The ordinary man of cinema / Jean Louis Schefer ; translated by Max Cavitch, Paul Grant, and Noura Wedell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schefer, Jean Louis, author.

Contributor:

Cavitch, Max, translator.

Grant, Paul (Translator), translator.

Wedell, Noura, translator.

Standardized Title:

Homme ordinaire du cinéma. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Characters and characteristics in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Phenomenology.

Subjectivity in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

223 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

South Pasadena, CA. : Semiotext(e), [2016]

Summary:

I have been trying to explain how the cinema exists within us as a kind of ultimate chamber where the hope and ghost of an interior history circulate. Because this history does not unfold, and if it even occurs, can only remain invisible, without a face, without characters, and most of all, without duration. Through the persistence of their images, we acclimatize all the films we see to this absence of duration and of a scene where that interior history might be possible. When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individual's personal memory confronts the cinema's ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaks-figures that are fundamental to Schefer's conception of the cinema because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefer's emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. While Schefer's book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. Book jacket.

Contents:

The Gods 25

Devil Dolls 27

The Mummy 31

The Jealousy of Freaks 35

Lost Horizons 37

The Inhuman Woman 39

The Maid on the Telephone 41

Occupation: Bouvard and Pécuchet 43

Laurel and Hardy: Brother and Sister 43

The Clown of Heraclitus 45

The White Orgy 47

The Black Orgy (The Slaves and the Painting) 49

The Object 51

The Shroud 53

The Sausage 55

Chickens 57

The Likeness 59

The Burlesque Body 60

The Death of Nero 63

The Death of Nero with a Character 65

The Phonograph 67

The ideal being can only be seen through the eyes of a criminal 69

From the Book of Satan 71

Burlesque 2 73

The Chubby One at the Theater 75

The Road Map 77

Nana 79

The Smoke 83

Shadows 85

In Front of the House 87

The Room 89

The Carriage, the Veins 91

The Criminal Life (The Film) 93

The Criminal Life 95

The Lesson of Darkness 121

The Wheel of Images 161

The Wheel 171

The Human Face 181.

Notes:

Originally published as "L'homme ordinaire du cinéma" in French by Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1980.

Includes translators' bibliographical references (notes) and list of photographs.

ISBN:

9781584351856

1584351853

OCLC:

960373582