Film: A Very Short Introduction

ISBN-13: 9780192803535 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 144 str.

Michael Wood

Opis

Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Wood offers a wealth of insight into the nature of film, considering its role and impact on society as well as its future in the digital age. As Wood notes, film is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often quite false, frankly and beautifully fantastic, and they are sometimes insistently said to be true. Indeed, many condemn movies as an instrument of illusion, an emphatic way of seeing what is not there. And others celebrate the reverse: that film brings us closest to the world as it actually is. "Photography is truth," a character says in a film by Jean-Luc Godard. "And cinema is the truth twenty-four times per second." But they are stories in either case, and there are very few films, Wood observes, even in avant-garde art, that don't imply or quietly slip into narrative.

Recenzje

This is an excellent short guide that manages to cram in a vast amount of information into a very small space. It never pretends to offer a history of film but is a superb resource for getting students to think about film as a medium, and to think about what makes film distinct as a means of conveying information, emotion, ideas at the same time as generating wonder, admiration, controversy, or ire. An unrivalled introduction to thinking about film as a medium. / Matthew Woodcock, University of East Anglia

O autorze

Michael Wood is Charles Barnwell Start Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University. He has published many books including America in the Movies (Basic Books and Secker & Warburg, 1975), The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the risks of fiction (Chatto and Windus, 1994); Belle de Jour ( BFI Film Classics, British Film Institute Publishing, 2001); and The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (Chatto & Windus, 2004).