E-Book Overview
The Altering Eye covers a "golden age" of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, the author develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figures as Luis Bu?uel, Joseph Losey, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, and the work of major Cuban filmmakers. Kolker's book has become a much quoted classic in the field of film studies providing essential reading for anybody interested in understanding the history of European and international cinema. This new and revised edition includes a substantive new Preface by the author and an updated Bibliography.
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THE ALTERING EYE
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Robert Kolker is EmNitus Professor of English ill the University of Marylilnd and Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, His works include A Cinema QfLl)ndine_�.II Tileatre, edited and translated by John Willett. Copyright © 1957, 1%3, 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag.. Frankfurt am Main. This tranlsation and notes © 1964 by John Wil lett. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and Methuen London. From "To PostNity" in Sell!Cted Poems, copyright 1947 by BNtold Brecht and H.R. Hays; copyright 1975 by Stefan S. Brecht and H.R. Hays. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Ann Elmo Agency, Inc.
Films Sans Frontieres for the cover image from Luis Bufiuel's Lm; Olvidad()�
(1950). All papN used by Op('n Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainabl(' Forestry Initia tive), and PEFC (programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.
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F& linda and
ill memury of GInier
Ihe character's name itself recalls Ricci's son in
Bic.lfc/r Thiefj movcs to sell
his baby and Ihen, when his girlfriend collapses in despair, to retrieve it. Travelling by molor scooter, running on foot, hiding in the freezing river wilh a young accomplice (a real-time sequence that is as painful to w,llch as it must have been 10 film), the
mi;;;e-etr-�cetre of L'rrrfiwi doesn't absorb its
chMaclers into Iheir urban spaces, but .11l0WS the grimy streets and grimy characters to coinhabit. The characters arc less products of th(> str('ets
as
its
creatures. This of course has been the hallmark of postwar cinema and is the base of the arguments developed in
The Altering Eye.
Building on a neorealist
ground, post-WWlI European filmmakers havc b('en intent on crcaling narrative Spad, they want to see the world whole, to ilIlow, as Bazin (very much the patron saint of postwar international film) theorized, cinema to emerge from the effacement of cinem conventions of th(> Holly ... vood styk filmmakers were freed (as Klaus Kn>imeier said of Carl Meyer) to think with Iheir eyes.J The D.lfdenne brothers burrow Ihrough Ihe hislory of postwar film to come up with anti-family anti-melodramas in which disenfr,lnchised, m process. In fact process itself is my major concern, and while I will look closely nt representative works and figures, I will concentrate upon movement and the changing perceptions of the work of cinema. Wh.lt follows is a critical progress through progreSSive film, through a cinema that asks to be taken seriously and assumes that complexity is not " quality that diminishes entert"inment. This is a cinema that invites emotional response and int(>Il(>c\ual participation, that is committed to history and polities and an cxamination of culture, that asks for the commitment of its audience; a cinema that offers ways to change, if not the world, at ieas