectacular fashion - the remarkable resources of the Hollywood studios, musicals came to epitomise the very idea of 'light entertainment'. Films like Top Hat and 42nd Street, Meet Me in St. Louis and On the Town, Singin' in the Rain and Oklahoma!, West Side Story and The Sound of Music were hugely popular, yet were commonly regarded by cultural commentators as trivial and escapist. It was the 1970s before serious study of the Hollywood musical began to change critical attitudes and foster an interest in musical films produced in other cultures. Hollywood musicals have become less common, but the genre persists and both academic interest in and fond nostalgia for the musical shows no signs of abating. 100 Film Musicals provides a stimulating overview of the genre's development, its major themes and the critical debates it has provoked. While centred on the dominant Hollywood tradition, 100 Film Musicals includes films from countries that often tried to emulate the Hollywood style, like Britain and Germany, as well as from very different cultures like India, Egypt and Japan. Jim Hillier and Douglas Pye also discuss post-1960s films from many different sources which adapt and reflect on the conventions of the genre, including recent examples such as Moulin Rouge! and High School Musical, demonstrating that the genre is still very much alive.

Film noir's popularity with cinema audiences, enthusiasts and scholars has remained unabated since post-war French critics began discerning a new trend in American film with the release of such stylish and atmospheric crime features as Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet. Many of Hollywood's greatest directors such as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak are now closely associated with film noir's psychologically acute observations of the darker contours of the American urban landscape. Thanks to evocative cinematography, sharp writing and powerful performances, these films have had an enduring influence on international visual culture. 100 Film Noirs provides an authoritative overview of film noir past and present by examining its core films and themes and providing an accessible introduction to critical debates. The book goes beyond the classical canon to examine the ways in which noir continues to have a diverse influence on American cinema. It demonstrates the way that noir has intervened in other more established Hollywood genres and also considers numerous lesser-known examples of the field. Importantly, 100 Film Noirs has a strong international dimension and provides new and revealing insights into film noirs from France, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico and beyond.

In the turbulent sixties, the provocative French film journal "Cahiers du Cinema" was at its most influential and controversial. The first successes of the New Wave by major "Cahiers" contributors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol focused international attention on the revitalization of French cinema and its relation to film criticism; and in the early 1960s the journal's laudatory critiques of popular American movies were attaining the greatest notoriety.

As the lively articles, interviews, and polemical discussions in this volume reveal, the 1960s saw the beginnings of significant new directions in filmmaking and film criticism changes in which the New Wave itself was a major factor. The "auteur" theory that the journal had championed in the 1950s began to be rethought and revalued. At the same time, along with a reassessment of American film, "Cahiers" began to embrace new, often oppositional forms of cinema and criticism, culminating in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the ensuing decade.

The selections, translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, are annotated by Hillier, and context is provided in his general introduction and part introductions. For an understanding of the important changes that took place in cinema and film criticism in the 1960s and beyond, this book is essential reading.

"Cahiers du Cinema" is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue.

The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing "mise en scene" as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, "auteur," a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave.

Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixeddoctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.