Description
Book SynopsisIn
Second Time Around, D. A. Miller seizes the opportunity of DVDs and streaming media; across thirteen essays, he watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he first saw in them but also what he was then kept from seeing.
Trade ReviewA humanizing assurance that art, memory, and desire are timeless. * Choice *
From writer D.A. Miller, this book is maybe the most CriterionCast book to have ever been made . . . For those who think far too much about what streaming and technological advances mean for film restoration and cinephilia, this is far and away the must-own book of the season. -- Joshua Brunsting * CriterionCast *
So glad we met, the old song says, the second time around, and Miller’s accounts of his first and second (and more) sights of film constitute a whole admirable viewing practice: attentive, reflective, witty, personal, historical. Once you’ve visited what he calls his old and new cinematheques—the one with poor prints in art houses and film clubs, the immaculate one on DVD at home—you may not want to go anywhere else. Or at least not go anywhere without remembering where you’ve been. -- Michael Wood, author of
Film: A Very Short IntroductionAt once mine shaft and pleasure dome, the cinema in
Second Time Around comes before us as a new art form, a form whose genius resides not in dialogue or durée but in its generation of a solitary Image—seductive, exorbitant, magnificent, and always psychically expensive. As thrilling as his accounts of the "second time around” are D. A. Miller’s revelations of the first time round—glimpses of a precocious, film-obsessed boy with his face and hands forever pressed against the screen. -- Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Harvard University
Second Time Around is a master class in close (re-)reading—a practice that the discipline of film studies has nearly forgotten. It is also a cinephile's spiritual autobiography, except that D. A. Miller’s version of cinephilia, thank goodness, is never precious or stuffy or completist. His brilliant and energetically patient attention to the cinematic artifact and to his own experience of observing it exemplifies the possibility of regarding art without guarding against it—of making ourselves vulnerable, again and again, to the unforeseen. The book reminds us that Miller is one of our greatest critics and most brilliant writers. -- John David Rhodes, author of
Spectacle of Property: The House in American FilmTable of ContentsPart I. Second Thoughts1. The Cinematheque Today
2. The Second Time Around
Part II. Second Times3.
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
4.
Cruising (1980)
5.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1983)
6. Bonnie and Pierrot
7.
Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
8.
Vertigo (1958)
9.
La Ronde (1950)
10.
The H-Man (1958)
11. French Hitchcock
12. “Toby Dammit” (1969)
13. Chabarthes: Chabrol,
Le Beau Serge; Barthes, “Cinema Right and Left”
14.
Medea (1970)
15. Last Time Around:
The Birds (1963)
Acknowledgments
