A St Andrews conference on the Harry Potter series as literary texts has not met with universal approval in the academic world

Academics gathered in Scotland on Friday to discuss hot literary topics including the racial politics of goblins, the canonisation of Neville Longbottom, and Beedle the Bard as mythopoesis in the Chaucerian tradition. Welcome to the UK's first conference on Harry Potter.

Entitled A Brand of Fictional Magic: Reading Harry Potter as Literature, the conference brings together 60 scholars from around the world for a two-day event hosted by the University of St Andrews school of English. Billed as the world's first conference to discuss Harry Potter strictly as a literary text, almost 50 lectures are lined up, with academics taking on issues including paganism, magic and the influence on Rowling of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Shakespeare. Seminar titles range from "Moral development through Harry Potter in a post-9/11 world" to "Harry Potter and Lockean civil disobedience".

Organiser John Pazdziora, a doctoral candidate in St Andrews' English department, is adamant Rowling's seven children's books merit an academic conference. "These are the most important, seminal texts for an entire generation of readers," he said. "In 100, 200 years' time, when scholars want to understand the early 21st century, when they want to understand the ethos and culture of the generation that's just breaking into adulthood, it's a safe bet that they'll be looking at the Harry Potter novels. As literary critics, as academics, why on Earth wouldn't we want to come to grips with these texts? There's so much here to talk about, culturally and critically, that a two-day conference really can only get the conversation started. People will be reading and writing and studying Harry Potter for years to come."

JK Rowling's seven novels run to 4,100 pages, so the books will easily be able to sustain serious academic discussion over the two-day conference, added Pazdziora.

"We've got nearly 50 serious academic critics talking about these texts, each of them is finding something different to talk about, and frankly, we're barely getting started. In any good literary text, there is so much depth and meaning to discover," he said.

"As I said in my welcome today, in fact, the Harry Potter novels are their own Platform nine and three-quarters, as it were. Run into them, and there are countless fascinating worlds opening up in front of you. So, yes, we're talking for two days - and we've hardly scratched the surface of the richness and complexity of what is truly a significant children's literature text."

John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, was less convinced. "I'm not against Harry Potter, my children loved it, [but] Harry Potter is for children, not for grownups," he said. "It's all the fault of cultural studies: anything that is consumed with any appearance of appetite by people becomes an object of academic study."

Mullan speculated about whether the conference was a result of those who enjoyed Harry Potter as children now reaching an age where they could apply academic criticism to Rowling's work. "Perhaps that has happened," he said. "But why do universities have conferences? It's to attract attention to themselves as dynamic places. St Andrews has taken a bit of a gamble here. Is all publicity really good publicity? They will get attention for having a Harry Potter conference, but I don't think it's going to give them the reputation of cutting edge cultural analysis they might be hoping for."

He professed himself "amazed" that the academics participating had time to do so. "They should be reading Milton and Tristram Shandy: that's what they're paid to do," he said.

'His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much'

I discovered Carlos Fuentes during my adolescence, through his Death of Artemio Cruz, which we studied in our Spanish Literature classes in Buenos Aires. Unlike many of the ponderous novels forced on us in school, this vivid depiction of an agonizing Mexican dictator, written in 1962, when Fuentes was only in his early 30s, enthralled my generation because we felt that here, at last, was something fiercely alive and new. Later, after reading Joyce and Faulkner, we realised that Fuentes belonged in their select company.

Throughout his life, Fuentes remained an adventurous storyteller, a perceptive reader, a relentless critic of those who abuse power, a conscientious intellectual for whom the craft of words was not constrained by the margins of a page. He believed that novelists were historians in the deepest, most creative sense, and he once suggested to a group of his Latin-American colleagues that they each write a novel on their endemic dictator (since there was at least one in each country) in order to set right the official stories. He called the project "The Fathers of the Fatherland" and it resulted in several masterpieces: among others, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos's I, The Supreme and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. Fuentes's own Artemio Cruz told the story of Mexico.

