A Film Encyclopaedia

 In 1972, I was involved in the publication of 'The World Encyclopaedia of Film':
 
 
You can see (just!) that John M. Smith and I were credited as co-editors. This was somewhat misleading because the book was the brainchild of Ian Cameron, the key figure behind Movie Magazine and the Movie Paperbacks series. Unfortunately, although the book was well advanced at the time, Ian withdrew from the project for various reasons (much to my regret) while John and I were given the task of bringing the book to publication. This happened in August 1972, a week before the production company preparing it for publication in the UK and the USA went into liquidation. Phew!   [March 2010: Ian Cameron died earlier this year - there is a good obituary by Charles Barr in the British newspaper The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/14/ian-cameron-obituary]
 
Some time after this – I can’t remember how long – I was in the Cinema Bookshop in London when I saw a paperback version which had been published in the US and Canada by the A & W Visual Library:
 
 
The book is interesting for its prosopographical approach. To save you looking that up, I mean that it is a history of the cinema through the individuals who made it. ‘Movie’ subscribed to the auteur theory which had particular currency at the time, but the encyclopaedia did something very attractive: it gave credit to many creative individuals besides directors: script writers, cameraman, set directors, editors, film composers, special effects wizards, choreographers, producers. So if you use the book creatively you could (for example) link cameramen to directors to discover which ones were favoured by studios or directors for particular films. This extended the idea of the auteur to a much wider circle than just that of directors.
 
It was also properly international, and the film index gave the titles in their original language. I remember working hard on this and, as a result, 40 years on, I can still give you the Russian for Battleship Potemkin, the Swedish for The Seventh Seal, the Japanese for The Human Condition: Bronenosets ‘Potyomkin’, Det Sjunde Inseglet and Ningen No Joken. So now you know.
 
The book crops up on the websites for second-hand books.