Cinematic Flashes
Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Indiana University Press
Published:28th Dec '12
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- Paperback£21.99(9780253006929)
An innovative approach to the studio system and its films
Challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame
Cinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of "cinephiliac" historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural fragments rather than composing grand narratives, this unorthodox history of the films of the studio system reveals how classical Hollywood emerges as a disjointed network of accidents, excesses, and coincidences.
Rashan 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.
* ChoiISBN: 9780253006882
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
280 pages