No two of Fuentes's books are alike: every new work proposes another way of telling, a different engagement with the reader, from the historical adventure story (The Old Gringo) to the uncanny (Aura), from the erotic and satirical (Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone) to the polyphonic drama (Happy Families). When I met him at last, after many years of reading his books, I realised that what remained constant was his essential honesty, his eclectic spirit, his intellectual refinement, his intolerance of injustice, his generosity and affections, his tenderness towards his wife, Silvia Lemus, his incisive, illuminating intelligence. He was, in the truest sense, a gentleman. I feel deeply privileged to have been his friend. AM

I was invited to lunch with Carlos Fuentes by his agent Bill Hamilton, to see if we got on. If we did, I might become his UK publisher. How could I not fall for this extraordinary man? He was already a hero for me, one of the fabled authors of the Latin American boom of the 60s along with García Márquez, Donoso, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa. By the time I met him in the mid-90s he had written more than 30 novels, short story collections and books of essays, not to mention many plays and screenplays.

We met for lunch again at Elena's Etoile in Charlotte Street. Lunch with Carlos was high art. Handsome, a very masculine figure (but not macho), he had elegance and old-world grace; he exuded a tremendous sense of enjoyment, showering his listeners with stories and gossip, passionate about politics, social justice and writing. He had a United Nations of friends: Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, Harold and Antonia Pinter were often in his life and conversation – among many others.

Although he and his wife Silvia lived in London for half the year (the warmer half) and he had ambivalent feelings about the US, the English translations of his books were edited in the States, so for me, as his UK editor, there was little to do editorially. The first book he offered Bloomsbury was Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, based loosely on the affair he had had with the actor Jean Seberg. Needless to say, Carlos adored women.

His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much. Yet he anticipated death in his early masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz with what the LA Times has called "ferocious, cosmic intensity". And he said in the Paris Review, "Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more." So persuasive was his charm that he might well have negotiated a get-out clause with the Grim Reaper – over lunch, no doubt. If the Grim Reaper had been a woman, it might have worked. LC

'His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much'

I discovered Carlos Fuentes during my adolescence, through his Death of Artemio Cruz, which we studied in our Spanish Literature classes in Buenos Aires. Unlike many of the ponderous novels forced on us in school, this vivid depiction of an agonizing Mexican dictator, written in 1962, when Fuentes was only in his early 30s, enthralled my generation because we felt that here, at last, was something fiercely alive and new. Later, after reading Joyce and Faulkner, we realised that Fuentes belonged in their select company.

Throughout his life, Fuentes remained an adventurous storyteller, a perceptive reader, a relentless critic of those who abuse power, a conscientious intellectual for whom the craft of words was not constrained by the margins of a page. He believed that novelists were historians in the deepest, most creative sense, and he once suggested to a group of his Latin-American colleagues that they each write a novel on their endemic dictator (since there was at least one in each country) in order to set right the official stories. He called the project "The Fathers of the Fatherland" and it resulted in several masterpieces: among others, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos's I, The Supreme and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. Fuentes's own Artemio Cruz told the story of Mexico.

No two of Fuentes's books are alike: every new work proposes another way of telling, a different engagement with the reader, from the historical adventure story (The Old Gringo) to the uncanny (Aura), from the erotic and satirical (Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone) to the polyphonic drama (Happy Families). When I met him at last, after many years of reading his books, I realised that what remained constant was his essential honesty, his eclectic spirit, his intellectual refinement, his intolerance of injustice, his generosity and affections, his tenderness towards his wife, Silvia Lemus, his incisive, illuminating intelligence. He was, in the truest sense, a gentleman. I feel deeply privileged to have been his friend. AM

I was invited to lunch with Carlos Fuentes by his agent Bill Hamilton, to see if we got on. If we did, I might become his UK publisher. How could I not fall for this extraordinary man? He was already a hero for me, one of the fabled authors of the Latin American boom of the 60s along with García Márquez, Donoso, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa. By the time I met him in the mid-90s he had written more than 30 novels, short story collections and books of essays, not to mention many plays and screenplays.

