The Analysis of Film - Hardcover

Bellour, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253337003 ISBN 13: 9780253337009

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The Analysis of Film brings together Raymond Bellour's heralded studies of classic Hollywood film. It is at once a book about the methods of close film analysis, the narrative structure of Hollywood film, Hitchcock's work, and the role of the woman in Western representation. But, finally, it is a book about cinema itself and the love for cinema that drives the passion for analyzing the supreme art form of the 20th century.

About this title

About the Author

Raymond Bellour is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is a scholar and writer whose work has been devoted to both literature--especially the Brontës, Dumas, and Michaux--and film--most notably L'Analyse du film, first published in 1979, and several related collections including Le Cinéma Américain and Le Western. Since the early eighties his work has concentrated on mixed media and the relation between words and images. This new focus has resulted in an exhibition, Passages de l'image (1989); a book, L'Entre-Images (1990); and a MOMA catalog, Jean-Luc Godard: Sonimage (1992). In 1991, with Serge Daney, he started the film journal Trafic.

Constance Penley is Professor and Chair of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A founding editor of the leading feminist media journal, Camera Obscura, she also edited the influential collection Feminism and Film Theory. Penley has written widely in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and science studies. Her most recent books are NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Invisible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, edited with Paula Treichler and Lisa Cartwright.

Review

Written between 1969 and 1990, the essays in this collection remind the reader of what a brilliant film analyst Bellour was. Building on the work of Lacan, Metz, and Thierry Kuntzel, Bellour developed his own approach to analysis based primarily on a shot-by-shot study. This method enabled him to come as close as possible to surmounting what he perceived as the greatest difficulty in analyzing films—how to capture the moving image in words. Most of the essays here deal with Hitchcock films—The Birds, Psycho, Marnie, and North by Northwest. The last shows Bellour at his magisterial best: he couples a carefully worked out Oedipal interpretation of the plot with a close reading of the crop—duster sequence. The result is one of the best pieces ever written on Hitchcock. The other Hitchcock essays are also superb. The editor included pieces on other films—The Big Sleep, Gigi, The Lonedale Operator—but it is for the Hitchcock analyses that this book will be most valued. No serious student of film should miss the great work collected in this volume.W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University, Choice, November 2000

(W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University Choice 2000-01-00)

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253337003
• ISBN 13: 9780253337009
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Penley Constance