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The Melancholy Lens
The prevalence of loss and mourning, and of charged relationships with parents or parental figures has had a surprising influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers' work. To date, however, little attention has been given to these themes. In The Melancholy Lens, author Tony Pipolooffers a detailed look at the significant role of underlying biographical and psychological factors in specific works by leading avant-garde filmmakers. Covering a range of filmmakers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr, The MelancholyLens takes a sensitive approach to understand the motivations of each filmmaker as related to a given work. Pip...
Robert Bresson
Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form's grammatical and expressive possibilities. In thirteen features over a forty-year career, he held to an uncompromising moral vision and aesthetic rigor that remain unmatched. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is the first comprehensive study to give equal attention to the films, their literary sources, and psycho-biographical aspects of the work. Concentrating on the films' cinematographic, imagistic, narrative, and thematic structures, Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each film-including nearly 100 illustrations-elucidating Bresson's unique style as it evolved from the impassioned Les Anges du p che to such disconsolate meditations on the world as The Devil Probably and L'Argent. Special attention is also given to psychosexual aspects of the films that are usually neglected. Bresson has long needed a thoroughgoing treatment by a critic worthy to the task: he gets it here. From it emerges a provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist whose moral engagement and devotion to the craft of filmmaking are without equal.
Between Images
"Between Images proposes a unique theory of montage a technique of relation: a means of fundamentally rethinking and reshaping how humans relate-to ourselves and each other, to the material world, to the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants. Historically, film criticism has cast montage in one of several roles: as narrative's invisible executor of spatiotemporal continuity to maintain the viewer's investment in the story-world; as an agent of disorder that confounds conventions of storytelling and realism and prompts the viewer's intellectual engagement; and as an expressionistic device for augmenting the duration and combination of shots to affect viewers at a sensory level. While not exactl...
Nonprofessional Film Performance
This book offers a critical account of film performances by nonprofessional actors. Nonprofessional actors — actors without previous acting training or experience — have performed in films since the days of the Lumière brothers. Generally associated with currents such as Early Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism and New Argentine Cinema, nonprofessional actors also feature prominently in the works of celebrated directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson and Joanna Hogg. Since the turn of the century and the rise of digital filmmaking, the performances of nonprofessional actors have remained a staple of independent cinemas from all over the world, including films associated with the loose trend often referred to as Slow Cinema. Despite their enduring presence in acclaimed and widely discussed films, nonprofessional actors have received scant scholarly attention. This book proposes to analyse exemplary nonprofessional performances from across the history of cinema as a means of illuminating their significance and celebrating the performers’ contributions to the films.
Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema
What is film criticism for? This book aims to answer this question It argues that art cinema's political effect is the result of indeterminacy and not character-centric meaning.
Eyes Upside Down
P. Adams Sitney, the leading critic of personal and experimental cinema in America, picks up where he left off in his landmark book, Visionary Film. This all new work offers in-depth analysis of eleven central filmmakers of the American avant-garde cinema, drawing on the aesthetic articulated by Emerson and theorized by John Cage, Charles Olson, and Gertrude Stein.
Projecting a Camera
In Projecting a Camera, film theorist Edward Branigan offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding film theory. Why, for example, does a camera move? What does a camera "know"? (And when does it know it?) What is the camera's relation to the subject during long static shots? What happens when the screen is blank? Through a wide-ranging engagement with Wittgenstein and theorists of film, he offers one of the most fully developed understandings of the ways in which the camera operates in film. With its thorough grounding in the philosophy of spectatorship and narrative, Projecting a Camera takes the study of film to a new level. With the care and precision that he brought to Narrative Comprehension and Film, Edward Branigan maps the ways in which we must understand the role of the camera, the meaning of the frame, the role of the spectator, and other key components of film-viewing. By analyzing how we think, discuss, and marvel about the films we see, Projecting a Camera, offers insights rich in implications for our understanding of film and film studies.
The Holy Fool in European Cinema
This monograph explores the way that the profile and the critical functions of the holy fool have developed in European cinema, allowing this traditional figure to capture the imagination of new generations in an age of religious pluralism and secularization. Alina Birzache traces the cultural origins of the figure of the holy fool across a variety of European traditions. In so doing, she examines the critical functions of the holy fool as well as how filmmakers have used the figure to respond to and critique aspects of the modern world. Using a comparative approach, this study for the first time offers a comprehensive explanation of the enduring appeal of this protean and fascinating cinematic character. Birzache examines the trope of holy foolishness in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, French cinema, and Danish cinema, corresponding broadly to and permitting analysis of the three main orientations in European Christianity: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. This study will be of keen interest to scholars of religion and film, European cinema, and comparative religion.
Film and Knowledge
Film has become such an underpinning of art and pop culture that its potential for inspiring serious thought is often overlooked. Our intellectual involvement with film has been minimized as more in the audience want to be merely amazed and entertained. Essays written by both established and cutting-edge philosophers of film concentrate in this work on the value of film in general and the value of certain films in particular for the study and teaching of ideas. The essays explore such topics as the significance of narrative unity for self knowledge in David Lynch’s Lost Highway and in Paul Schrader’s Affliction; ambiguity and responsibility in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon; consciousness and cognition in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane; skepticism in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; language and gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game; Platonic idealism in Chris Marker’s La Jetée; race in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam; the concept of the imagination in cognitive film theory; and the role of ideology in feminist film theory. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Edgar G. Ulmer
Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row examines the full scope of the career of this often overlooked film auteur, with essays exploring individual films, groups of films (such as his important work in film noir), repetitive themes appearing across the spectrum of his work, and a case study of three essays analyzing The Black Cat (1934).