We met for lunch again at Elena's Etoile in Charlotte Street. Lunch with Carlos was high art. Handsome, a very masculine figure (but not macho), he had elegance and old-world grace; he exuded a tremendous sense of enjoyment, showering his listeners with stories and gossip, passionate about politics, social justice and writing. He had a United Nations of friends: Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, Harold and Antonia Pinter were often in his life and conversation – among many others.

Although he and his wife Silvia lived in London for half the year (the warmer half) and he had ambivalent feelings about the US, the English translations of his books were edited in the States, so for me, as his UK editor, there was little to do editorially. The first book he offered Bloomsbury was Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, based loosely on the affair he had had with the actor Jean Seberg. Needless to say, Carlos adored women.

His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much. Yet he anticipated death in his early masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz with what the LA Times has called "ferocious, cosmic intensity". And he said in the Paris Review, "Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more." So persuasive was his charm that he might well have negotiated a get-out clause with the Grim Reaper – over lunch, no doubt. If the Grim Reaper had been a woman, it might have worked. LC

'His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much'

I discovered Carlos Fuentes during my adolescence, through his Death of Artemio Cruz, which we studied in our Spanish Literature classes in Buenos Aires. Unlike many of the ponderous novels forced on us in school, this vivid depiction of an agonizing Mexican dictator, written in 1962, when Fuentes was only in his early 30s, enthralled my generation because we felt that here, at last, was something fiercely alive and new. Later, after reading Joyce and Faulkner, we realised that Fuentes belonged in their select company.

Throughout his life, Fuentes remained an adventurous storyteller, a perceptive reader, a relentless critic of those who abuse power, a conscientious intellectual for whom the craft of words was not constrained by the margins of a page. He believed that novelists were historians in the deepest, most creative sense, and he once suggested to a group of his Latin-American colleagues that they each write a novel on their endemic dictator (since there was at least one in each country) in order to set right the official stories. He called the project "The Fathers of the Fatherland" and it resulted in several masterpieces: among others, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos's I, The Supreme and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. Fuentes's own Artemio Cruz told the story of Mexico.

No two of Fuentes's books are alike: every new work proposes another way of telling, a different engagement with the reader, from the historical adventure story (The Old Gringo) to the uncanny (Aura), from the erotic and satirical (Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone) to the polyphonic drama (Happy Families). When I met him at last, after many years of reading his books, I realised that what remained constant was his essential honesty, his eclectic spirit, his intellectual refinement, his intolerance of injustice, his generosity and affections, his tenderness towards his wife, Silvia Lemus, his incisive, illuminating intelligence. He was, in the truest sense, a gentleman. I feel deeply privileged to have been his friend. AM

I was invited to lunch with Carlos Fuentes by his agent Bill Hamilton, to see if we got on. If we did, I might become his UK publisher. How could I not fall for this extraordinary man? He was already a hero for me, one of the fabled authors of the Latin American boom of the 60s along with García Márquez, Donoso, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa. By the time I met him in the mid-90s he had written more than 30 novels, short story collections and books of essays, not to mention many plays and screenplays.

We met for lunch again at Elena's Etoile in Charlotte Street. Lunch with Carlos was high art. Handsome, a very masculine figure (but not macho), he had elegance and old-world grace; he exuded a tremendous sense of enjoyment, showering his listeners with stories and gossip, passionate about politics, social justice and writing. He had a United Nations of friends: Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, Harold and Antonia Pinter were often in his life and conversation – among many others.

Although he and his wife Silvia lived in London for half the year (the warmer half) and he had ambivalent feelings about the US, the English translations of his books were edited in the States, so for me, as his UK editor, there was little to do editorially. The first book he offered Bloomsbury was Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, based loosely on the affair he had had with the actor Jean Seberg. Needless to say, Carlos adored women.

