Here are 100 books that America on Film fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a professor of pop culture, so I know personally that talking about race can be so incredibly awkward at times – but it does not always have to be! Often, many restrict themselves from fully participating in these necessary dialogues only because of a profound fear of “saying the wrong thing.” As individuals responsible for preparing a new generation of thinkers prepared to innovate improved solutions for the society we share, inevitably, the topic of race must not only be broached, but broached productively. I write to provide tools to help make such difficult conversations less difficult.
This book is an absolutely indispensable reference – Donald Bogle may well be dubbed the “godfather” of race studies in film as he meticulously chronicled and chartered black images in early film.
The book’s title alone already clues readers into the idea that Bogle will not pull any punches in describing popular black film caricatures that we now regard as problematic today.
This classic iconic study of black images in American motion pictures has been updated and revised, as Donald Bogle continues to enlighten us with his historical and social reflections on the relationship between African Americans and Hollywood. He notes the remarkable shifts that have come about in the new millennium when such filmmakers as Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) examined America's turbulent racial history and the particular dilemma of black actresses in Hollywood, including Halle Berry, Lupita Nyong'o, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Hudson, and Viola Davis. Bogle also looks at the ongoing careers of such stars…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a professor of pop culture, so I know personally that talking about race can be so incredibly awkward at times – but it does not always have to be! Often, many restrict themselves from fully participating in these necessary dialogues only because of a profound fear of “saying the wrong thing.” As individuals responsible for preparing a new generation of thinkers prepared to innovate improved solutions for the society we share, inevitably, the topic of race must not only be broached, but broached productively. I write to provide tools to help make such difficult conversations less difficult.
This book is both valuable and important primarily because whenever most conversations get started about race relations, magically white people as a group are “left out” as attention is turned to black, indigenous, Latino, or other people of color.
This book prompts readers to reconcile with whiteness as a larger category of analysis to deepen our understanding of complex race relations.
Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.
Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness.
Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability.
In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack…
I am a professor of pop culture, so I know personally that talking about race can be so incredibly awkward at times – but it does not always have to be! Often, many restrict themselves from fully participating in these necessary dialogues only because of a profound fear of “saying the wrong thing.” As individuals responsible for preparing a new generation of thinkers prepared to innovate improved solutions for the society we share, inevitably, the topic of race must not only be broached, but broached productively. I write to provide tools to help make such difficult conversations less difficult.
I recommend this book to anyone who has ever seen a female character onscreen (does that make all of us?!).
As a cisgender male, I grew up with a pretty myopic point of view and was conditioned to look to (white) males onscreen for key pieces of information or heroism.
This book helped me appreciate why my perspective was slanted and shaped this way – Karen Hollinger’s work has sensitized me to the idea that there is always more than one perspective to be mindful of when watching a movie.
Feminist Film Studies is a readable, yet comprehensive textbook for introductory classes in feminist film theory and criticism.
Karen Hollinger provides an accessible overview of women's representation and involvement in film, complemented by analyses of key texts that illustrate major topics in the field. Key areas include:
a brief history of the development of feminist film theory
the theorization of the male gaze and the female spectator
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a professor of pop culture, so I know personally that talking about race can be so incredibly awkward at times – but it does not always have to be! Often, many restrict themselves from fully participating in these necessary dialogues only because of a profound fear of “saying the wrong thing.” As individuals responsible for preparing a new generation of thinkers prepared to innovate improved solutions for the society we share, inevitably, the topic of race must not only be broached, but broached productively. I write to provide tools to help make such difficult conversations less difficult.
This book is excellent in providing quantitative data to demonstrate how well-meaning people often make negative racial associations based upon media content – this book really helps readers question to what degree we are influenced by or are impervious to media images.
While they do not focus on movies exclusively, they do thoroughly explain subtle racial patterns within mainstream media.
