
Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
NEW TO STORE:
Mad Men, Sopranos AND
Biography Collections
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Edited by Mark Crispin Miller, this collection of essays on American cinema amounts to the last word on genres and modes of filmmaking that defined cinema during the middle decades of its existence.
The lineup of pieces includes:
*Pat Aufderhyde on the "re-fighting" of the Vietnam war in ways that oversimplified the conflict, and offered American viewers an unearned sense of redemption and purpose;
*Stuart Klawans on the corporate forces behind the push to colorize black-and-white cinema treasures in the late 1980s;
*Mark Crispin Miller on the influx of TV-style storytelling and visual grammar into theatrical films in the 1980s, in ways that degraded the expressive possibilities of the art form;
*Douglas Gombry on the financial and cultural reasons why movie palaces gave way to multiplexes;
* Peter Biskind (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) on the reshaping of storytelling by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and their peers and pupils, in a manner that (Biskind argues) "infantilizes" individual viewers, and film culture as a whole.
Part of The Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, a series of informed yet accessible volumes of cultural criticism released in the late '80s/early '90s, Seeing Through Movies presents a snapshot of the state of the art at that moment. It is filled with astute, provocative, often cutting observations that had the sting of the new at the time, and were absorbed by subsequent generations of critics and scholars.
All copies are new, but guaranteed in good condition. Due to the book's out-of-print status and frequent use as a scholarly text, there may be some underlining or highlighting, and some volumes may have library markings/cards/stamping.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
“Please. Have mercy. I’ve been wearing the same underwear since Tuesday.”
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and the forthcoming The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently working on a memoir about his marriages and a feature-length documentary about his father, jazz musician and composer Dave Zoller.
His hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. He has the attention span of a gnat.