His death is very hard to believe. He loved living so much. Yet he anticipated death in his early masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz with what the LA Times has called "ferocious, cosmic intensity". And he said in the Paris Review, "Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more." So persuasive was his charm that he might well have negotiated a get-out clause with the Grim Reaper – over lunch, no doubt. If the Grim Reaper had been a woman, it might have worked. LC

From Christopher Isherwood's 'limbo of mirror-images' to 'the projected film's best-kept secret'

We don't have to think about what we like, but thinking can be part of our pleasure, rather than opposed to it. When I was asked to write Film: A Very Short Introduction – the book became the 300th in a series that covers topics from advertising to witchcraft, anaesthesia to the World Trade Organisation – I jumped at the possibility, because I took it as a chance to think fast and hard about a much-loved topic. Not everybody thought this was a good idea. One of the publisher's readers said the project was distinctly amateurish, and the other said it was impossible. These responses were not unkindly meant, and I found them helpful. I realised I wanted the book to be the work of an amateur – a lover of film – though not amateurish in the sense of inept. And the genuine impossibility of the thing as a comprehensive enterprise made me think hard about what might be possible in smaller dimensions.

The book is an essay, not a history or a guidebook. It attempts to say something about what film has been and might be, when it was born and how it might die; to tell some stories about varieties of film in different parts of the world; and above all to convey a sense of wonder about what makes the films we care about exciting or surprising.

Pursuing this line of thought I got a bit carried away by the paradoxes of film: an illusion of movement that isn't an illusion but a picture of the real moving thing as it moves; a series of still images that, projected at the right speed, produce this illusion that isn't an illusion. I know some people can't bear this low-grade philosophical talk about the languages and technology of vision, but I am still captivated by it.

I also found a way of thinking about film and photography together, as twins and opposites. Roland Barthes once said he had decided to prefer photography to cinema, and he was in good company, with Philippe Sollers, Brassaï and Proust, among others. The argument, broadly, is that photography resists time by stopping it, even at the cost of producing only reminders of death; film, on the other hand, gives in to time, can't offer us anything other than what rolls past us in what Sollers calls "cinematic profusion" and Proust calls a "cinematic procession". This contrast seems hopelessly biased, especially to those of us who prefer cinema to photography, but it may all be a matter of our attitude to time. If we think it is to be lived with rather than fought against, almost everything turns round. And the fact that film is an awakening of still frames into undeniable movement suggests that if photography is about death, moving pictures are about rebirth or resurrection.

I regard my book as a very small contribution to a genre we might think of as the writing up of the surprises of film, and I'd like to suggest 10 books, very different from each other, that do this in a way I couldn't dream of doing. Two are by film directors, two are by film critics, one is by a film scholar, one is by a dance critic, one is by a philosopher, one is a novel, another is (though not a novel) by a novelist, and one is a memoir. All of them pursue the pleasure of thinking about pleasure. The order is chronological.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood (1945)
This delicate, informed and ironic novel recounts the making of a frothy musical (set in Vienna) in the London studios of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. The unreality of the film set, "a half-world", Isherwood calls it, "a limbo of mirror-images", chimes eerily with the grim reality of European politics in the 30s.

What Is Cinema? by André Bazin (1962; translated by Hugh Gray 1967-1971 and by Timothy Barnard, 2009)
Bazin's question is not rhetorical, and his book is full of inventive and still influential answers. Never a purist about the medium, Bazin is always attentive to what the art can be; he's especially interested in long takes and deep focus, which allow the viewer to make choices about what he or she wants to see.

I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (1965)
Surely the greatest of all regular film critics,Kael loved the movies with unflagging passion, and wrote especially well about the films that let her passion down. She was always funny. This is the first collection of her work, but there are many others, all wonderful.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell (1971)
Cavell is a philosopher who finds in a film a reflection of ongoing questions of scepticism about reality. Film is mesmerising because, among other reasons, it presents a world perfectly complete without us, converting us into ghosts as we watch it.

