William Rothman

The Murderous Gaze (Harvard Film Studies)

Hitchcock

Rothman

Originally published in 1988, The I of the Camera has become a classic in the literature of film. 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 movies and our experience of them. In a series of eloquent essays examining particular films, filmmakers, genres and movements, and the Americanness of American film, Rothman argues compellingly that movies have inherited the philosophical perspective of American transcendentalism. This second edition contains all of the essays that made the book a benchmark of film criticism. It also includes fourteen essays, written subsequent to the book s original publication, as well as a new foreword. The new chapters further broaden the scope of the volume, fleshing out its vision of film history and illuminating the author s critical method and the philosophical perspective that informs it.

Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics

The 'I' of the Camera

This extensive collection offers a substantially complete retrospective of Stanley Cavell's previously uncollected writings on film. Cavell is the only major philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition who has made film a central concern of his work, and his work offers inspiration and new directions to the field of film studies. The essays and other writings in this volume, presented in the order of their composition, range from major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films or filmmakers to occasional pieces, all of which illuminate Cavell's practice of philosophy as it has developed in the more than three decades since the publication of The World Viewed. All periods of Cavell's career are represented, from the 1970s to the present, and the book includes many previously unpublished essays written since the early 1990s. In his introduction, William Rothman provides a useful and eloquent overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.

Cavell on Film

Charles Warren

Rebecca Meyers

Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardners achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (19252014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genres conventionsconventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as one of the worlds most extraordinary independent filmmakers, working in a unique border area between ethnography, the essay film, and poetic/experimental cinema. Richly illustrated, Looking with Robert Gardner assesses the range and magnitude of Gardners achievements not only as a filmmaker but also as a still photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. The contributors give critical attention to Gardners most ambitious films, such as Dead Birds (1963, New Guinea), Rivers of Sand (1975, Ethiopia), and Forest of Bliss (1986, India), as well as lesser-known films that equally exemplify his mode of seeking anthropological understanding through artistic means. They also attend to his films about artists, including his self-depiction in Still Journey On (2011); to his roots in experimental film and his employment of experimental procedures; and to his support of independent filmmakers through the Harvard Film Study Center and the television series Screening Room, which provided an opportunity for numerous important film and video artists to present and discuss their work. This book is a monumental, fearless, and insightful contribution of critique that looks both with and at Gardners works as a whole.  Catherine Summerhayes, author of Google Earth: Outreach and Activism Looking with Robert Gardner introduces new and exciting voices into the dialogue about the renowned ethnographic and documentary filmmaker. The book contains very close readings of many of his films and suggests fresh approaches for analyzing those as well as ethnographic films in general.  Ilisa Barbash, coeditor of The Cinema of Robert Gardner

Looking with Robert Gardner

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch

Three Documentary Filmmakers

Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner’s achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (1925–2014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genre’s conventions—conventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as one of the world’s most extraordinary independent filmmakers, working in a unique border area between ethnography, the essay film, and poetic/experimental cinema. Richly illustrated, Looking with Robert Gardner assesses the range and magnitude of Gardner’s achievements not only as a filmmaker but also as a still photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. The contributors give critical attention to Gardner’s most ambitious films, such as Dead Birds (1963, New Guinea), Rivers of Sand (1975, Ethiopia), and Forest of Bliss (1986, India), as well as lesser-known films that equally exemplify his mode of seeking anthropological understanding through artistic means. They also attend to his films about artists, including his self-depiction in Still Journey OnM (2011); to his roots in experimental film and his employment of experimental procedures; and to his support of independent filmmakers through the Harvard Film Study Center and the television series Screening Room, which provided an opportunity for numerous important film and video artists to present and discuss their work. Rebecca Meyers is a filmmaker and Academic Film Programmer at Bucknell University, where she teaches in the Film/Media Studies program. She worked with Robert Gardner as editor on his late films. William Rothman is Professor of Cinema and Interactive Media at the University of Miami. Among his numerous books are three published by SUNY Press: Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition and as editor, Cavell on Film and Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, and Jean Rouch. Charles Warren is Lecturer on Film at Boston University and Associate of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University. He writes widely on film and has edited many books, including Gardner’s Making Dead Birds, Just Representations, and Human Documents: Eight Photographers.

