Description
Book SynopsisIncludes essays by a range of film theorists that propose stimulating approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait films, documentary, and realist depictions of urban life.
Trade Review“These exciting and varied essays probe the relations between cinematic realism and representations of the body—above all the body as a guarantor (or not) of a link between images and the real. As in the best collections, the essays present distinctive points-of-view, yet they cohere around a compelling through-line, offering illumination and insight beyond just the sum of their parts.”—Leo Charney, author of
Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift"Ivone Margulies's
Rites of Realism is a stunning reconsideration of one of the most important and often underestimated issues in film studies—the complex nature of cinematic realism. Orchestrating a wide range of critical debates, this collection ranges brilliantly across decades, cultures, and individual films to remind us that realism at the movies has never been a more interesting and demanding topic. I highly recommend it for any serious student of film."—Timothy Corrigan, author of
A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after VietnamTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Bodies Too Much / Ivone Margulies 1
Bazinian Contingencies Death Every Afternoon / André Bazin 27
Translated by Mark A. Cohen The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals) / Serge Daney 32
Translated by Mark A. Cohen History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in Bazin / Philip Rosen 42
The Object of Theory / Mary Ann Doane 80
Cultural Indices No Longer Absolute: Portraiture in American Avant-Garde and Documentary Films of the Sixties / Paul Arthur 93
In Search of the Real City: Cinematic Representations of Beijing and the Politics of Vision / Xiaobing Tang 119
Private Reality: Hara Kazou's Films / Abé Mark Nornes 144
Mike Leigh's Modernist Realism / Richard Porton 164
Why Is This Absurd Picture Here? Ethnology/Heterology/Buñuel / James F. Lastra 185
Retracings Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in
Love in the City,
Sons, and
Close Up / Ivone Margulies 217
Pasolini on
Terra Sancta: Towards a Theology of Film / Noa Steimatsky 245
Ecstatic Ethnography: Maya Deren and the Filming of Possession Rituals / Catherine Russell 270
Filmic Tableau Vivant: Vermeer, Intermediality, and the Real / Brigitte Peucker 294
Dreyer's Textual Realism / James Schamus 315
Selected Bibliography 325
Contributors 333
Index 337
