Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002-2012

Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002-2012

Geoffrey O'Brien

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 1619021706

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


“We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection—gathering the best of a decade’s worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics—ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age.

Here are 38 searching essays on contemporary blockbusters like Spider-Man and Minority Report; recent innovative triumphs like The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild; and the intricacies of genre mythmaking from Chinese martial arts films to the horror classics of Val Lewton. O’Brien probes the visionary art of classic filmmakers—von Sternberg, Fod, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Godard—and the implications of such diverse recent work as Farenheit 9/11, The Passion of Christ, and The Sopranos. Each of these pieces is alert to the always-surprising intersections between screen life and real life, and the way that film from the beginning has shaped our sense of memory and history.

Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism

Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg

27 Movies from the Dark Side (Ebert's Essentials)

If ... (BFI Film Classics)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

identification by the uncompromising intensity with which he follows his path, even if the path seems to lead into darkness. Even while the novel was still appearing in installments, stage adaptations were made of its early episodes, and these were followed by a two-part 1935 film version (now presumed lost) whose directors included Hiroshi Inagaki, known for his later Samurai trilogy and his 1962 version of Chûshingura. After the war, the novel was remade repeatedly, in three parts (1953) by

Wells’s narrator meditates on is a game devised by Wells himself, with a measure of detachment verging on the misanthropic. In his Experiment in Autobiography he described how he “wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians.” The book might then be imagined as the soliloquy of a man who bicycles through the suburbs of 1890s London imagining their destruction, along with the devouring of their inhabitants by blood-drinking aliens. A secret

command of the practicalities of grand-scale filmmaking as anyone in Hollywood. He had been responsible, with the director Jacques Tourneur, for the memorable revolutionary scenes in the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, and took credit for some of the most vivid details—“the harp, the parrot, and the ancestral portraits being taken out of town”—in the evacuation of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. He had also apparently been pushed to his limits by that most obsessive of moguls: “You can’t talk reason,”

surprise all over again, like a caveman dropped down without warning at the laundromat—all this to recover the shock effect of, say, a one-shot movie of a tree filmed against a bare sky, its branches swaying in the wind. Pure beauty, with underlying terror: and if the image were perceived with an ever so slight difference, if the merest suggestion of the phantasmal seemed to hover among the branches, then it would be pure terror with underlying beauty. Quite aside from the trees and the

Miss Froy is “merely a vivid subjective image.” The whole train, for that matter, is a congeries of vivid subjective images, from the magician’s rabbits peering up out of a top hat at a violent struggle in the baggage car to the nun in high heels keeping guard over an accident victim wrapped up like a mummy. This Europe of sinister baronesses and grinning conjurers is indeed a runaway train bound for nowhere good. All along, the film has pitted England against the world, with the English

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