The structure of complex images

by Ray, Robert B., (Robert Beverley)

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Title Statements

Full title :The structure of complex images / Robert B. Ray.

Summary

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 close readings 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.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2020.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Palgrave Macmillan
Place of Publication:Cham
Language:eng
Publication Date:2020.

The Physical Object

Description:1 online resource (xii, 259 pages) : : illustrations

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9783030406318, 3030406318
oclc:on1154340054
LC Classification:PN1993.5.A1
Dewey Decimal:791.4309

Part I. Film studies and its problems. Screen vs. movie : the great divide in film studies -- The automatic auteur, or, a certain tendency in film criticism -- Part II. Cinephilia, Cavell, and description-as-method. Cinephilia and method -- Cavell, Thoreau, and the movies -- Part III. Movie star performance. The mystery of movie stardom -- Vertigo : why doesn't Scottie recognize "Madeleine"? -- Notes on Fred Astaire -- Part IV. Memory theaters. Memory theaters : Casablanca and Breathless -- Part V. The structure of complex images. The Cukor "problem" : David Copperfield, Holiday, and The Philadelphia story -- The structure of complex images : Abbas Kiarostami's tickets.