Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford University Press) — a commissioned history in which each section is written by a specialist.

Good for

Context, at the scale the wiki's context notes need. It is organised by period and then by industry and movement, so it answers the questions Commerce asks — who paid, under what system, selling to whom — with actual history rather than generalities. Douglas Gomery's account of the studio system opens at ohwc 43; the silent era opens the book.

Its real advantage over a single-author history is the "world cinema" of the title: the national and regional chapters are written by people who work on those cinemas, so it is the right source when a note needs something outside Hollywood. It is also the natural home for the movement material the wiki has not built yet — expressionism, Soviet montage, neorealism, the New Waves — each of which currently has a Reel concept but no page here.

Handle with care

The scan's page numbers are 23 higher than the printed book's. The roman-numeral front matter was numbered along with everything else. The book's own index proves it: Sunset Boulevard is indexed at 55, 258 and 603 and sits on scan pages 78, 281 and 626. Citations here use the printed page, so they match a copy on the shelf; tools/reel.py applies the correction automatically. (An earlier version of this note called the numbering verified after checking only that content sat on the scan pages it was expected on. That test cannot catch a constant offset. Corrected 26 September 2026.)

The bigger caution is the form. A multi-author history has no single argument, and the sections vary in how much they assume. It is a reference work — go in with a question, not for a read-through. For a single continuous argument about how film history fits together, Biskind is livelier on one decade and much less reliable.

In the library

Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 142 parts, 4,692 indexed passages. Page numbering is unverified.

Cite passages from this book as ohwc <page> — for example ohwc 214.

Strongest on

Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.

• Commerce — 2.8× the library average (947 passages)
• Colour — 2.4× the library average (195 passages)
• Themes — 2.1× the library average (310 passages)
• Printed language — 2.1× the library average (57 passages)
• Audio — 1.8× the library average (460 passages)
• Setting — 1.6× the library average (874 passages)