Gerald Mast – författare

This is the essential core of Mast and Kawin’s classic in a streamlined volume: the most accurate, carefully updated account of cinema today in a clear and lively book.

 

Building on Mast’s astute and lively history of cinema, Kawin has refined and updated the fascinating story of cinema’s evolution from its earliest beginnings to the digital age. Probing deeper than most movie books, he takes us into the studio vaults, corrects the record, discloses what goes on inside the industry, clarifies the mysteries of movie technology, and offers a precise, thoroughly researched account. Kawin's analysis is witty and engaging, rich in instructive insights and entertaining illustrations of the art, history, technology, business, and fun of film. Now the essentials of Mast and Kawin’s classic book are available in a compact version, judiciously streamlined at an even trimmer price.

The eleventh edition of A Short History of the Movies continues its long-standing tradition of scrupulously accurate details, up-to-date information, and jargon-free writing style that has made it the most widely adopted film history textbook.

 

This edition offers students a panoramic overview of the worldwide development of film. From the early experiments with motion photography, through the American studio years of the 1930’s and 1940’s, from Neorealism and the New Wave, up to the present age of digital cinema, A Short History of Film provides a comprehensive presentation of the history of cinema. This eleventh edition has been revised and updated to include current scholarship, recent industry developments, and new films and filmmakers.

Although books on the comedies of the silent era abound, few have attempted to survey film comedy as a whole—its history and evolution, how the philosophical visions of its greatest artists and directors have shaped its traditions, and how these visions have informed both the meaning and manner of their work.Blending information with interpretation, description with analysis, Mast traces the development of screen comedy from the first crude efforts of Edison and Lumière to the subtlety and psychological complexity of Annie Hall. As he guides the reader through detailed discussions of specific films, Mast reveals the structures, the values, and the cinematic techniques which have appeared and reappeared in comic cinema.The second edition of The Comic Mind treats the comic developments of the 1970s in terms of the traditions of film comedy set forth in the first edition, including a discussion of the evolution of Jacques Tati and the emergence of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as the two greatest American comic stylists of the seventies."The most comprehensive study of film comedy yet written in English. . . .The book's extensive index with references to companies from which 16mm prints of many of the cited films may be rented will be of great value to the film teacher and audiovisual librarian."—Choice