The Director's Vision: A Concise Guide to the Art of 250 Great Filmmakers

Covering the true originals of classic Hollywood, the masters of world cinema, the more distinctive contemporary filmmakers, and a number of downright eccentrics, The Director’s Vision is a guide to 250 of the all-time great visual stylists. These filmmakers are each given a single film still that exemplifies their work; the accompanying text explores how they exploit the cinematic arts—composition, color, camera angle and movement, lighting, sound, sets, and action—to convey their thematic obsessions and artistic visions. This simple premise builds into one of the most fascinating, visually arresting, and insightful of all film books. Never have the images of cinema and the words written about it been so expertly tied together. The result is an entertaining and genuinely enlightening film reference.

Geoff Andrew is film editor of London’s Time Out magazine, programmer of London’s National Film Theatre, and one of Britain’s leading film critics. His books include Stranger than Paradise: Maverick Filmmakers in Recent American Cinema, Hollywood Gangsters, The Films of Nicholas Ray, and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy.