Internet Archive Film E-Books: Pudovkin, Kracauer, Balázs, Rotha

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you news of some more cinema-related items from the Internet Archive. The following are links to out of copyright or otherwise legally scannable books that have been collected and archived by the IA. They may be accessed in various formats (PDF, DjVu, Full Text) and can take a while to download, but it's great that they're available online. There are quite a few film books archived (of variable quality) -- check out the IA search tool HERE -- but Film Studies For Free especially likes these classic tomes:

• Film Technique And Film Acting (1958) - V. I. Pudovkin (also on Google Books)


• Theory of the Film (1952) - Béla Balázs


• From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History Of The German Film (1947) - Siegfried Kracauer


• Jean Cocteau: Diary of a Film (1950 - on La Belle et la Bête) - Ronald Duncan (limited preview on Google Books)


• The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (1949) - Paul Rotha (on Google Books)


• Rotha On The Film A Selection Of Writings About The Cinema (1958) - Paul Rotha


• Kino A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film (1960) - Jay Leyda (snippet view on Google Books)


• The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (1939) - Lewis Jacobs


• Le Fantastique au cinéma (1958) - Michel Laclos (in French)

By the way, if you want to know more about these or any other books then Film Studies For Free recommends you look no further than the wonderful Open Library site. The Open Library promises 'one web page [full of information] for every book ever published':

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now [and there are 1,064,822 so far with full-text]), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. It needs volunteers (like all wiki-type projects) so, to find out more about participating, please click HERE, or just start browsing around and add some book information.

Finally, thanks for all the appreciative email comments about Film Studies For Free's listing of Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing Of Note by Individual Named Authors (also see the explanation of the listing HERE). To reiterate, suggestions for further items for inclusion are also warmly welcomed: please email Film Studies For Free HERE. Thanks.