Description
Book SynopsisA collection of Bruce F. Kawin’s most engaging and important essays on film, accompanied by his interviews with Lillian Gish and Howard Hawks.
Trade Review“Bruce F. Kawin’s ‘Selected Film Essays and Interviews,’ a collection of his writings spanning from 1977 to 2011, is a welcome addition to film studies literature. Kawin, Professor of English and Film at the University of Colorado at Boulder, writes in a style refreshingly free of the jargon and verbal clutter that all too often serve to obfuscate and distract in academic film writing. This volume collects a number of his most important essays and reviews as well as two interviews with Lillian Gish and Howard Hawks, respectively. [...] [A]n essential collection [containing] concise and thoughtful examinations on different areas of film studies.” —Matt Barry, roguecinema.com
“The way in which the volume situates Faulkner and Foote in – even surrounds them with – such groundbreaking film scholarship productively skews more conventional accounts of these writers […] [Scholars] would do well to heed Kawin’s plea to ‘get it right,’ to ‘stand up for accuracy.’ I can think of no better model in this pursuit than his ‘Selected Film Essays and Interviews’.” —Sarah Gleeson-White, “Mississippi Quarterly”
“This book is a splendid introduction to an influential writer you may not have had the opportunity to read previously. Kawin emerges as the quintessential cinema academic, a writer of (mostly) concise opinion imbued with an understanding of the technicalities of the medium and a real adoration for its possibilities; a unique overview of cinema as a multi-faceted artistic expression.” —Jez Owen, “Film International”
Table of ContentsForeword by Howie Movshovitz; Preface; 1. VIOLENCE AND POLITICS: Me Tarzan, You Junk; The Whole World Is Watching; Violent Genres; Wild Blueberry Muffins; 2. HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION: The Mummy’s Pool; Time and Stasis in “La Jetée”; “Carnival of Souls”; 3. REVIEWS: “Welcome to L.A.”; “The Fury”; “Piranha”; “The Elephant Man”; 4. INTERVIEWS: Lillian Gish; Howard Hawks; 5. LITERATURE AND NARRATION: The Montage Element in Faulkner’s Fiction; Horton Foote; An Outline of Film Voices; Dorothy’s Dream: Mindscreen in “The Wizard of Oz”; 6. GETTING IT RIGHT: Creative Remembering and Other Perils of Film Study; Late Show on the Telescreen: Film Studies and the Bottom Line; Video Frame Enlargements; Three Endings; Acknowledgments; Index of Names and Titles
