A01=Kristin Thompson
Acting
Ambiguity
Art film
Author_Kristin Thompson
Bicycle Thieves
Boredom
Category=ATFA
Characterization
Cinema of the United States
Classical Hollywood cinema
Classicism
Close-up
Columbia University Press
Continuity editing
Criticism
David Bordwell
Decoupage
Defamiliarization
Digression
Dissolve (filmmaking)
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Explanation
Eyeline match
Film analysis
Film studies
Filmmaking
Genre
Humour
Ideology
Imagery
Jean-Luc Godard
Kristin Thompson
Late Spring
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot
Lighting
Literature
Little Dorrit
Long shot
Martine (character)
Medium shot
Melodrama
Michelangelo Antonioni
Mordred
Narration
Narrative
Narrative structure
Parody
Picaresque novel
Poetry
Point-of-view shot
Prose
Prostitution
Protagonist
Robert Bresson
Russian formalism
Screen direction
Short story
Stylistic device
Suggestion
Terror by Night
The Comic
The Heroine
The Other Hand
The Remaining
The Various
Theft
Tout Va Bien
Tracking shot
Two Women
V.
Viewing (funeral)
Voice-over
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691014531
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Aug 1988
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Princeton, 1981), she clearly demonstrates the flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually. Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing, ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. Stage Fright and Laura provide cases in which the classical cinema defamiliarizes its own conventions by playing with audience expectations. Other chapters deal with Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play Time and Godard's Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut (la vie).
Although neoformalist analysis is a rigorous, distinctive approach, it avoids extensive specialized vocabulary and esoteric concepts: the essays here can be read separately by those interested in the individual films. The book's overall purpose, however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible and intriguing to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a whole.