Living in a segregated society, white Americans learn about African Americans not through personal relationships but through the images the media show them. "The Black Image in the White Mind" offers the most comprehensive look at the intricate racial patterns in the mass media and how they shape the ambivalent attitudes of Whites towards Blacks. Using the media, and especially television, as barometers of race relations, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki explore but then go beyond the treatment of African Americans on network and local news to incisively uncover the messages sent about race by the entertainment industry -…
For over 40 years I’ve been teaching and writing books for film and television professionals. Ever since childhood, storytelling has been my rescue and my spiritual path. As soon as I could read, I devoured books as though I’d been given water after a long thirst, and felt closer to the characters in books than I did to my family. In my twenties, I discovered in an acting class that playing characters took me even closer to my lifelong urgency to understand myself and the world around me. I love to share with the world everything I’ve learned about the centrality of storytelling to our humanity.
As an American film revolutionary, before there was Cassavetes, before there was Tarrantino, before there was Scorsese or Coppola or Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan or Jane Campion or Todd Field—there was Elia Kazan. He ushered in a new post-World War II era of naturalism in acting. He gave us James Dean and Marlon Brando.
This book is culled from the actual diaries he kept during rehearsal and production for his theater and film projects. Windows into his hopes, his strategies, his self-doubts. As a creative person myself, I felt given permission to take ownership of my own ambitions, ideas, and fears.
Elia Kazan was the twentieth century's most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan's list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan's method: how he uncovered the “spine,” or core, of each script; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; and how he determined the specifics of his…
I’m an artist, designer, writer. I usually work in collage. I enjoy how the constraints of collage generate more inventive thinking, forcing me to come up with unexpected solutions. I also like how the found material retains traces of its original context. I’ve always been interested in the interplay between words and images – for 15 years I did the weekly Lost Consonants series in the Weekend Guardian – and that gradually led me to writing fiction. All my books have visual or structural elements designed to bring an additional narrative dimension to the story. Over the years, I’ve become fascinated by what makes great stories great. Hence this list.
Another book focusing on the medium of film, but again the lessons to be learned about good storytelling are universal. Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick directed such classic Ealing comedies as The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, also the Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. After retiring from filmmaking in 1969, he spent nearly 25 years as a professor at CalArts in Los Angeles where he helped students to write better stories and communicate them effectively through the craft of filmmaking.
This book is compiled from Mackendrick's legacy of masterly handouts and lectures. One section I found incredibly insightful is his comparison of two versions of a key scene from the script of Sweet Smell of Success (initially written by Ernest Lehman and subsequently rewritten by Clifford Odets), seeing how increased tension between the characters is achieved.
An invaluable analysis of the director's art and craft, from one of the most revered of all film school directors. Alexander 'Sandy' Mackendrick directed classic Ealing comedies plus a Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. But after retiring from film-making in 1969, he then spent nearly 25 years teaching his craft at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
Mackendrick produced hundreds of pages of masterly handouts and sketches, designed to guide his students to a finer understanding of how to write a story, and then use those devices peculiar to cinema in order to tell that story…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I have been writing books about film, theatre, and popular music since 1991 but my love of old movies goes back much further. Before VCRs, DVDs, and streaming, one could only catch these old films on television (often cut to allow for commercial time) or revival houses. Today even the more obscure movies from 1939 are attainable. Writing 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year gave me the opportunity to revisit dozens of old favorites and to see the many also-rans of that remarkable year.
Because this book concentrates on only six 1939 movies – Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn– Adams is able to go into much more detail about the making of each film and the critical reaction each received. I'd be hard-pressed to pick only six movies from that eventful year and movie fans will disagree with Vieira's choices somewhere down the line. But once you get past that, this book is filled with important information and plenty of trivial details that it is a great read.
