Description
Book SynopsisFilms provide valuable spaces for aesthetic experimentation and analysis, for cinema's openness to other media has always allowed it to expand its own. In Aesthetic Spaces, Brigitte Peucker shows that when painterly or theatrical conventions are appropriated by the medium of film, the dissonant effects produced open it up to intermedial reflection and tell us a great deal about cinema itself.The films studied in these chapters include those by Abbas Kiarostami, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Th. Dreyer, Peter Greenaway, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Lars von Trier, Spike Jonze, Éric Rohmer, Lech Majewski, and others. Where two media are in evidence in these films, there is usually a third, and often theater mediates between film and painting. Aesthetic Spaces interrogates issues of cinematic space and mise-en-scène from different but interconnected theoretical perspectives, organizing its chapters a
Trade ReviewThis book is a meditation on cinema's hybrid or 'intermedial' status that proceeds through elegant, finely nuanced and elaborately detailed close readings of canonical films. Refreshingly, the book steers clear of fashionable discussions of intermediality and instead makes a case for cinema as an inherently, even ontologically intermedial art."" - John David Rhodes, author of
Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film""Peucker is well known for her important scholarship on the relationship between cinema and art history, as well as for her prominence as a scholar of German film, and this book certainly contributes to both of these fields. Very few books in film studies take on film form so closely and with such sophisticated theoretical attention to the matter of representation."" - Rosalind Galt, author of
Pretty: Film and the Decorative ImageTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Kiarostami’s Shirin and the Life of Cinema
- Chapter 1: Space
- Chapter 2: Spectator
- Chapter 3: Frame
- Chapter 4: Color
- Chapter 5: Props
- Chapter 6: Décor
- Chapter 7: Actor
