Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world

The Oxford History of World Cinema

Antonio Gramsci

David Forgacs

William Boelhower

Selections from Cultural Writings

موسوعة تاريخ السينما فى العالم - المجلد الثالث - السينما المعاصرة 1960 - 1995

New Cinemas of the 1960s

Making Waves

The 1960s was famously the decade of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It was also a decade of revolution and counter-revolution, of the Cuban missile crisis, of the American intervention in Vietnam, of economic booms and the beginning of consumerism (and the rebellion against it). It was a decade in which the avantgarde came out of the closet and into the street, expressing itself on album covers and posters as much as in galleries. And it was a decade in which the old popular art - crooners and show bands, Hollywood musicals and melodramas - seemed destined to be swept away by the tide of novelty emerging across the world. The cinema was central to this atmosphere of cultural ferment. Hollywood was in decline, both artistically and commercially. The genres which had held audiences captive in the 1940s and 50s - musicals, Westerns, melodramas - were losing their appeal and their great practitioners were approaching retirement. The scene was therefore set for new cinemas to emerge to attract the young, the discriminating, the politically conscious and the sexually emancipated. The innovative features of the new cinemas were not the same everywhere. Common to most of them, however, were a political and aesthetic radicalism and a break with the traditions of studio filmmaking and its cult of perfect illusion. Making Waves, Revised and Expanded is a sharp, focused, and brilliant survey of the innovative filmmaking of the 1960s, placing it in its political, economic, cultural and aesthetic context - capturing the distinctiveness of a decade which was great for the cinema and for the world at large. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith pays particular attention to a handful of the most remarkable talents (Godard, Antonioni, Oshima) that emerged during the period and helped to make it so special.

Making Waves, Revised and Expanded

Cinema was the first, and is arguably still the greatest, of the industrialized art forms that came to dominate the cultural life of the twentieth century. Today, it continues to adapt and grow as new technologies and viewing platforms become available, and remains an integral cultural and aesthetic entertainment experience for people the world over. Cinema developed against the backdrop of the two world wars, and over the years has seen smaller wars, revolutions, and profound social changes. Its history reflects this changing landscape, and, more than any other art form, developments in technology. In this Very Short Introduction, Nowell-Smith looks at the defining moments of the industry, from silent to sound, black and white to color, and considers its genres from intellectual art house to mass market entertainment. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The History of Cinema

Luchino Visconti's career as a film-maker began in the 1930s when he escaped the culture of fascist Italy to work with Jean Renoir in the France of the Popular Front. This is a study of this director.

Luchino Visconti

Aristocrat and Marxist, master equally of harsh realism and sublime melodrama, Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was without question one of the greatest European film directors. His career as a film-maker began in the 1930s when he escaped the stifling culture of Fascist Italy to work with Jean Renoir in the France of the Popular Front. Back in his native country in the 40s he was one of the founders of the neo-realist movement. In 1954, with Senso, he turned his hand to a historical spectacular. The result was both glorious to look at and a profound reinterpretation of history. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960) he returned to his neo-realist roots and in The Leopard (1963), with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, he made the first truly international film. He scored a further success with Death in Venice (1971), a sensitive adaptation of Thomas Mann's story about a writer (in the film, a musician) whose world is devastated when he falls in love with a young boy. A similar homo-erotic theme haunts Ludwig (1973), a bio-pic about the King of Bavaria who prefers art to politics and the company of stableboys to the princess he is supposed to marry. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's classic study of the director was first published in 1967 and revised in 1973. It is now updated to include the last three films that Visconti made before his death, together with some reflections on the 'auteur' theory of which the original edition was a key example.

Robert C. Allen

Linda Williams

Ana M. Lopez

John Belton

Richard Abel

Noel Carroll

Naomi Greene

Ien Ang

Christopher Orr

Jean-Loup Bourget

Pam Cook

Alan Casty

Charles Affron

Christian Viviani

Chuck Kleinhans

Charlotte Brunsdon

Cawelti, John G.

Gerould, Daniel

Brooks, Peter

Elsaesser, Thomas

Ruth McCormick

Ellen Seiter

A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama

Imitations of Life

British Film Institute

James Hay

British Film Institute Staff

Gianni Volpi

Project Director for European Filmography and Fellow of the European Humanities Research Center Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

The Companion to Italian Cinema

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

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