Anmerkungen:
Also issued in print: 2024. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on November 15, 2023)
Beschreibung:
In 'Describing Cinema', Timothy Corrigan explores the art & poetics of writing about film. Part theory, part rhetoric, & part pedagogy, the text examines & shows acts of describing scenes, shots, & sequences in films as the most common & most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. The text represents a global range of movies from Hollywood to Morocco to Rome, made from the 1940s to the present. As Corrigan shows, energetic & careful descriptions can serve as exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate & celebrate the activities, varieties, & challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing & interpretation of films. At its best, the act of describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative & intersubjective movement between images, viewers, & a rhetorical language.
"Describing Cinema is part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy. It examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films, as probably the most common and the most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Practiced energetically and carefully, descriptions become exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and interpretation of films. My motto might be an inversion of one character's tongue-in-cheek remark in Jean-Luc Godard's First Name, Carmen (played by Godard himself), "badly seen, badly said," rephrased for this project as "badly said, badly seen." Here, that phrase becomes an indication how acts of describing films or parts of films can measure and instantiate complex ways of seeing that are partly about accuracy but also about the mobility of understanding and interpretation. At its best, describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Here, especially, writing about film becomes thinking about film. Part I provides a theoretical basis for this argument. Part II features sixteen short essays from landmarks of post-war cinema that demonstrate the energy and movement of precise descriptions"--