Halliwell's Film Guide [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Cinema celebrates its hundredth birthday in 1995, and this tenth edition joins in the festivities by adding another LOOO entries so that it now contains around 20,000 of the most enduring movies ever made. It's impossible to date precisely the birth of cinema, although we can say that it was a century ago. The great French film-maker Marcel Pagnol used to insist that it coincided with his birth on 28 February 1895, which was when the Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, patented their machine for photographing and projecting motion pictures. They began giving private demonstrations early that year, culminating in the first public showing in Paris on Saturday, 28 December. A month earlier. Max and Emil Skladanowsky had patented their methods and had shown eight films in Berlin. Other public showings swiftly followed, from R. W. Paul in Britain, and C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat in America - and the rest is a notable part of the history of this century. This edition adds some new features to make this guide an even more complete work of reference. Included are lists, in chronological and alphabetical order, of four-star films - those that, for reasons of excellence or influence, can be accounted among the best that the cinema has produced. Also listed are Oscar-winners in the major categories. And you can now discover, from individual entries, which films have soimdtrack albums released on compact disc and which are available on video-cassette, both in Britain and the United States, as well as on laser disc and the newest format, VideoCD. VideoCD is a standard agreed by all the major electronic companies for releasing, among other things, feature films on compact disc, which can be played either on special consoles or through computers fitted with a CD-ROM drive and a FMV (Full Motion Video) card. The films so far available have been released by Philips to play on its CD-i (Compact Disc Interactive) console and, for reasons best known to Philips, deviate from the agreed standard, although they are also compatible with Commodore's Amiga CD32 console. Several other CD-based video-players are plarmed and there is at least one special card available for IBM PC and compatible computers which, when linked to a CD-ROM drive, will allow computer users to watch VideoCD. At the moment, a compact disc can hold about 72 minutes of film, so that, as with many laser discs, two discs are necessary for each film, but it won't be long before single discs are available which can play back an entire film. So far, only a few films have been released on VideoCD, but there are many more on the way. The quality compares favourably with movies on videotape. Visually, the picture is as good, although occasionally