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When the lights go down and the film starts to roll, we give
ourselves over to the magic of movies. But as George Toles
observes, what we experience in this house of light may strike
closer to home than we imagine.
In eleven essays, Toles combines aesthetic inquiry with a
psychology of spectatorship to illuminate the dialogue between
sentiment and irony that unfolds in every good movie. Reflecting a
literary critic's and professional screenwriter's ongoing love
affair with cinema, each essay plunges the reader into the
experience of one or more films, inviting us to ponder the nature
and implications of that experience. Toles considers a wide variety
of film experience, from Frank Capra to the Coen brothers to Alfred
Hitchcock.
However escapist a trip to the movies might be, says Toles,
there is no escaping some version of "home" in every film
experience. Toles examines important homes -- from the cottage in
Random Harvest to the foreboding Bates house in Psycho -- to
suggest that the house of film is a frame we long to enter in the
spirit of homecoming but one that we cannot possess any more
securely than the lost home of our beginnings. As film study marks
a return to art-centered criticism, A House Made of Light breaks
new ground in its assessment of the creation -- and enjoyment -- of
movies.
Since his explosive debut with the indie sensation Hard Eight ,
Paul Thomas Anderson has established himself as one of contemporary
cinema's most exciting artists. His 2002 feature Punch-Drunk Love
radically reimagined the romantic comedy. Critics hailed There Will
Be Blood as a key film of the new millennium. In The Master ,
Anderson jarred audiences with dreamy amorphousness and a departure
from conventional story mechanics. Acclaimed film scholar and
screenwriter George Toles approaches these three films in
particular, and Anderson's oeuvre in general, with a focus on the
role of emergence and the production of the unaccountable.
Anderson, Toles shows, is an artist obsessed with history,
workplaces, and environments but also intrigued by spaces as
projections of the people who dwell within. Toles follows Anderson
from the open narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia through the
pivot that led to his more recent films, Janus-faced masterpieces
that orbit around isolated central characters--and advance
Anderson's journey into allegory and myth. Blending penetrative
analysis with a deep knowledge of filmic storytelling, Paul Thomas
Anderson tours an important filmmaker's ever-deepening landscape of
disconnection.
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