I'm current writing a new article and was returning to some of the books that had the most impact on me. Not a top ten list - just some books I often find myself citing and thought I would share.
The one I always keep returning to is Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).
I discovered this book when researching my MA thesis on Abbas Kiarostami. Then I was assigned to read it for a film theory course I took when I was working toward my Ph.D.
Mulvey is mostly know for her article on the male gaze in Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure. There are some great chapters in that book. But 24x is the one that I constantly return to.
I love the chapter on Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin, where she compares their writings on photography and film, respectively. The last two chapters on the possessive and pensive spectator are also really good and provide some very interesting insights into new technologies and cinema.
I think one of the key points of her book is that cinema has a ghostly secret - the still frame. Digital media has changed our relationship to cinema because we now have the technologies to halt the flow of images which "opens a space for consciousness" (186).
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