Description
Book SynopsisChallenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame
Trade ReviewRashan Wadia Richards's Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood both treats and is itself the product of the author's cinephilia, that fervent, devotional, sometimes rabid love for movies once professed by critics such as Susan Sontag and the New Wave devotees of Cahiers du cinema. As Richards traces, this cinephiliac passion was to be suppressed by the sober film theorists of the 1970s, who argues the necessity of destroying cinematic pleasure in order to understand its mechanisms. In recent years, cinephilia has experienced something of a revival, due no doubt to the technological tools that have enabled a new generation of scholars and critics to access vast archives of film material.10th October 2013
* Times Literary Supplement *
[S]ophisitcated readers will be rewarded with a fresh take on a familiar subject. . . . Recommended.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Inventing Cinephiliac Historiography
1. Sonic Booms: 1929 and the Sensational Transition to Sound
2. Show Stoppers: 1937 and the Chance Encounter with Chiffons
3. Signature Crimes: 1946 and the Strange Case of the Lost Scene (as Well as the Stranger Case of the Missing Auteur)
4. Apocalyptic Antennae: 1954 and the End of Storytelling
Conclusion: The Cinephiliac Return
Notes
Bibliography
Index
