Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen Book

This is a great overview of what was happening in the 1960s. Nowell-Smith thoroughly explains how and why certain practices emerged, connecting them to the political situation in the world and dividing the 1960s themselves into three comprehensive subperiods. His conception of the political in cinema is lacking though, as he makes the claim about the "apolitical" character of the films of the 1950s, for instance - they for sure cannot be apolitical in themselves and such feature is rather the result of one's optics. Still, that is really the only truly lacking part of Nowell-Smith's analysis. His systematization also misses a lot of what was happening, for instance, in Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, or at least ponders that legacy briefly, but examines the situation in Japan, for instance, so the overview is not narrow-sighted, it just implies a lot. He also explains very well the 1940s and 1950s studio system in the United States, the events around Cinémathèque Française, the development of the auteurist theory, etc.