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce (1972)
It's very hard to write about movement, and Croce manages the almost unheard-of feat of being faithful to the lightness of art, catching so much of what is remarkable about Astaire and Rogers's work.

Hollywood by Garson Kanin (1974)
Perhaps the funniest, most intelligent book about Hollywood. It contains the story of Sam Goldwyn overcoming his advisers' doubts about The Thomas Crown Affair. No one understood the complex plot, but Goldwyn was serene. "Stop worrying," he said. "The public is f'Chrissake smarter than we are!"

Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson (1975; translated by Jonathan Griffin 1977)
Uncanny epigrams from a master director. You don't have to believe what they say to enjoy their style and reach; there are austere jewels on every page.

My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel (1982; translated by Abigail Israel 1983)
An autobiography written with Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. There is mischief everywhere from this staid man with a wild mind, who understood the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie from the inside.

The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992)
This is among Rushdie's best works of non-fiction. Full of great thoughts about colour and Kansas and fantasy, and how there really is no place like home, because no place is home.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey (2005)
A scholar well-known for her work on the gender of the gaze in cinema turns her attention to the old and new fact of stillness in the movies, "a projected film's best kept secret". A book that helps us to think and keeps us thinking.

From Christopher Isherwood's 'limbo of mirror-images' to 'the projected film's best-kept secret'

We don't have to think about what we like, but thinking can be part of our pleasure, rather than opposed to it. When I was asked to write Film: A Very Short Introduction – the book became the 300th in a series that covers topics from advertising to witchcraft, anaesthesia to the World Trade Organisation – I jumped at the possibility, because I took it as a chance to think fast and hard about a much-loved topic. Not everybody thought this was a good idea. One of the publisher's readers said the project was distinctly amateurish, and the other said it was impossible. These responses were not unkindly meant, and I found them helpful. I realised I wanted the book to be the work of an amateur – a lover of film – though not amateurish in the sense of inept. And the genuine impossibility of the thing as a comprehensive enterprise made me think hard about what might be possible in smaller dimensions.

The book is an essay, not a history or a guidebook. It attempts to say something about what film has been and might be, when it was born and how it might die; to tell some stories about varieties of film in different parts of the world; and above all to convey a sense of wonder about what makes the films we care about exciting or surprising.

Pursuing this line of thought I got a bit carried away by the paradoxes of film: an illusion of movement that isn't an illusion but a picture of the real moving thing as it moves; a series of still images that, projected at the right speed, produce this illusion that isn't an illusion. I know some people can't bear this low-grade philosophical talk about the languages and technology of vision, but I am still captivated by it.

I also found a way of thinking about film and photography together, as twins and opposites. Roland Barthes once said he had decided to prefer photography to cinema, and he was in good company, with Philippe Sollers, Brassaï and Proust, among others. The argument, broadly, is that photography resists time by stopping it, even at the cost of producing only reminders of death; film, on the other hand, gives in to time, can't offer us anything other than what rolls past us in what Sollers calls "cinematic profusion" and Proust calls a "cinematic procession". This contrast seems hopelessly biased, especially to those of us who prefer cinema to photography, but it may all be a matter of our attitude to time. If we think it is to be lived with rather than fought against, almost everything turns round. And the fact that film is an awakening of still frames into undeniable movement suggests that if photography is about death, moving pictures are about rebirth or resurrection.

I regard my book as a very small contribution to a genre we might think of as the writing up of the surprises of film, and I'd like to suggest 10 books, very different from each other, that do this in a way I couldn't dream of doing. Two are by film directors, two are by film critics, one is by a film scholar, one is by a dance critic, one is by a philosopher, one is a novel, another is (though not a novel) by a novelist, and one is a memoir. All of them pursue the pleasure of thinking about pleasure. The order is chronological.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood (1945)
This delicate, informed and ironic novel recounts the making of a frothy musical (set in Vienna) in the London studios of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. The unreality of the film set, "a half-world", Isherwood calls it, "a limbo of mirror-images", chimes eerily with the grim reality of European politics in the 30s.

