Author: Jim Hillier File Type: pdf Cahiers du Cinema is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue. The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing mise en scene as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, auteur, a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journals major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of Frances most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film. ReviewA good case can be mode for the 1950s as the most stimulating decode in the annals of film criticism. Credit for this goes largely to the French journal Cahiers du Cinema, which nurtured and published a small band of iconoclasts who later moved into active filmmaking and became the core of the influential New Wave group. Jean-Luc Godard and the late Francois Truffaut were probably its most important members, with Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chobrol right at their heels...Jim Hilliers collection...concentrates on the 1950s, assessing the pre-New Wove cinema of France, as well as classical Hollywood film and Italys neo-realist school. It also treats such technical issues as the essence of mise en scene and the advent of CinemaScope...This is a fascinating and provocative book that casts a keen light on the ideas (and by extension, the films) of such astonishing cineastes as Godard and Rivette, while also showing their affinities with the incisive thought of Andre Bazin, the groups mentor...This collection deserves a wide readership among casual and committed filmgoers alike. (Christian Science Monitor )This isnt simply an anthology of interesting film criticism its something much more rare and intriguing--the documentary history of an important intellectual shift...By treating movies as movies, not as poor relations to books or plays, the Cahiers critics helped introduce a new art form to the century that produced it. (New York Times Book Review )Wonderfully intellectual and anti-academic at the same time, the articles are, more than anything else, supremely personal...These are immensely serious people, self-consciously bent on nothing less than changing the history of cinema. In important ways they first taught us how to look at movies, especially our own. (American Film ) About the AuthorJim Hillier is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Bulmershe College of Higher Education, Reading, England.

Author: Geoff Pfeifer File Type: pdf Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althussers materialism as a starting pointwhich, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Francais and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its timesthe book looks at the differing ways in which both Badious and Zizeks work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Zizeks materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badious does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Zizek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifers book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory. **Review The New Materialism is an impressive engagement with contemporary materialist attempts to reconcile structure and subjectivity, stability and resistance, from Althusser to Badiou to Zizek. Chad Kautzer Associate Professor of Philosophy, Lehigh University About the Author Geoff Pfeifer is Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.