The 'I' of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics

by William Rothman

Overview

Originally published in 1988, The "I" of the Camera has become a classic in the literature of film. This second edition includes fourteen new essays, as well as a new foreword. Offering alternatives to the viewing and criticism of film, William Rothman challenges readers to think about film in adventurous ways that are more open to our experience of movies. In explaining the "American" quality of American film, Rothman argues compellingly that movies have inherited the philosophical perspective of American transcendentalism. First Edition Hb (1988): 0-521-36048-X First Edition Pb (1988): 0-521-36828-6

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521527248
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2003
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Film
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.98(d)

Table of Contents

1. Hollywood reconsidered: reflections on the classical American cinema; 2. D. W. Griffith and the birth of the movies; 3. Judith of Bethulia; 4. True heart Griffith; 5. The ending of City Lights; 6. The Goddess: reflections on melodrama east and west; 7. Red Dust: the erotic screen image; 8. Virtue and villainy in the face of the camera; 9. Pathos and transfiguration in the face of the camera: a reading of Stella Dallas; 10. Viewing the world in black and white: race and the melodrama of the unknown woman; 11. Howard Hawks and Bringing Up Baby; 12. The filmmaker in the film: Octave and the rules of Renoir's game; 13. Stagecoach and the quest for selfhood; 14. To have and to have not adapted a film from a novel; 15. Hollywood and the rise of suburbia; 16. Nobody's perfect: Billy Wilder and the postwar American cinema; 17. The River; 18. Vertigo: the unknown woman in Hitchcock; 19. North by Northwest: Hitchcock's monument to the Hitchcock film; 20. The villain in Hitchcock; 21. Thoughts on Hitchcock's authorship; 22. Eternal vérités: cinema-vérité and classical cinema; 23. Visconti's Death in Venice; 24. Alfred Guzzetti's Family Portrait Sittings; 25. The taste for beauty; 26. A Tale of Winter: philosophical thought in the films of Eric Rohmer; 27. The 'New Latin American Cinema'; 28. What is American about American film study.