The Structure of Complex Images

After over a century of existence, the cinema still has its mysteries. Why, for example, is the job we call movie stardom unlike any other in the world? How do films provide so much unconcealed information that we fail to notice? What makes it hard to define what counts as acting? How do movies like Casablanca and Breathless store the film and world histories of their generations? How can we reconcile auteurism 's celebration of the movie director's authority with the camera's automatism? Why have the last four decades of film criticism so often neglected such questions? After beginning with an overview of film studies, this book proposes a shift from predictable theoretical approaches to models that acknowledge the perplexities and mysteries of the movies. Deriving methods from cinephilia, Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Eleanor Duckworth, V. F. Perkins, and James Naremore, Robert B. Ray offers closereadings that call attention to what we have missed in such classic films as La Règle du Jeu , It Happened One Night , It's a Wonderful Life , Vertigo , Holiday , The Philadelphia Story , Casablanca, Breathless , and Tickets.

Offers a series of meditations on problems and questions in the field of film studies Opens with a provocative overview of the discipline before offering a compelling argument for film scholars to relinquish their overreliance on familiar theoretical frameworks and predictable critical models Provides a series of revelatory close readings of a number of classic films

Auteur

Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is the author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, and Walden X 40. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, Opposite Sex, and Wide Awake.

Texte du rabat

After over a century of existence, the cinema still has its mysteries. Why, for example, is the job we call movie stardom unlike any other in the world? How do films provide so much unconcealed information that we fail to notice? What makes it hard to define what counts as acting ? How do movies like Casablanca and Breathless store the film and world histories of their generations? How can we reconcile auteurism s celebration of the movie director s authority with the cameräs automatism? Why have the last four decades of film criticism so often neglected such questions? After beginning with an overview of film studies, this book proposes a shift from predictable theoretical approaches to models that acknowledge the perplexities and mysteries of the movies. Deriving methods from cinephilia, Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Eleanor Duckworth, V. F. Perkins, and James Naremore, Robert B. Ray offers closereadings that call attention to what we have missed in such classic films as La Règle du Jeu, It Happened One Night, It s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, Breathless, and Tickets.

Contenu
Part I: Film Studies and Its Problems.- 1. Movie vs. Screen: The Great Divide in Film Studies.- 2. The Automatic Auteur , or, A Certain Tendency in Film Criticism.- Part II: Cinephilia, Cavell, and Description-as-Method.- 3. Cinephilia and Method.- 4. Cavell, Thoreau, and the Movies.- Part III: Movie Star Performance.- 5. The Mystery of Movie Stardom.- 6. Vertigo : Why Doesn't Scottie Recognize Madeleine?.- 7. Notes on Fred Astaire.- Part IV: Memory Theaters.- 8. Memory Theaters: Casablanca and Breathless.- Part V: The Structure of Complex Images.- 9. The Cukor Problem: David Copperfield, Holiday , and The Philadelphia Story.- 10. The Structure of Complex Images: Abbas Kiarostami's Tickets .