CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/2/2024

Film lovers, rejoice! 'Sergio Leone by Himself' is NEW from Reel Art Press

Featured spreads are from Sergio Leone by Himself, Sir Christopher Frayling’s highly anticipated compilation of writings and interviews from the influential Italian director of “spaghetti Westerns” like A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West, among many others. “He was all cinema,” Frayling writes. “He once said ‘I was born in a cinema, almost. Both my parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice versa.’ The passionate experience of movie-going, the ideas and sensations it unleashed in him, informed all his work in film. And he had the photographic memory of a deep cinephiliac—not so much for the dialogue, but for the visuals. One critic even suggested that Sergio Leone should write in his passport ‘Nationality: Cinema.’ His films refreshed film language with elements gleaned from various cultures—among them Italian, Spanish, American and Japanese—not recognizing the borderlines of geography and time—and the result entered the global pop culture zeitgeist in unmistakable ways, competing on level terms in that arena with the instantly recognizable work of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Modern genre cinema—which is to say much of mainstream cinema—and the modern action hero, begin here.”