Describing Cinema

In Describing Cinema, award-winning film scholar Timothy Corrigan explores the art and poetics of writing about film. Part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy, the text examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films as the most common and most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Describing Cinema represents a global range of movies from Hollywood to Morocco to Rome, made from the 1940s to the present. As Corrigan shows, energetic and careful descriptions can serve as exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and 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 and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Providing an invaluable exploration of the challenges and rewards film scholars face in describing movies, Corrigan insists that writing about film becomes thinking about film.

Timothy Corrigan is Professor Emeritus of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His past publications include New German Film: The Displaced Image, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies.

Preface

Part I: In Other Words: Film and the Spider Web of Description

Part II: “Badly Said, Badly Seen”: Describing . . .

1.Dis-chord: Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

2. The Pedestrian: The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

3. Vacancy: Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

4. Ghosting: Pyassa (Guru Dutt, 1957)

5. Exposures: Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

6. Immobility: The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

7. Red: Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

8. Folds: The Marriage of Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder,1978)

9. Discretion: Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)

10. Emplacements: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

11. Noise: The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

12. Interiors: A Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

13. Correspondence: Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)

14. Anticipation: In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

15. Gaming: The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007)

16. The Tactile: Adam (Maryam Touzani, 2019)