European Cinema

The book really only exists as a lead into its subject. The vast differences in the national trends all over Europe since films first arose causes this. Nonetheless, you might get a good top level appreciation of, say, Soviet film making, from 1920 to the end of the Soviet Union. Or of the films of Weimar Germany. Space considerations restrict those 2 examples to one chapter each. Fans obviously will want more detailed texts. But the sweep of the book is impressive. The one big omission is a study of films made in Nazi Germany. There are chapters on German film making before (as mentioned above) and after those years. Probably because Nazi films are a uniquely pathological case, even more so than Soviet films, and might have made an awkward fit with the rest of the book.