To The Distant Observer: Form and meaning in the Japanese cinema, Noël Burch Burch aims to do something akin to Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, namely, a…
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (1979) – Cavell is interested in how we experience a film and insists on a sort of starting-over…
Michele Lagny, “The feeling gaze: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938)” – The essay traces some of the context of the film’s release, particularly the way it was somewhat ordained to…
André Bazin, “On the politiques des auteurs,” in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985: 248-259. Bazin’s essay carefully takes…
Amédée Ayfre, “Neo-Realism and Phenomenology,” in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Ayfre takes issue with the term “Neo-realism,”…
Alexandre Astruc, “What is Mise-en-scène?” Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave,” ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985: 266-268. Astruc’s essay is concerned with aesthetic creation…
Vivian Sobchack, “Embodying Transcendence: On the Literal, the Material, and the Cinematic Sublime,” Material Religion 4 (2008): 194-203. Published 17 years after her important The Address of the Eye, this article…
Andrew Quicke, “Phenomenology and Film: An Examination of a Religious Approach to Film Theory by Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre,” Journal of Media and Religion 4, Vol. 4 (2005): 235-250. Quicke…
Summary of Stanley Cavell’s argument in The World Viewed, taken from Jeffrey Pence, “Cinema of the Sublime,” Poetics Today 25, Vol. 1 (2004), 61-62: “Like [Walter] Benjamin, Cavell insists that to appreciate film’s…
Jeffrey Pence, “Cinema of the Sublime,” Poetics Today 25, Vol. 1 (2004): 29-66) Pence wants to correct the modernist critical tendency to box in films by means of various theories and…
Brian Price, “The End of Transcendence, the Mourning of Crime: Bresson’s Hands,” Studies in French Cinema 2, No. 3: 124-135. Price’s essay is quite important in Bresson criticism and does a…
Rosalind Galt, “The Obviousness of Cinema,” World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008). Before publishing on the “pretty” (see previous post), Galt wrote this piece for the online journal World Picture on cinema’s “obviousness.”…
