Twenty-One Landmark European Films 1939-1999
Bert CardulloThe book is aimed at students, teachers, and cinephiles with an interest in European cinema in particular and cinema studies in general, as well as at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of film analysis and criticism.
"Cardullo provides readers with highly valuable accounts of the context in which each film was made (and released). Although this may sound trivial, lack of context - social, historical, and otherwise - is one of the great weaknesses of most film criticism. On the other hand, Cardullo provides a comprehensive and detailed survey of what has already been said about each film, while simultaneously demonstrating how genuinely new his own analysis is. Frankly, positing a canon of significant films, as Cardullo does here, and then re-evaluating them - or, rather, validating their importance - is a critical act of serious merit. Nowadays, academic film criticism takes an excessively microscopic view of the cinema. In short, the significance of Twenty-One Landmark European Films is that it creates a canon and makes a convincing argument for the place of these particular films within it.
"This work
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