Author: Howard Suber
Year of Release: 2006
America’s most distinguished film professor provides the definitive A to Z course on the intricacies of film. Each entry in this remarkable book, which represents a lifetime of teaching film, has already inspired and educated several generations of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers and writers. This book examines the patterns and principles that make films popular and memorable, and will be useful both for those who want to create films and for those who just want to understand them better.
Suber’s book, “The Power of Film”, uses this same Socratic Method but the technique is necessarily different. Instead of asking questions, a writer can only pose riddles, and to this end Suber employees wit and irony to provoke careful and thoughtful reading of his concise dictionary like definitions.
The films Suber examines are American films. Without being jingoistic, he says that over the decades American films have been the most popular not only in the U.S. but all over the world. The American films he focuses on are those that have maintained their appeal ten years after they were released those, in other words, which have stood the test of time and remain perennial favorites.
About the Author: Howard Suber was the founding chair of the Film and Television Producers Program at UCLA, where he has been a faculty member for more than 47 years. He has taught thousands of young filmmakers in more than 65 different courses covering most areas of film and television as both arts and industries. In recent decades, 2/3rds of his students have been screenwriters. He has also taught a several-week workshop for the winners of the Independent Feature Project, West’s screenwriting competition.