Gilberto Perez's love of film dates back to his childhood in Havana, His favourite theatre was the Capri, which showed an astonishing variety of films from all over the world. And his regular companion at the movies was his father, a doctor who brought a passion for literature and the arts to his enjoyment of film - and passed that sensibility to his son. "I grew up with the movies as art", writes Perez, "and with art not as something stuffy and affected but as something vital, like the movies". In "The Material Ghost", Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write an engaging study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory - a medium both lifelike and dreamlike, both documentary and fictional, where real details create imaginary worlds, where figures appear before us like actors on a stage and yet are removed from us like characters in a novel. He investigates these complexities by discussing a breathtaking range of works from the earliest days of cinema to the present.
From the silent era, he explores the work of Keaton and Chaplin, Griffith and Eisenstein, the haunting anxiety of Murnau's "Nosferatu" and the epic lyricism of Dovzhenko's "Earth". From the classic era of sound cinema, he discusses the searching realism of Jean Renoir and the memorable westerns of John Ford, Bunuel's corrosive documentary "Land Without Bread" and Hitchcock's mesmerizing "Vertigo". From the sixties and seventies, he examines the shifting parables of Jean-Luc Godard and the arresting uncertainty of Antonini's "Eclipse", Straub and Huillet's reflective "History Lessons" and such explosive Hollywood films as "The Wild Bunch" and "The Godfather". He also comments on the current scene, including the refashioned gangster films of Martin Scorsese and the philosophical realism of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Gilberto Perez's love of film dates back to his childhood in Havana, His favourite theatre was the Capri, which showed an astonishing variety of films from all over the world. And his regular companion at the movies was his father, a doctor who brought a passion for literature and the arts to his enjoyment of film - and passed that sensibility to his son. "I grew up with the movies as art", writes Perez, "and with art not as something stuffy and affected but as something vital, like the movies". In "The Material Ghost", Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write an engaging study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory - a medium both lifelike and dreamlike, both documentary and fictional, where real details create imaginary worlds, where figures appear before us like actors on a stage and yet are removed from us like characters in a novel. He investigates these complexities by discussing a breathtaking range of works from the earliest days of cinema to the present.
From the silent era, he explores the work of Keaton and Chaplin, Griffith and Eisenstein, the haunting anxiety of Murnau's "Nosferatu" and the epic lyricism of Dovzhenko's "Earth". From the classic era of sound cinema, he discusses the searching realism of Jean Renoir and the memorable westerns of John Ford, Bunuel's corrosive documentary "Land Without Bread" and Hitchcock's mesmerizing "Vertigo". From the sixties and seventies, he examines the shifting parables of Jean-Luc Godard and the arresting uncertainty of Antonini's "Eclipse", Straub and Huillet's reflective "History Lessons" and such explosive Hollywood films as "The Wild Bunch" and "The Godfather". He also comments on the current scene, including the refashioned gangster films of Martin Scorsese and the philosophical realism of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Contents: Introduction: Film and Physics Chapter 1: The Documentary Image Chapter 2: The Narrative Sequence Chapter 3: The Bewildered Equilibrist Chapter 4: The Deadly Space Between Chapter 5: The Meaning of Revolution Chapter 6: Landscape and Fiction Chapter 7: American Tragedy Chapter 8: History Lessons Chapter 9: The Signifiers of Tenderness Chapter 10: The Point of View of a Stranger
The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Bela Balazs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez's superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet? -- Adrian Martin This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn't hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism--a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an art form. The book is really about nothing beyond the author's own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style... A work of transcendent intelligence. -- Peter Matthews A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book-the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching-accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film. -- Stanley Cavell Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book. -- Edward W. Said
Gilberto Perez is a professor of film studies at Sarah Lawrence College and film critic for the Yale Review.
Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He never condescends to his audience or sacrifices his intellectual clarity, and most importantly he makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses. The virtues of his writing are quite rare. -- James Naremore Cineaste Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism that treats the complexities of film and the sensibilities of readers with equal understanding, consideration, and respect. -- David Sterrit Christian Science Monitor Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Antonioni's Eclipse, Ford's My Darling Clementine, Godard's Breathless. Perez's frame-by-frame analysis of them is always lucid and invigorating, reminding us why these films were considered classics from the first. Even better, Perez takes up lesser known films and filmmakers... The eclectic mixture of films is one the book's strengths, allowing Perez to write on a breadth of topics... Despite holding films to a high standard, Perez never comes off as a film snob; his readings remain rooted in a genuine and communicable love for the cinema. -- Jonathan Vogels The Republic of Letters In recent decades there has been no more cogent a rethinking of the physical and psychological experience of film as it evolved, both as a technology and as an art form. I want to read it again, soon. -- Nick James Sight & Sound Perez's book may strike some readers as anachronistic because it is about nothing but the author's love of movies, its pleasure lying in the sheer intensity of his intelligence. In so far as this wonderfully flexible and expansive thinker has a thesis, it's that the illusionist medium of cinema is endlessly poised between reality and abstraction... Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic Andre Bazin. Sight and Sound Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating. -- Alfred Guzzetti Boston Book Review [Perez's] early and persistent love of film imbues The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, which moves gracefully from the documentaries of Robert Flaherty to the revolutionary epics of Alexander Dovzhenko to the pastoralism of Jean Renoir. Chronicle of Higher Education The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks; the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. -- Michael Wood London Review of Books The section on [Iranian director Abbas] Kiarostami in Perez's new book, The Material Ghost, is the best comment I've seen on the subject. -- Stanley Kauffman New Republic Gilberto Perez's book, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (*****) ranks with the finest cinematic writing anywhere. -- Tony McKibben The List (Glasgow and Edinburgh) It is as fine a book on film as I have ever encountered, a hypermarche of insight, precise and lovely writing, information, and clear thinking. Page after page elaborates arguments so acute and aptly formulated that I have no doubt I'll be exploiting them in the classroom and in writing for the rest of my career. -- Lesley Brill Criticism Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism. -- David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks; the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. -- Michael Wood London Review of Books
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