Author Archive for: ‘Des O Rawe’
Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging
David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 520 24197 5 330pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) David Bordwell is a model of efficient scholarship. His writings on directors such as Dreyer (1981), Ozu (1988), and Eisenstein (1993), for example, are stylistically attentive, structurally coherent, and theoretically …
Read MoreCinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss
Images virtually rob us of our memory, because they replace it. – Johan van der Keuken[1] Johan van der Keuken was born in Amsterdam in 1938; he died from prostate cancer in 2001 after a long illness. The son of schoolteachers, he began taking photographs when he was twelve (in the company of his grandfather), and was already publishing his …
Read MoreCinema/Theatre: Beyond Adaptation
In his Notes sur le cinématographe (1975), Robert Bresson refers to ‘la terrible habitude du théâtre’. This note is not an absolute renunciation of relations between cinema and theatre. At this moment, Bresson is reminding himself of how cinema is always betrayed whenever the filmmaker succumbs to reproducing theatre on screen, a spectacle that in being neither one thing nor the other amounts …
Read MoreInviolable Attachments: Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls
Someone said that in this day and age, people won’t accept a play unless it is very realistic and logically convincing, so there are many things in the old stories that people will not stand for now … They will not accept the sort of childish antics of the past. Chikamatsu answered: “That argument seems quite reasonable, but it fails …
Read MoreFilm Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (new introduction)
Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (new introduction). University of Minnesota Press, 1991; 2006. ISBN 0-8166-4970-7 US$22.50 (pb) 296pp Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8166-4357-1 US$25.00 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) If the increased production of cartographic knowledge in the seventeenth century was one of the earliest achievements of …
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