Film critics and historians are virtually unanimous in considering 1939 the greatest year in the history of motion pictures. This one year produced many of the greatest films of all time, including “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and marketed the height of the careers of such legendary stars as Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Judy Garland. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of this amazing year in Hollywood history, “1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year” profiles of six of the greatest films of the year:…
I am currently the features editor at Input, a website about tech and culture. Earlier in my career, I worked at the now-defunct music magazine Blender, for which I wrote an oral history of Sub Pop, the Seattle label that put out early records by the likes of Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney. That article was the basis of my book for Everybody Loves Our Town. I’m also a widely published freelancer, with pieces in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Wired, WSJ. Magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other outlets.
Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s plot-light, pot-heavy 1993 film about Texas teens hanging out on the last day of school in 1976, is perhaps my favorite movie ever, so I was already inclined to love this oral history about the film’s creation and legacy. Maerz expertly weaves the voices of almost everyone involved in the project — from breakout star Matthew McConaughey to members of the crew — to create a highly entertaining, super-compelling look at a stoner cinema classic.
"Melissa Maerz's brilliant oral history is the definitive account of a cult-classic movie that took a slow ride into the Seventies and defined the Nineties." -Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
The definitive oral history of the cult classic Dazed and Confused, featuring behind-the-scenes stories from the cast, crew, and Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater.
Dazed and Confused not only heralded the arrival of filmmaker Richard Linklater, it introduced a cast of unknowns who would become the next generation of movie stars. Embraced as a cultural touchstone, the 1993 film would also make Matthew McConaughey's famous phrase-alright, alright, alright-ubiquitous. But it started with…
I’m an actor as well as a writer. I’ve spent more hours than can be counted dissecting stories and characters in order to better understand and transmit them to an audience. While standing on a stage, an actor is never unaware that they are performing for others. We may lose ourselves in a moment, in a character, in emotion, but the applause and the gasps, and the laughter always bring us back. As a writer, I spend a lot of time tapping into that feeling of ignoring-while-being-totally-aware of the fourth wall. I love books that wink at readers the way actors can at audiences.
Though not a book, the film starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson borrowed heavily from "Niebla" by Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish novel about a character who becomes aware he is being narrated by a writer and goes to visit the writer. This film lives rent-free in my heart because the style of self-awareness that Ferrell’s character experiences in this film is close to the way I conceived of the meta-awareness of the characters Forsyth and Kintyre in The Untold Tale. I love the idea of someone learning they are being puppeteered and breaking free of the expected, the prescribed, and the narrative laid out for them. Maybe that’s why I like the film The Truman Show so much, too.
In this strange and delightful tale, an IRS agent namedHarold Crick suddenly finds himself the subject of a narrationonly he can hear—narration that soon affects everythingfrom his work to his love life to his death. Starring WillFerrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah,and Emma Thompson, Stranger Than Fiction is a heartfelt film,perhaps a comedy, perhaps a tragedy, about love and literatureand death and taxes.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
Following mysterious trails and uncovering esoteric stories: it’s what I love to do, and it’s also what I love to read about. Before I released Extreme Music, I wrote extensively about unusual music subcultures and audiological anomalies, for example artists who put out hourlong blocks of unchanging white noise. I’ve learned that the most interesting ideas – and tales – exist in these outer fringes.
The filmic counterpart to Amanda Petrusich’s exposé on collectors of 78 RPM records, Do Not Sell at Any Price, this book uncovers the eccentric characters who have devoted their free time to collecting theatrical prints of movies, often risking harm (and jail time) in the process. One highlight is a profile of Mike Vraney, the man who founded Something Weird Video, a film distributor famous for re-releasing arcane Z-movies and shock films. The self-professed owner of the “largest sexploitation archive on Earth,” his stories, and those of a range of other specialized collectors, make this book a worthy compendium of a unique subculture.
A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.
The book includes the stories of film historian/critic Leonard Maltin, TCM host Robert Osborne discussing Rock Hudson's secret 1970s film vault, RoboCop producer Jon Davison dropping acid and screening King Kong with Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East, and Academy Award-winning film…
