The script to the 1966 film by Alain Resnais profiling the effect of the Spanish Civil War on the lives of a group of anti-Franco exiles living in France, and still actively working for the overthrow of the dictatorship. Called an incomparable thriller by some critics, it is also a beautiful love story and a moving document of our time. This volume presents the complete scenario by Jorge Semprun and 114 frame-enlargements from the film itself, carefully keyed to the text.

Montage enters into a dialogue with the cinema, probing and playing with its language of motion and stillness, continuity and discontinuity, constraint and openness, time and duration. Comprised of a series of elegantly-written and intellectually vibrant essays, Sam Rohdie’s book carefully expresses his ideas and arguments in a manner free from the complexities of contemporary theory and cultural criticism. As much a book written with the cinema as about it, Montage explores associative and comparative possibilities in the films of directors such as Takeshi Kitano, Jean Renoir, D.W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Lev Kulsehov, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. It offers new and fascinating perspectives on mise en scène, framing, shots, and narrative variation. In combining the sensitive analysis of film forms and structures with an awareness of their historical and artistic relation to other art forms, it also elucidates an appreciation of montage aesthetics that is attentive to the influences of photography, painting and other arts. Montage is a book that will enrich our ways of seeing, understanding, and enjoying the cinema.

Alain Resnais, director of 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) and 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad' (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a concise account of critical discussions of his work in France and beyond. Yet it also offers a highly personal and detailed engagement with individual images and scenes in Resnais' films. A passionate and partial defence of Resnais' work, old and new, this volume stands apart in its attention to the more tangible and moving pleasures of his films, their pathos, rigour and visual beauty.

Studies the remarkable work of Resnais, whose films include La Guerre est Fini, Stavisky, and Last Year at Marienban.

A story of survival, and a meditation on desire and loss, language and violence In Abbas El-Zein's new memoir, conflicts abound -- either tragic or amusing, sometimes both -- between teachers and students, left- and right-wing factions, civilians and militiamen and, not least, French and Arabic, two languages vying for primacy in the post-colonial worlds of Beirut and the Levant, with English coming fast from behind. By the time he graduated from high school, El-Zein had nearly drowned in the Mediterranean, survived the breakout of civil war and lived through the violent death of two close family members. He witnessed Syrian and Israeli soldiers invade his country and, from his bedroom balcony, saw the mushroom cloud of the explosion that killed hundreds of American and French marines. But while war and tragedy struck every now and then, everyday life continued unabated, rich with humour, serendipity and love of many kinds. Bullet Paper Rock is a story of survival, and a meditation on desire and loss, language and violence. It is at once a requiem for a Levantine past gone sour -- from the innocent 1970s, through September 11 and its aftermath, to the cataclysms of the Arab Spring -- and a tribute to women of his family -- 'weavers whose fabric of choice is hope, they were hard at work, at night as in daytime, carving out viable lives, ones in which they loved and were loved aplenty'.