BackLife to Those Shadows
(book in English)
by Noël Burch
- Type
- Studies
- Subject
- History of Cinema
- origins of cinema, early cinema, sociology
- Publishing Date
- 1990
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Collection
- (no collection)
- Language
- English
Relative size
- Physical desc.
- Paperback • 324 pages • 43 €
5 ½ x 8 ½ inches (14 x 21.5 cm) - ISBN-10
ISBN-13 - 0-520-07144-1
978-0-520-07144-5 - User Ratings
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Book Presentation:
Noël Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history. Life to Those Shadows presents a critique of "classical" approaches to film: the assumptions that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, and that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being. The view that film language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself, is also challenged here.
Burch's major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed-in the capitalist and imperialist West between 1892 and 1929.
From this perspective, the book examines the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the sociohistorical circumstances in which it took place. Central to the Institutional Mode are the principles of visualization-camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scène-that filmmakers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the all-important change that occurred in the placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image-implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909)-to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject-completed only with the generalization of lip-synch sound after 1929. Burch contends that this imaginary centering of a sensorially isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago.
See the publisher website: University of California Press
> From the same author:
Le Cinéma au prisme des rapports de sexe (2009)
by Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier
Subject: Sociology
La lucarne de l'infini (2007)
Naissance du langage cinématographique
by Noël Burch
Subject: Silent Cinema
De la beauté des latrines (2007)
Pour réhabiliter le sens au cinéma et ailleurs
by Noël Burch
Subject: Sociology
Revoir Hollywood (2007)
La nouvelle critique anglo-américaine
Dir. Noël Burch
Subject: On Films > Movie reviews
Robbe-Grillet cinéaste (2005)
by René Prédal, Noël Burch, Dominique Chateau and Claude Murcia
Subject: Director > Alain Robbe-Grillet
Les Communistes de Hollywood (1995)
autre chose que des martyrs
by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch
Subject: History of Cinema
La Lucarne de l'infini (1991)
Naissance du langage cinématographique
by Noël Burch
Subject: Silent Cinema
> On a related topic:
De la scène à la pellicule (2021)
Théâtre, musique et cinéma autour de 1900
Dir. Rémy Campos, Alain Carou and Aurélien Poidevin
Subject: History of Cinema
Le muet a la parole (2005)
Cinéma et performances à l'aube du XXe siècle
Dir. Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner
Subject: History of Cinema
Du panorama pictural au cinéma circulaire (2000)
Origines et histoire d'un autre cinéma, 1785-1998
Subject: History of Cinema
Théâtre et pré-cinéma (1978)
essai sur la problématique du spectacle au XIXe siècle
Subject: History of Cinema
The Emergence of Pre-Cinema (2018)
Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination
by Alberto Gabriele
(in English)
Subject: History of Cinema
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