Books about Cinematic from Amazon.com

What the industry's most succcessful writers and directors have in common is that they have mastered the cinematic conventions specific to the medium..
Price: $15.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Vincent Versace is a Renaissance man who has produced the best how-to book of the year! With its subtitle of “A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop” Versace introduces a system for creating images that owes as much to the traditional darkroom as the digital one. Don’t just read the book; study it. The first chapter isn’t called “The Tao of Dynamic Workflow” for nothing and, like the rest of the book, contains Versace’s charm, wit, and wisdom. It’s copiously illustrated with detailed step-by-step examples of techniques that when applied to your own work will turn you from zero to hero. The fact that he’s a heck of a photographer means the book is stunningly illustrated, but it’s also been well designed. It has become a cliché to say that a book could change your life, but this one could." -- Joe Farace, December, 2007 , Shutterbug,  Top Digital Books Of 2007; More & Better Digital Imaging Books

Creating memorable photographs is a process that starts before you edit an image in Photoshop, before you capture the image, even before you pick up the camera. You must first approach the subject with the proper sense of perception, with the ability to visualize the finished print before you commit a scene to pixels, but still be flexible and spontaneous. Master Fine Art photographer Vincent Versace has spent his career learning and teaching the art of perception and how to translate it into stunning images. In Welcome to Oz,  he delves into what it means to approach digital photography cinematically, to use your perception, your camera, and Photoshop to capture the movement of life in a still image.

•  Adapt your workflow to the image so you always know how best to use your tools
•  Turn a seemingly impossible photographic scenario into a successful image
•  Practice “image harvesting” to combine the best parts of  many captures to create an optimum final result
•  Create black and white prints that have the look, feel and “richness” of traditional silver prints without ever leaving the RGB color space

.
Price: $25.67 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The book uses extensive illustrations to explain how to create extended sequence shots, elaborate moving camera choreography, and tracking shots with multiple story points..
Price: $15.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism.

Still photography—cinema's ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic "shots"; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the "decisive moment" of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media.

Contributors:
Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Bellour, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Victor Burgin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Catherine David, Thierry de Duve, Gilles Deleuze, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philippe Dubois, Régis Durand, Sergei Eisenstein, Mike Figgis, Hollis Frampton, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nan Goldin, Chris Marker, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, László Moholy-Nagy, Beaumont Newhall, Uriel Orlow, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Constance Penley, Richard Prince, Steve Reich, Carlo Rim, Raul Ruiz, Susan Sontag, Blake Stimson, Michael Tarantino, Agnès Varda, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Peter Wollen.

Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Price: $16.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, the cinema emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time--and this at a moment when disciplines from physics to philosophy, and historical trends from industrialization to the expansion of capitalism, were transforming the very idea of time. In a work that itself captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.

At this book's heart is the cinema's essential paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images. Doane explores the role of this paradox, and of notions of the temporal indeterminacy and instability of an image, in shaping not just cinematic time but also modern ideas about continuity and discontinuity, archivability, contingency and determinism, and temporal irreversibility. A compelling meditation on the status of cinematic knowledge, her book is also an inquiry into the very heart and soul of modernity..
Price: $26.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With her astounding beauty and enigmatic persona, Greta Garbo is the ultimate Hollywood icon. Though many books have tried to unlock the mystique of the "Swedish Sphinx" by focusing primarily on her personal life, Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy is the first to pay serious attention to what made her an icon-her 24 Hollywood films.

Celebrating the centenary of her birth, the book draws extensively on interviews, letters, and newly accessible M-G-M production files to chronicle Garbo's career from her American debut in 1926 to her self-imposed retirement in 1941 at the height of her popularity. A wealth of film stills, production photographs, and portraits-many previously unpublished, all beautifully reproduced from pristine prints-combine with Mark Vieira's engrossing text to bring vividly to life the actress who inspired the critic Kenneth Tynan to declare: "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." AUTHOR BIO: Mark A. Vieira is a photographer, film historian, and the author of Abrams' acclaimed Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, and Hollywood Horror: From Gothic to Cosmic. He lives in Los Angeles..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A humorous collection of autobiographical literary low-browsing, low-budget filmmaking philosophy, and tips by the legendary twin, underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar; a reflection on their flickering universe and the famous and infamous who drop into it from time-to-time. Original illustrations by Mike and George Kuchar and a selection of never-before-seen photos. Includes filmography, bibliography and index..
Price: $27.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Film is the supreme medium for mythmaking The gods and heroes of mythology are both larger than life and deeply human; they teach us about the world, and they tell us a good story. Similarly, our experience of film is both distant and intimate Cinematic techniques—panning, tracking, zooming, and the other tools in the filmmaker's toolbox—create a world that is unlike reality and yet realistic at the same time. We are passive spectators, but we also have a personal relationship with the images we are seeing. In Cinematic Mythmaking, Irving Singer explores the hidden and overt use of myth in various films and, in general, the philosophical elements of a film's meaning. Mythological themes, Singer writes, perform a crucial role in cinematic art and even philosophy itself.

Singer incisively disentangles the strands of different myths in the films he discusses. He finds in Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve that Barbara Stanwyck's character is not just the biblical Eve but a liberated woman of our times; Eliza Doolittle in the filmed versions of Shaw's Pygmalion is not just a statue brought to life but instead a heroic woman who must survive her own dark night of the soul. The protagonist of William Wyler's The Heiress and Anieszka Holland's Washington Square is both suffering Dido and an awakened Amazon. Singer reads Cocteau's films—including La Belle et la Bête, Orphée, and The Testament of Orpheus—as uniquely mythological cinematic poetry. He compares Kubrickean and Homeric epics and analyzes in depth the self-referential mythmaking of Federico Fellini in many of his movies, including 8½. The aesthetic and probing inventiveness in film, Singer shows us, restores and revives for audiences in the twenty-first century myths of creation, of the questing hero, and of ideals—both secular and religious—that have had enormous significance throughout the human search for love and meaning in life..
Price: $16.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]