Twenty-One Landmark European Films 1939-1999

Twenty-One Landmark European Films, 1939-1999 is a film-analysis text that includes illustrated essays on many of the best European films made between the coming of World War II and the end of the twentieth century. Written with university students in mind (but also aimed at teachers, film buffs, and educated readers), these essays cover some of the central films treated in cinema courses. They also provide students with practical models to help them improve their own analytical and critical skills. The essays included in Twenty-One Landmark European Films thus make perfect introductions to their respective films as well as important contributions to the field of film studies in general. This book contains, in addition, a valuable critical apparatus: notes, bibliographies, movie credits, filmographies, and topics for writing and discussion.

The book is aimed at students, teachers, and cinephiles with an interest in European cinema in particular and cinema studies in general, as well as at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of film analysis and criticism.

"Cardullo provides readers with highly valuable accounts of the context in which each film was made (and released). Although this may sound trivial, lack of context - social, historical, and otherwise - is one of the great weaknesses of most film criticism. On the other hand, Cardullo provides a comprehensive and detailed survey of what has already been said about each film, while simultaneously demonstrating how genuinely new his own analysis is. Frankly, positing a canon of significant films, as Cardullo does here, and then re-evaluating them - or, rather, validating their importance - is a critical act of serious merit. Nowadays, academic film criticism takes an excessively microscopic view of the cinema. In short, the significance of Twenty-One Landmark European Films is that it creates a canon and makes a convincing argument for the place of these particular films within it.

"This work

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