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Something Like an Autobiography
A first rate book and a joy to read…. It’s doubtful that a complete understanding of the director’s artistry can be obtained without reading this book…. Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction.Translated from the Japanese By Audie Bock. -
Godard on Godard: Critical Writings
This book offers evidence that he may be even more original as a thinker about film than as a director. Covering the period of 1950–1967, the years of Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Alphaville, La Chinoise, and Weekend, this book of writings is an important document and a fascinating study of a vital stage in Godard’s career. With commentary by Tom Milne and Richard Roud, and an extensive new foreword by Annette Michelson that reassesses Godard in light of his later films, here is an outrageous self-portrait by a director who, even now, continues to amaze and bedevil, and to chart new directions for cinema and for critical thought about its history.
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Making Movies
For in this book, Sidney Lumet, one of our most consistently acclaimed directors, gives us both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on forty years of experience on movies that range from Long Day’s Journey into Night to Network and The Verdict-and with such stars as Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino-Lumet explains how painstaking labor and inspired split-second decisions can result in two hours of screen magic.
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Speaking Of Films
Speaking of Films brings together some of Ray’s most memorable writings on film and film-making. With the masterly precision and clarity that characterize his films, Ray discusses a wide array of subjects. He also writes about his own experiences, the challenges of working with rank amateurs, and the innovations in the face of technological, financial and logistical constraints. Ray provides fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpses of the people who worked with him.
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Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema
Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema, Satyajit Ray is acknowledged to be one of the worlds finest film-makers. This book brings together some of his most cerebral writings on film.With the economy and precision that marked his films, Ray writes on the art and craft of cinema, pens an ode to silent cinema, discusses the problems in adapting literary works to film, pays tribute to contemporaries like Godard and Uttam Kumar, and even gives us a peek into his experiences at film festivals, both as a jury member and as a contestant. Including fascinating photographs by and of the master, Deep Focus not only reveals Rays engagement with cinema but also provides an invaluable insight into the mind of a genius.
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My Years with Apu
In My Years with Apu Ray brings to light the story behind the making of the three films in the Apu trilogy. Completed shortly before his death, this memoir covers the key aspects of his career: his decision to give up a lucrative job in advertising in order to make his first film, early setbacks, a chronic shortage of funds, the guidance and support of directors such as Jean Renoir, his solutions to problems, and the acclaim for his films at home and abroad.
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The Apu Trilogy
With Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trliogy—”Pather Panchali” (1955), “Aparajito” (1956) and “Apur Sansar” (1959)—a stirring new cinematic voice was born. Listed among the greatest films of all time, the trilogy follows the unforgettable character of Apu—a free-spirited child in impoverished rural Bengal who, with his passion for creativity and learning, matures into an urban adolescent and, finally, into a complex, sensitive, battered man.
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Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker
Akira Kurosawa said of the great director: ‘Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.’ Martin Scorsese remarked on Ray’s birth centenary in 2021: ‘The films of Satyajit Ray are truly treasures of cinema, and everyone with an interest in film needs to see them.’
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Satyajit Ray Miscellany: On Life, Cinema, People Much More
Satyajit Ray Miscellany, the second book in The Penguin Ray Library series, brings to light some of the rarest essays and illustrations of Ray that opens a window to the myriad thought-process of this creative genius. With more than seventy gripping write-ups and rare photographs and manuscripts, this book is a collector’s item. -
An Actor Prepares
An Actor Prepares is the most famous acting training book ever to have been written and the work of Stanislavski has inspired generations of actors and trainers. This translation was the first to introduce Stanislavski’s ‘system’ to the English speaking world and has stood the test of time in acting classes to this day. Stanislavski here deals with the inward preparation an actor must undergo in order to explore a role to the full. He introduces the concepts of the ‘magic if’ units and objectives, of emotion memory, of the super-objective and many more now famous rehearsal aids.
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Building a Character
In this follow up to his most famous book, An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski develop his influential ‘system’ of acting by exploring the imaginative processes at the heart of the actor’s craft. Building a Character deals with the physical realization of character on the stage through such tools as expressions, movement and speech. It is a book in which every theory is inextricably bound up with practice – a perfect handbook to the physical art of acting. The work of Stanislavski has inspired generations of actors and trainers and it remains an essential read for actors and directors at all stages of their careers.
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Creating A Role
This volume completes, with An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, the trilogy in which Stanislavski set down his life’s accomplishment.
Creating a Role describes the elaborate preparation that precedes actual performance. Stanislavski here relates the techniques he describes in his preceding books to analyzing specific plays and their roles.
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On Directing Film
According to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually. Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are composed of simple shots. The great filmmaker understands that the burden of cinematic storytelling lies less in the individual shot than in the collective meaning that shots convey when they are edited together. Mamet borrows many of his ideas about directing, writing, and acting from Russian masters such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and Vsevelod Pudovkin, but he presents his material in so delightful and lively a fashion that he revitalizes it for the contemporary reader.