In the year 2000, Sight & Sound magazine asked 51 leading critics and writers which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written. The choices threw more light on the writers who made the selections rather than on the content or quality of the books they mentioned. It only intrigued me enough to come up with my own list, though not restricted to a list of five. These may not be the 'greatest' books on cinema (if any such judgement was possible) but they are the ones closest to my heart.
30 Best books on Cinema (not in order of excellence)
1. Signs & Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen (Secker & Warburg, 1969)
2. Hitchcock by Francoise Truffaut (Paladin, 1967)
3. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of the Film by Stanley
4. What is Cinema? Volumes I & II by Andre Bazin (University of California Press, 1967, 1971)
5. Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson (Editions Gallimard, 1975)
6. Currents in Japanese Cinema by Tadao Sato (Kodansha International, 1982)
7. Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel (Random House, 1974)
8. Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky (Bodley Head, 1986)
9. The Cinema Book by Pam Cook (BFI, 1985)
10. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema by Robert Phillip Kolker (OUP, 1983)
11. Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein (Harcourt Brace, 1949)
12. Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein (Faber & Faber, 1943)
13. A History of the Cinema: From its Origins to 1970 by Eric Rhode (Allen Lane, 1976)
14. Bergman on Bergman ed. Stig Bjorkman, et al (Touchstone, 1973)
15. Godard on Godard ed. by Tom Milne (De Capo Press, 1986)
16. To the Distant Observer: Form & Meaning in Japanese Cinema by Noel Burch (University of California Press, 1979)
17. Ozu by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1974)
18. The Japanese Film: Art & Industry by Donald Richie & Joseph L Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1982)
19. Movies & Methods, Volume I and II ed. Bill Nichols (University of California Press, 1976 ; reprinted by Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993)
20. Film Theory & Criticism ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (OUP, 1985)
21. Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism ed. Stuart Kaminsky (OUP, 1975)
22. Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism ed. Peter Bondanella (OUP, 1978)
23. Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew (OUP, 1984)
24. My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (Penguin, 1964)
25. Jump-Cut: Hollywood
26. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism & Beyond ed. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (Routledge, 1992)
27. Brazilian Cinema ed. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam (Columbia University Press, 1995)
28. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America by John King (Verso, 2000)
29. The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1998)
30. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave by David Desser (Indiana University Press, 1988)