What Is Cinema? by André Bazin (1962; translated by Hugh Gray 1967-1971 and by Timothy Barnard, 2009)
Bazin's question is not rhetorical, and his book is full of inventive and still influential answers. Never a purist about the medium, Bazin is always attentive to what the art can be; he's especially interested in long takes and deep focus, which allow the viewer to make choices about what he or she wants to see.

I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (1965)
Surely the greatest of all regular film critics,Kael loved the movies with unflagging passion, and wrote especially well about the films that let her passion down. She was always funny. This is the first collection of her work, but there are many others, all wonderful.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell (1971)
Cavell is a philosopher who finds in a film a reflection of ongoing questions of scepticism about reality. Film is mesmerising because, among other reasons, it presents a world perfectly complete without us, converting us into ghosts as we watch it.

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce (1972)
It's very hard to write about movement, and Croce manages the almost unheard-of feat of being faithful to the lightness of art, catching so much of what is remarkable about Astaire and Rogers's work.

Hollywood by Garson Kanin (1974)
Perhaps the funniest, most intelligent book about Hollywood. It contains the story of Sam Goldwyn overcoming his advisers' doubts about The Thomas Crown Affair. No one understood the complex plot, but Goldwyn was serene. "Stop worrying," he said. "The public is f'Chrissake smarter than we are!"

Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson (1975; translated by Jonathan Griffin 1977)
Uncanny epigrams from a master director. You don't have to believe what they say to enjoy their style and reach; there are austere jewels on every page.

My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel (1982; translated by Abigail Israel 1983)
An autobiography written with Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. There is mischief everywhere from this staid man with a wild mind, who understood the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie from the inside.

The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992)
This is among Rushdie's best works of non-fiction. Full of great thoughts about colour and Kansas and fantasy, and how there really is no place like home, because no place is home.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey (2005)
A scholar well-known for her work on the gender of the gaze in cinema turns her attention to the old and new fact of stillness in the movies, "a projected film's best kept secret". A book that helps us to think and keeps us thinking.

From Christopher Isherwood's 'limbo of mirror-images' to 'the projected film's best-kept secret'

We don't have to think about what we like, but thinking can be part of our pleasure, rather than opposed to it. When I was asked to write Film: A Very Short Introduction – the book became the 300th in a series that covers topics from advertising to witchcraft, anaesthesia to the World Trade Organisation – I jumped at the possibility, because I took it as a chance to think fast and hard about a much-loved topic. Not everybody thought this was a good idea. One of the publisher's readers said the project was distinctly amateurish, and the other said it was impossible. These responses were not unkindly meant, and I found them helpful. I realised I wanted the book to be the work of an amateur – a lover of film – though not amateurish in the sense of inept. And the genuine impossibility of the thing as a comprehensive enterprise made me think hard about what might be possible in smaller dimensions.

The book is an essay, not a history or a guidebook. It attempts to say something about what film has been and might be, when it was born and how it might die; to tell some stories about varieties of film in different parts of the world; and above all to convey a sense of wonder about what makes the films we care about exciting or surprising.

Pursuing this line of thought I got a bit carried away by the paradoxes of film: an illusion of movement that isn't an illusion but a picture of the real moving thing as it moves; a series of still images that, projected at the right speed, produce this illusion that isn't an illusion. I know some people can't bear this low-grade philosophical talk about the languages and technology of vision, but I am still captivated by it.

I also found a way of thinking about film and photography together, as twins and opposites. Roland Barthes once said he had decided to prefer photography to cinema, and he was in good company, with Philippe Sollers, Brassaï and Proust, among others. The argument, broadly, is that photography resists time by stopping it, even at the cost of producing only reminders of death; film, on the other hand, gives in to time, can't offer us anything other than what rolls past us in what Sollers calls "cinematic profusion" and Proust calls a "cinematic procession". This contrast seems hopelessly biased, especially to those of us who prefer cinema to photography, but it may all be a matter of our attitude to time. If we think it is to be lived with rather than fought against, almost everything turns round. And the fact that film is an awakening of still frames into undeniable movement suggests that if photography is about death, moving pictures are about rebirth or resurrection.

