A grammar of murder : violent scenes and film form / Karla Oeler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oeler, Karla.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Murder in motion pictures.

Murder in mass media.

Motion pictures--Aesthetics.

Motion pictures.

Thrillers (Motion pictures)--History and criticism.

Thrillers (Motion pictures).

Detective and mystery films--History and criticism.

Detective and mystery films.

Physical Description:

xv, 282 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Summary:

In A Grammar of Murder, Karla Oeler views twentieth-century film through the lens of the murder scene. Murder, she asserts, is not merely a cinematic object par excellence-akin to the racing train or the romantic kiss-but an activity that sheds new light on the history of cinema, from the great breakthroughs in the theory and practice of montage to the formulation of rules and syntax for Hollywood genres.

Reexamining works by such filmmakers as Eisenstein, Renoir, Hitchcock, Dassin, Kubrick, and Jarmusch, Oeler argues that murder plays such a central role in film because it mirrors, on multiple levels, the act of cinematic representation. Death and murder at once eradicate life and call attention to its former existence, just as cinema conveys both the reality and the absence of the objects it depicts. But murder shares more with film than this interplay between presence and absence, movement and stillness: unlike death, killing entails the deliberate reduction of a singular subject to a disposable object. Like cinema, it involves a crucial choice about what to cut and what to keep.

Through persistent attention to this choice, A Grammar of Murder distills a new method for understanding the social meaning of film form, and a new way to see the formal bases of social representation itself.

Contents:

Part 1 Murder and Montage

1 Framing for Murder: Cut-Ins and Close-Ups 23

The Human Face, the Murder Weapon, and the Close-Up 23

How Guns Get Attention in Film Theory 25

Case Study: Vsevolod Pudovldn's The Heir of Genghis Khan (aka Storm over Asia, 1928) 29

Murder and Perspectival Scale: Eisenstein's "Hidden Montage" 37

Acting in Silents: Murder, Montage, and the Film Actor 50

The Body in Pieces 50

Man, Montage, and the Machine Aesthetic 54

Case Study: Lev Kuleshov's By the Law (1926) 57

The End of St. Petersburg (1927): Bringing Life to a Statue 68

Aural Montage and Pudovkin's Deserter (1933) 74

Anatomy as Alphabet and the Occlusion of Interiority 78

Putting Stanislavsky Actors through the Montage Machine: Revolvers and Revolutionary Consciousness in The Mother (1926) 81

Coda: Eisenstein, Inner Speech, and Murder 91

Murder Outside the Poetics of Montage: André Bazin and Jean Renoir 95

André Bazin and the Preservation of Loss 95

Bazinian Ambiguity and the Murder Scene 104

Murder Scenes in Renoir's Films of the 1930s: An Overview 107

Case Study: Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

The Rules of the Game (1939)

A Montage of Distractions: La Chienne (1931), Toni (1935), La Bête humaine (1938), and La Marseillaise (1938) 120

Part 2 Murder and Genre

4 Individual and Series 133

Montage and Genre 133

Manny Farber and the Logic of Genre 135

Case Study: Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) 140

"Cosmetics on a Cadaver" : James Agee on War Films 152

Stylization and Mimesis 164

Murder as Stylization 164

Mildred Pierce (1945) 164

Style and the Man 184

Murder in the Mirror: The Shining (1980) and Dead Man (1995) 202.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226617947

0226617947

9780226617954

0226617955

OCLC:

298670855