Note: I’ve only just realized all my suggestions are from actual film directors. No theorists or critics.
Subject of filmmaking, the best textbooks are Jerry Lewis’s (yes, glavin) The Total Filmmaker which being transcribed from lectures he gave at USC around the time that George Lucas was a student it presents a soup to nuts overview of the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, principal photography including camera coverage, directing actors, editing and post production. Including some of the most salient observations on the avant-garde artistry of Stanley Kubrick/2001:A Space Odyssey I have read anywhere. It is a highly practical treatise, including tips such as how to develop mnemonics to remember shots, or how to balance the self-criticism of being a performer-director, or why you should leave an extra frame between a cut from an A to B camera.
Surprising to an outsider, but not surprising to those who know how much Lewis longed to be taken ‘seriously’ not much of the book is about comedy and there is a very simple reason for this—because the technical information is much the same irrespective of tone or genre.
While Lewis avoids explicating a ‘theory of comedy’ he does have some salient observations such as “the snowball is always thrown at the top hat, not the battered fedora”. It also introduced me to what has become a mantra for me
Who is doing what to whom?
Every time I write a scene, make an edit, direct someone I ask myself this question.
I would rate it above Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Film Technique especially for beginners. Pudovkin’s book is still great, as Stanley Kubrick opined in a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis
“The most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across was Pudovkin’s Film Technique, which simply explained that editing was the aspect of film art form which was completely unique, and which separated it from all other art forms.”
I’m inclined to agree. In the book Pudovkin gives the example of a rally or parade down the street and describes all the different types of camera coverage that could be used to frame the events that take place within it. Pudovkin was also clearly a great observer of the innovations of storytelling that were happening in Hollywood at the time and internalized the way to produce a good climax.
Kubrick compares Pudovkin’s book to the essays and in particular the book The Film Sense of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein (the Battleship Potemkin) and I’m inclined to agree that the latter’s work is much more opaque and preoccupied with a prescriptive use of juxtaposition to create a visual equivalent of Marxist Dialectic whereas Pudovkin’s book I felt was much more Descriptivist and observational of technique.
That being said I found the most illuminating explanation of Eisenstein’s theories wasn’t the Film Sense at all but an essay found in Grierson on Documentary by John Grierson. Grierson was a propagandist for the British Empire, including Canada, and was instrumental in setting up the documentary industries. He manages to describe the importance rhythm in Eisenstein’s theories with much more lucidity than any translator of Eisenstein ever has.
The go-to text book in most Film Schools is of course Michael Rabinger’s Film Techniques and Aesthetics. When I studied documentary film my supervisor pointed us to Rabinger’s other book “Directing the Documentary”. While my memory is foggy I remember Directing the Documentary being a fine book on the topic, discussing many of the practical (and interpersonal) difficulties a documentary filmmaker may face.
I could name many other useful or practical books (especially Judith Weston’s Directing Actors), but I’ve tried to restrict this comment to all-encompassing textbooks on the techniques and aesthetics and practicalities useful for film directors.
Note: I’ve only just realized all my suggestions are from actual film directors. No theorists or critics.
Subject of filmmaking, the best textbooks are Jerry Lewis’s (yes, glavin) The Total Filmmaker which being transcribed from lectures he gave at USC around the time that George Lucas was a student it presents a soup to nuts overview of the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, principal photography including camera coverage, directing actors, editing and post production. Including some of the most salient observations on the avant-garde artistry of Stanley Kubrick/2001:A Space Odyssey I have read anywhere. It is a highly practical treatise, including tips such as how to develop mnemonics to remember shots, or how to balance the self-criticism of being a performer-director, or why you should leave an extra frame between a cut from an A to B camera.
Surprising to an outsider, but not surprising to those who know how much Lewis longed to be taken ‘seriously’ not much of the book is about comedy and there is a very simple reason for this—because the technical information is much the same irrespective of tone or genre.
While Lewis avoids explicating a ‘theory of comedy’ he does have some salient observations such as “the snowball is always thrown at the top hat, not the battered fedora”. It also introduced me to what has become a mantra for me
Every time I write a scene, make an edit, direct someone I ask myself this question.
I would rate it above Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Film Technique especially for beginners. Pudovkin’s book is still great, as Stanley Kubrick opined in a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis
I’m inclined to agree. In the book Pudovkin gives the example of a rally or parade down the street and describes all the different types of camera coverage that could be used to frame the events that take place within it. Pudovkin was also clearly a great observer of the innovations of storytelling that were happening in Hollywood at the time and internalized the way to produce a good climax.
Kubrick compares Pudovkin’s book to the essays and in particular the book The Film Sense of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein (the Battleship Potemkin) and I’m inclined to agree that the latter’s work is much more opaque and preoccupied with a prescriptive use of juxtaposition to create a visual equivalent of Marxist Dialectic whereas Pudovkin’s book I felt was much more Descriptivist and observational of technique.
That being said I found the most illuminating explanation of Eisenstein’s theories wasn’t the Film Sense at all but an essay found in Grierson on Documentary by John Grierson. Grierson was a propagandist for the British Empire, including Canada, and was instrumental in setting up the documentary industries. He manages to describe the importance rhythm in Eisenstein’s theories with much more lucidity than any translator of Eisenstein ever has.
The go-to text book in most Film Schools is of course Michael Rabinger’s Film Techniques and Aesthetics. When I studied documentary film my supervisor pointed us to Rabinger’s other book “Directing the Documentary”. While my memory is foggy I remember Directing the Documentary being a fine book on the topic, discussing many of the practical (and interpersonal) difficulties a documentary filmmaker may face.
I could name many other useful or practical books (especially Judith Weston’s Directing Actors), but I’ve tried to restrict this comment to all-encompassing textbooks on the techniques and aesthetics and practicalities useful for film directors.