I regard my book as a very small contribution to a genre we might think of as the writing up of the surprises of film, and I'd like to suggest 10 books, very different from each other, that do this in a way I couldn't dream of doing. Two are by film directors, two are by film critics, one is by a film scholar, one is by a dance critic, one is by a philosopher, one is a novel, another is (though not a novel) by a novelist, and one is a memoir. All of them pursue the pleasure of thinking about pleasure. The order is chronological.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood (1945)
This delicate, informed and ironic novel recounts the making of a frothy musical (set in Vienna) in the London studios of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. The unreality of the film set, "a half-world", Isherwood calls it, "a limbo of mirror-images", chimes eerily with the grim reality of European politics in the 30s.

What Is Cinema? by André Bazin (1962; translated by Hugh Gray 1967-1971 and by Timothy Barnard, 2009)
Bazin's question is not rhetorical, and his book is full of inventive and still influential answers. Never a purist about the medium, Bazin is always attentive to what the art can be; he's especially interested in long takes and deep focus, which allow the viewer to make choices about what he or she wants to see.

I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (1965)
Surely the greatest of all regular film critics,Kael loved the movies with unflagging passion, and wrote especially well about the films that let her passion down. She was always funny. This is the first collection of her work, but there are many others, all wonderful.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell (1971)
Cavell is a philosopher who finds in a film a reflection of ongoing questions of scepticism about reality. Film is mesmerising because, among other reasons, it presents a world perfectly complete without us, converting us into ghosts as we watch it.

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce (1972)
It's very hard to write about movement, and Croce manages the almost unheard-of feat of being faithful to the lightness of art, catching so much of what is remarkable about Astaire and Rogers's work.

Hollywood by Garson Kanin (1974)
Perhaps the funniest, most intelligent book about Hollywood. It contains the story of Sam Goldwyn overcoming his advisers' doubts about The Thomas Crown Affair. No one understood the complex plot, but Goldwyn was serene. "Stop worrying," he said. "The public is f'Chrissake smarter than we are!"

Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson (1975; translated by Jonathan Griffin 1977)
Uncanny epigrams from a master director. You don't have to believe what they say to enjoy their style and reach; there are austere jewels on every page.

My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel (1982; translated by Abigail Israel 1983)
An autobiography written with Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. There is mischief everywhere from this staid man with a wild mind, who understood the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie from the inside.

The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992)
This is among Rushdie's best works of non-fiction. Full of great thoughts about colour and Kansas and fantasy, and how there really is no place like home, because no place is home.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey (2005)
A scholar well-known for her work on the gender of the gaze in cinema turns her attention to the old and new fact of stillness in the movies, "a projected film's best kept secret". A book that helps us to think and keeps us thinking.

From Christopher Isherwood's 'limbo of mirror-images' to 'the projected film's best-kept secret'

We don't have to think about what we like, but thinking can be part of our pleasure, rather than opposed to it. When I was asked to write Film: A Very Short Introduction – the book became the 300th in a series that covers topics from advertising to witchcraft, anaesthesia to the World Trade Organisation – I jumped at the possibility, because I took it as a chance to think fast and hard about a much-loved topic. Not everybody thought this was a good idea. One of the publisher's readers said the project was distinctly amateurish, and the other said it was impossible. These responses were not unkindly meant, and I found them helpful. I realised I wanted the book to be the work of an amateur – a lover of film – though not amateurish in the sense of inept. And the genuine impossibility of the thing as a comprehensive enterprise made me think hard about what might be possible in smaller dimensions.

