Overview
- develops the understudied area of motifs in the cinema by looking at the way they are deployed in film endings.- in particular through the main example of the beach, shows how films from many different countries – in many cases unconsciously – have articulated their endings in similar ways.- looks at the aesthetics and rhetoric of film endings, exploring their implications.- focuses on the director’s, rather than the scriptwriter’s, contribution to the ending. - provides a thoroughly researched thesis, citing hundreds of examples of endings from different periods and national cinemas.
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Thresholds and Water
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending—that is, it looks at ‘endings as endings’. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book’s argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michael Walker has written for Movie, Film Dope, CinéAction, Hitchcock Annual and Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. He has contributed to The Movie Book of Film Noir (1992), The Movie Book of the Western (1996), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (1999), Style & Meaning (2005), and A Companion to Steven Spielberg (2017). He is the author of Hitchcock’s Motifs (2005) and Modern Ghost Melodramas (2017).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Endings in the Cinema
Book Subtitle: Thresholds, Water and the Beach
Authors: Michael Walker
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31657-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31656-3Published: 14 March 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31659-4Published: 30 June 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-31657-0Published: 13 March 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 316
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations, 23 illustrations in colour
Topics: Film Theory, Close Reading