Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema
The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.
- book
- reel
- history
- reference
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 66, and the silent era runs from ohwc 24.
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
Page numbering is flagged unverified in the library, but it checks out on inspection:
ohwc 66 lands exactly on the opening of "The Hollywood Studio System", and a second
spot-check at ohwc 400 sits correctly inside the Weimar material. Worth marking as verified
in Reel; until then, confirm before citing.
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)