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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Final testament of an unsung genius.,
This review is from: Melville on Melville (Cinema One) (Hardcover)
This is one of those few books I take out every couple of years and which make me feel so happy. The idea is the same as Truffaut's book on Hitchcock, a series of interviews between a master-filmmaker near the end of his career (Melville would be dead within three years) and an impressionable admirer. Melville is one of the great, still stupidly underrated mavericks of cinema, a self-confessed intransigent, most famous for his series of gangster thrillers (e.g. Le Samourai), which seeped the genre of all superfluity, and turned them into haunting, oneiric meditations on death. This is the conventional view - I think Melville is much larger, more full of life than that, and this wonderful book proves it. 'Melville on Melvile' is as full of technical information and memories of productions as you would expect, but it is also full of wit, anecdote, invective, love. Most directors are diffident and barely articulate - Melville is, as he says himself, a monster, opinionated, self-obsessed, suffering no fools whatsoever - his generosity, wisdom, humour and intelligence bely his reputation as an austere existentialist; this book is full of insights into his own films and those of others that enrich both. He compares himself to Nabokov, and this is the best way to look at his work, more playful than it appears; but also this book, as Melville constantly makes fun of his interviewer, deliberately contradicting himself, or provoking him. You have to read this just to find out how Godard really made A Bout De Souffle, the film in which Melville made his famous cameo as the novelist Parvelesco. I love this man, I love his films, and I love this book.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I wish this book was in print so I could buy a copy!,
By
This review is from: Melville on Melville (Cinema one, 16) (Hardcover)
I am a huge Melville fan. He really is one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century. Right up there with Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, etc. I've haven't read this book because I can't find any place that sells it. Somebody please put this book back in print. It can't be that expensive to publish a book. It's just paper and ink. Somebody please make this book available. There is definitely an audience for it. Especially, since Criterion is starting to release all his films on dvd.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Tantalizing Glimpse,
By Mr. Gone (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Melville on Melville (Cinema one, 16) (Hardcover)
The most frustrating part of this series of interviews is its length. No thicker than a double-disc set of Le Cercle Rouge, the author should have kept Melville, Kathy Bates in Misery-style so that we could have a tome to rival the Encyclopedia Britannica.It's sorted by movie, which is helpful, though also frustrating, because it reveals how little of Melville's ouvre is available in the States. However, based on the chapters which focus on films I have seen, it's one of the best interviews with an artist available. $300 is a bit much for any book, my advice is to find and "lose" a library copy and pay the replacement fee.
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