The 'I' of the Camera
The 'I' of the Camera
The 'I' of the Camera has become a classic in the literature of film. Offering alternatives to the viewing and criticism of film, William Rothman challenges readers to think about film in adventurous ways that are more open to movies and our experience of them. In a series of eloquent essays examining particular films, filmmakers, genres and movements, and the 'Americanness' of American film, Rothman argues compellingly that movies have inherited the philosophical perspective of American transcendentalism. This second edition contains all of the essays that made the book a benchmark of film criticism. It also includes fourteen essays, written subsequent to the book's original publication, as well as a new foreword. The new chapters further broaden the scope of the volume, fleshing out its vision of film history and illuminating the author's critical method and the philosophical perspective that informs it.
- Written in clear English, not technical jargon
- Extensive use of frame enlargements, exploring the impact and meaning of specific sequences
- Addresses a wide range of historical and philosophical issues
Product details
December 2003Paperback
9780521527248
424 pages
230 × 153 × 25 mm
0.681kg
373 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Hollywood reconsidered: reflections on the classical American cinema
- 2. D. W. Griffith and the birth of the movies
- 3. Judith of Bethulia
- 4. True heart Griffith
- 5. The ending of City Lights
- 6. The Goddess: reflections on melodrama east and west
- 7. Red Dust: the erotic screen image
- 8. Virtue and villainy in the face of the camera
- 9. Pathos and transfiguration in the face of the camera: a reading of Stella Dallas
- 10. Viewing the world in black and white: race and the melodrama of the unknown woman
- 11. Howard Hawks and Bringing Up Baby
- 12. The filmmaker in the film: Octave and the rules of Renoir's game
- 13. Stagecoach and the quest for selfhood
- 14. To have and to have not adapted a film from a novel
- 15. Hollywood and the rise of suburbia
- 16. Nobody's perfect: Billy Wilder and the postwar American cinema
- 17. The River
- 18. Vertigo: the unknown woman in Hitchcock
- 19. North by Northwest: Hitchcock's monument to the Hitchcock film
- 20. The villain in Hitchcock
- 21. Thoughts on Hitchcock's authorship
- 22. Eternal vérités: cinema-vérité and classical cinema
- 23. Visconti's Death in Venice
- 24. Alfred Guzzetti's Family Portrait Sittings
- 25. The taste for beauty
- 26. A Tale of Winter: philosophical thought in the films of Eric Rohmer
- 27. The 'New Latin American Cinema'
- 28. What is American about American film study.
