Picturehouse Blog
Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
19 Apr 21
We've teamed up with Thames & Hudson, to give away a copy of their brand new book, The Mysteries of Cinema, to one lucky winner.
The first consumers of moving pictures were delighted by a new art that communicated without words – yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm. Since the 19th century, films have proven their powerful effects on our psyche. In The Mysteries of Cinema, Peter Conrad explores how the movie camera has forever changed our view of reality as he takes readers on a thematic roller-coaster ride through movie history.
Directors and critics speculate about the nature of cinematic vision, and there are contributions to the debate from writers like Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, artists including Salvador Dalí, George Grosz and Fernand Léger, and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. The book begins from the audacious innovations of silent film, and examines the influence of French surrealism and German expressionism; it accounts for the appeal of Hollywood genres like the Western, the horror film and the musical, and ends by considering the fate of the moving image in our visually glutted society.
Combining contagious enthusiasm with an eye for the subjective quirks of filmmakers and the allure of favourite performers, Conrad delivers an astonishing addition to the literature on the seventh art.
For a chance to get your hands on a copy of The Mysteries of Cinema, tell us your your favourite cinema memory, and why.
Simply email [email protected] with MYSTERIES OF CINEMA in the subject line and your answer.
The competition closes on 3 May 2021.
Open to UK residents only. Entrants must be at least 18 years old. The winners will be picked at random and contacted via their method of entry. Our standard competition terms and conditions apply.
