A Century of Chinese Cinema is the commemorative e-book version of a major exhibition last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, free courtesy of the TIFF organizers themselves.
This is an amazingly nice freebie and very likely the second-best freebie we've been given that I've ever seen. Seriously, this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
Not only does it have a thorough overview of Chinese cinema through the decades from its initial silent beginnings up to the latest action dramas from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as mainland China, with plenty of sidebars on important and influential films, but it's also packed full of video lectures from academics from the University of Toronto and elsewhere, interviews with top Chinese film directors such as Chen Kaige (
IMDB,
Wikipedia) and Johnnie To (
IMDB,
Wikipedia), among others, as well as round-table discussions between them on various aspects of Chinese film.
And it's also bilingual, with all text in both English and Mandarin Chinese, and all videos subtitled with Mandarin Chinese characters for the English-speaking portions (as well as Johnnie To, who's mostly speaking Cantonese in his interview). So in case you wanted to practice your language skills in either direction…
Sadly, TIFF seems to have taken down the special website where they used to host all the materials related to this exhibition, but you can still read a bit about it via the CBC news article on it last year, which gives you a much better idea of what's inside than the blurb below:
TIFF's Chinese film retrospective traces ups and downs of greater China
If you have any interest whatsoever in Chinese film/culture in particular and/or arts history in general, I highly recommend this e-book. It's absolutely wonderful and you'll learn a great deal from it.
(ETA 2: provided you can read it in the first place, that is. This is a Made for iBooks title which will require an iDevice/Mac with the iBooks app; please see the product page for minimum requirement details.)
Currently free @
iTunes (available worldwide, as far as I can tell; I spot-checked random countries like Sweden and the TIFF e-books seemed to be free even there). This is a huge, nearly 2 GB file, so you'll probably want to download to your computer/sideload rather than using 3G on your iDevice, but it's well worth the time and space it'll take up.
Unfortunately for the benefit of people living outside the official iTunes Store-serving countries, I couldn't find a direct download for this the way some of the space organizations have for their science Made for iBooks titles so people could just open them in the iBooks app without having to have a valid store account.
But TIFF has generously made this free since its inception, and hopefully they keep it that way until everyone around the world can get it.
(ETA: if you have further interest in the subject, there's also a nice
audio lecture podcast and an
introduction/audience question segment from the British Film Institute via iTunes U by the same name.)
And this has been the selected (deliberately, this time) 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Enjoy!
Description
This free e-book offers a panoramic overview of TIFF's landmark film series and exhibition A Century of Chinese Cinema through critical essays, scholarly roundtables, and commentary by some of the most esteemed filmmakers and world-renowned authorities on Chinese cinema.