The book is an essay, not a history or a guidebook. It attempts to say something about what film has been and might be, when it was born and how it might die; to tell some stories about varieties of film in different parts of the world; and above all to convey a sense of wonder about what makes the films we care about exciting or surprising.

Pursuing this line of thought I got a bit carried away by the paradoxes of film: an illusion of movement that isn't an illusion but a picture of the real moving thing as it moves; a series of still images that, projected at the right speed, produce this illusion that isn't an illusion. I know some people can't bear this low-grade philosophical talk about the languages and technology of vision, but I am still captivated by it.

I also found a way of thinking about film and photography together, as twins and opposites. Roland Barthes once said he had decided to prefer photography to cinema, and he was in good company, with Philippe Sollers, Brassaï and Proust, among others. The argument, broadly, is that photography resists time by stopping it, even at the cost of producing only reminders of death; film, on the other hand, gives in to time, can't offer us anything other than what rolls past us in what Sollers calls "cinematic profusion" and Proust calls a "cinematic procession". This contrast seems hopelessly biased, especially to those of us who prefer cinema to photography, but it may all be a matter of our attitude to time. If we think it is to be lived with rather than fought against, almost everything turns round. And the fact that film is an awakening of still frames into undeniable movement suggests that if photography is about death, moving pictures are about rebirth or resurrection.

I regard my book as a very small contribution to a genre we might think of as the writing up of the surprises of film, and I'd like to suggest 10 books, very different from each other, that do this in a way I couldn't dream of doing. Two are by film directors, two are by film critics, one is by a film scholar, one is by a dance critic, one is by a philosopher, one is a novel, another is (though not a novel) by a novelist, and one is a memoir. All of them pursue the pleasure of thinking about pleasure. The order is chronological.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood (1945)
This delicate, informed and ironic novel recounts the making of a frothy musical (set in Vienna) in the London studios of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. The unreality of the film set, "a half-world", Isherwood calls it, "a limbo of mirror-images", chimes eerily with the grim reality of European politics in the 30s.

What Is Cinema? by André Bazin (1962; translated by Hugh Gray 1967-1971 and by Timothy Barnard, 2009)
Bazin's question is not rhetorical, and his book is full of inventive and still influential answers. Never a purist about the medium, Bazin is always attentive to what the art can be; he's especially interested in long takes and deep focus, which allow the viewer to make choices about what he or she wants to see.

I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (1965)
Surely the greatest of all regular film critics,Kael loved the movies with unflagging passion, and wrote especially well about the films that let her passion down. She was always funny. This is the first collection of her work, but there are many others, all wonderful.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell (1971)
Cavell is a philosopher who finds in a film a reflection of ongoing questions of scepticism about reality. Film is mesmerising because, among other reasons, it presents a world perfectly complete without us, converting us into ghosts as we watch it.

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce (1972)
It's very hard to write about movement, and Croce manages the almost unheard-of feat of being faithful to the lightness of art, catching so much of what is remarkable about Astaire and Rogers's work.

Hollywood by Garson Kanin (1974)
Perhaps the funniest, most intelligent book about Hollywood. It contains the story of Sam Goldwyn overcoming his advisers' doubts about The Thomas Crown Affair. No one understood the complex plot, but Goldwyn was serene. "Stop worrying," he said. "The public is f'Chrissake smarter than we are!"

Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson (1975; translated by Jonathan Griffin 1977)
Uncanny epigrams from a master director. You don't have to believe what they say to enjoy their style and reach; there are austere jewels on every page.

My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel (1982; translated by Abigail Israel 1983)
An autobiography written with Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. There is mischief everywhere from this staid man with a wild mind, who understood the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie from the inside.

The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992)
This is among Rushdie's best works of non-fiction. Full of great thoughts about colour and Kansas and fantasy, and how there really is no place like home, because no place is home.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey (2005)
A scholar well-known for her work on the gender of the gaze in cinema turns her attention to the old and new fact of stillness in the movies, "a projected film's best kept secret". A book that helps us to think and keeps us thinking.