The analysis of film / Raymond Bellour ; edited by Constance Penley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bellour, Raymond.

Contributor:

Penley, Constance, 1948-

Standardized Title:

Analyse du film. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899-1980.

Hitchcock, Alfred.

Motion pictures--Production and direction.

Motion pictures.

Cinematography.

Physical Description:

xviii, 303 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, [2000]

Summary:

The Analysis of Film brings together Raymond Bellour's acclaimed studies of classical Hollywood film. It is at once a book about the methods of close film analysis, the narrative structure of Hollywood film, Hitchcock's work--The Birds, Marnie, Psycho, North by Northwest--and the role of the woman in Western representation. Finally, it is a book about cinema itself and the love for cinema that drives the passion for analyzing this supreme art form of the twentieth century.

The book is also a model for writing about the intricacies of film narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing larger contextual issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in Western cultural forms. The final, added chapter on D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale Operator brilliantly demonstrates that the dynamics of repetition and alternation that Bellour discovered to be the heartbeat of Hollywood narrative film were already there in nascent form at the beginnings of cinema.

Raymond Bellour is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. He is a scholar and writer whose work has been devoted to both literature (especially the Brontes, Dumas, and Michaux) and film (including L'analyse du film, first published in 1979, and several collections, especially Le cinema americain and Le western). Since the early eighties his work has concentrated on new media and the relation between words and images. This new focus has resulted in an exhibition, Passages de I'image (1989); two books, L'entre-images (1990) and L'entre-images 2 (1999); and a MOMA catalog, Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image (1992). In 1991, with Serge Daney, he started the film journal Trafic.

Contents:

A Bit of History 1

1. The Unattainable Text 21

2. System of a Fragment (on The Birds) 28

3. The Obvious and the Code (on The Big Sleep) 69

4. Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest) 77

5. To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi) 193

6. To Enunciate (on Marnie) 217

7. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho) 238

8. To Alternate/To Narrate (on The Lonedale Operator) 262.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-294) and index.

"Works by Raymond Bellour": page [295].

ISBN:

0253337003

0253213649

OCLC:

42309829