The film anthologies index /

By indexing the contents of 716 English-language (and translated-into-English) books containing critical essays about film written between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, Bowles provides a source to access this ever-expanding field of literature. Volumes of film reviews or single-author books on specific filmmakers are not included, and Bowles does not attempt to interpret or judge the caliber of the writing. The main index is an author index, where the individual essays and the book in which they appear are cited. A second index allows the reader to find essays on particular films, people, and subjects (using keywords or phrases) by referring the reader back to the main index by use of the chronological number that was assigned to each author citation. This method of indexing is easy to follow. This book would be a worthwhile companion to Jack Ellis, Charles Derry, and Sharon Kern's The Film Book Bibliography, 1940-1975 (CH, Sep'79) or the author's own Index to Critical Film Reviews in British and American Film Periodicals (CH, Dec'75). Valuable to academic and professional libraries that support film programs or have extensive film holdings. J. A. Badics; Eastern Michigan University

More than 600 English-language anthologies published through 1991 containing more than 10,000 essays on film and filmmakers are indexed in this reference source. Excluded are anthologies of exclusively film reviews (unless they center around a "defined theme"), reference books containing "capsule summaries" of films and filmmakers, and single-author monographs on specific filmmakers. No qualitative criteria have been imposed on the selection of essays for this index. The main body of the book consists of 6,563 author entries (arranged alphabetically) that identify anthologies where particular essays appear and that tie together anthologies containing the same essay. (Essays whose titles have changed or whose contents have been altered are listed separately under the author's entry.) Following this is a useful 156-page index allowing readers to access indexed essays by title of film and names and keywords that appear in the titles of the essays. Unfortunately, there is no general subject index, so that someone looking for information on films that deal with Irish Americans, for example, will be unable to find anything except three essays where the word Irish appears in the title. The index is useful for research libraries, specialized film libraries, and large public libraries with comprehensive film book collections. Most other libraries will find it sufficient to rely on Essay and General Literature Index to access essays on film and filmmakers in anthologies. (Reviewed February 01, 1995)