Overview
- Offers a series of meditations on problems and questions in the field of film studies
- Opens with a provocative overview of the discipline before offering a compelling argument for film scholars to relinquish their overreliance on familiar theoretical frameworks and predictable critical models
- Provides a series of revelatory close readings of a number of classic films
Part of the book series: Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television (CRFT)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Film Studies and Its Problems
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Front Matter
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Cinephilia, Cavell, and Description-as-Method
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Front Matter
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Movie Star Performance
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Front Matter
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Memory Theaters
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Front Matter
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The Structure of Complex Images
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
After over a century of existence, the cinema still has its mysteries. Why, for example, is the job we call movie stardom unlike any other in the world? How do films provide so much unconcealed information that we fail to notice? What makes it hard to define what counts as “acting”? How do movies like Casablanca and Breathless store the film and world histories of their generations? How can we reconcile auteurism’s celebration of the movie director’s authority with the camera’s automatism? Why have the last four decades of film criticism so often neglected such questions? After beginning with an overview of film studies, this book proposes a shift from predictable theoretical approaches to models that acknowledge the perplexities and mysteries of the movies. Deriving methods from cinephilia, Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Eleanor Duckworth, V. F. Perkins, and James Naremore, Robert B. Ray offers closereadings that call attention to what we have missed in such classic films as La Règle du Jeu, It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, Breathless, and Tickets.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is the author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, and Walden X 40. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, Opposite Sex, and Wide Awake.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Structure of Complex Images
Authors: Robert B. Ray
Series Title: Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40631-8
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: 978-3-030-40630-1Published: 10 May 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-40633-2Published: 11 May 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-40631-8Published: 09 May 2020
Series ISSN: 2634-6133
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6141
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 259
Number of Illustrations: 26 b/w illustrations, 14 illustrations in colour
Topics: Close Reading, Film Theory, Film History