Synopses & Reviews
Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book. -- Edward W. Said
In The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. The images on the screen, he writes, carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost.
Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating. -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review
A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum
Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism. -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic Andr Bazin. -- Sight & Sound
The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks; the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books
Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film. -- StanleyCavell
Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses. -- James Naremore, Cineaste
Synopsis
Gilberto Perez's love of film dates to his childhood in Havana",a great town for going to the movies". His favorite theater was the Capri, which showed an astonishing variety of films from all over the world. And his regular companion at the movies was his father, a doctor who brought a passion for literature and the arts to his enjoyment of film -- and passed that sensibility to his son. "I grew up with the movies as art", writes Perez, "and with art not as something stuffy and affected but as something vital, like the movies".
In The Material Ghost, Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write an engaging study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory -- a medium both lifelike and dreamlike, both documentary and fictional, where real details create imaginary worlds, where figures appear before us like actors on a stage and yet are removed from us like characters in a novel. He investigates these complexities by discussing a breathtaking range of works from the earliest days of cinema to the present.
From the silent era, he explores the work of Keaton and Chaplin, Griffith and Eisenstein, the haunting anxiety of Murnau's Nosferatu and the epic lyricism of Dovzhenko's Earth. From the classic era of sound cinema, he discusses the searching realism of Jean Renoir and the memorable westerns of John Ford, Bunuel's corrosive documentary Land without Bread and Hitchcock's mesmerizing Vertigo. From the sixties and seventies, he examines the shifting parables of Jean-Luc Godard and the arresting uncertainty of Antonioni's Eclipse, Straub and Huillet's reflective HistoryLessons, and such explosive Hollywood films as The Wild Bunch and The Godfather. He also comments on the current scene, including the refashioned gangster films of Martin Scorsese and the philosophical realism of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [417-448) and indexes.