Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 1

I'm current writing a new article and was returning to some of the books that had the most impact on me. Not a top ten list - just some books I often find myself citing and thought I would share.

The one I always keep returning to is Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).

 

 

I discovered this book when researching my MA thesis on Abbas Kiarostami. Then I was assigned to read it for a film theory course I took when I was working toward my Ph.D. 

Mulvey is mostly know for her article on the male gaze in Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure. There are some great chapters in that book. But 24x is the one that I constantly return to. 

I love the chapter on Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin, where she compares their writings on photography and film, respectively. The last two chapters on the possessive and pensive spectator are also really good and provide some very interesting insights into new technologies and cinema. 

I think one of the key points of her book is that cinema has a ghostly secret - the still frame. Digital media has changed our relationship to cinema because we now have the technologies to halt the flow of images which "opens a space for consciousness" (186).

 

 

Realist Film Theory and Bicycle Thieves

A central claim of Andre Bazin is that the power of cinema can render the mysteriousness of reality on film--to capture and embalm the structures of reality. 

 

Hilary Neroni's excellent new book builds upon Bazin’s theory, arguing that those structures (or mysteriousness of reality) is mediation—language, unwritten rules of communication, systems of signification. Her other point is that what is "new" about neorealism is the combination of realism and melodrama. The two work together to bring forth (mediation) to draw attention to the workings of the social order. In this case, it is early post WWII, Italy. Those two key points (mediation and melodrama) make this a very interesting and engaging analysis of De Sica’s landmark film, Bicycle Thieves.

 

Movies often try to avoid showing us mediation (the forms that create the story world). But neorealism wants to draw our attention to them. But it also wants us involved in the story, to feel the emotions of the characters, to experience the melodrama, to make us aware of the systems that are working against these characters. 

 

 

I am so happy this is book is available. I teach this movie and agree with Neroni that Bazin should not be left in the dustbin of film theory. 

 

 

Realist film theory has a lot to offer for current cinema. Just think how much digital effects have developed over the past thirty years, how they have gotten more and more realistic. This is just one example that demonstrates the importance of Bazin and realist film theory. This book is definitely worth checking out.