"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy
armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin
Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films.
Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan the
Terrible (Princeton, 1981), she clearly demonstrates the
flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics
often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit
those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the
critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her
analytical assumptions continually.
Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing,
ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such
masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a
formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle
Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. Stage Fright and
Laura provide cases in which the classical cinema defamiliarizes
its own conventions by playing with audience expectations. Other
chapters deal with Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play
Time and Godard's Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut (la vie).
Although neoformalist analysis is a rigorous, distinctive
approach, it avoids extensive specialized vocabulary and esoteric
concepts: the essays here can be read separately by those
interested in the individual films. The book's overall purpose,
however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible
and intriguing to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a
whole.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!