A Celebration of Life and Film

Jean Rouch

Makes the case that philosophy has an essential role to play in the serious study of film. William Rothman has long been considered one of the seminal figures in the field of film-philosophy. From his landmark book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, now in its second edition, to the essays collected here in Tuitions and Intuitions, Rothman has been guided by two intuitions: first, that his kind of film criticism is philosophy; and second, that such a marriage of criticism and philosophy has an essential part to play in the serious study of film. In this book, he aspires, borrowing a formulation from Emerson, to “pay the tuition” for these intuitions. Thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated, and provocative, the essays included here address a wide range of films, including classical Hollywood movies; the work of “auteur” directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Yasujirō Ozu, and Woody Allen; performances by John Barrymore and James Stewart; unconventional works by Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman, Terrence Malick, and the Dardenne brothers; the television series Justified; and documentaries by Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Robert Gardner. All the essays address questions of philosophical significance and, taken together, manifest Rothman’s lifelong commitment when writing about a film, to respect the film’s own ideas; to remain open to the film’s ways of expressing its ideas; and to let the film help teach him how to view it, how to think about it, and how to discover what he has at heart to say about it. “Tuitions and Intuitions is simply indispensable to anyone interested in philosophy and in film as philosophy. This book as a whole expresses and exemplifies moral perfectionism through the exploration of what our self becomes with this experience of cinema.” — Sandra Laugier, University Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris “Bringing Rothman’s work together highlights patterns and consistent concerns that may not otherwise be obvious to readers. The book will be invaluable to current and future Rothman scholars.” — Kyle Stevens, author of Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism

Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy

Tuitions and Intuitions

Wimal Dissanayake

Dudley Andrew

Adjunct Fellow East-West Center Hawaii Scholar in Residence Wimal Dissanayake

This unique study examines the importance of melodrama in the film traditions of Japan, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia.

Melodrama and Asian Cinema

Documentary Film Classics

Andrew Horton

Mihail Iosifovič Brašinskij

Michael Brashinsky

Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost gathers together 23 essays written by some of Russia's most astute commentators of film and culture. Written during the 1980s and published in English for the first time, this collection includes reviews of films such as Little Vera and Taxi Blues, which were critically hailed in the West. Their comments not only illuminate important aspects of Russian filmmaking during this decade: as importantly, they capture a sense of a society in flux during the waning years of Communism, as well as the larger context within which Glasnost cinema and culture developed. This collection provides insight into the successes and shortcomings of Glasnost, as captured in film, for a Western audience.

Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost

William Rothman argues that the driving force of Hitchcock's work was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite Oscar Wilde quote, "Each man kills the thing he loves," with the quintessentially American philosophy, articulated in Emerson's writings, that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era their extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic seriousness. A Hitchcock thriller could be a comedy of remarriage or a melodrama of an unknown woman, both Emersonian genres, except for the murderous villain and godlike author, Hitchcock, who pulls the villain's strings—and ours. Because Hitchcock believed that the camera has a murderous aspect, the question "What if anything justifies killing?," which every Hitchcock film engages, was for him a disturbing question about his own art. Tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock's career, Rothman discerns a progression in the films' meditations on murder and artistic creation. This progression culminates in Marnie (1964), Hitchcock's most controversial film, in which Hitchcock overcame his ambivalence and fully embraced the Emersonian worldview he had always also resisted. Reading key Emerson passages with the degree of attention he accords to Hitchcock sequences, Rothman discovers surprising affinities between Hitchcock's way of thinking cinematically and the philosophical way of thinking Emerson's essays exemplify. He finds that the terms in which Emerson thought about reality, about our "flux of moods," about what it is within us that never changes, about freedom, about America, about reading, about writing, and about thinking are remarkably pertinent to our experience of films and to thinking and writing about them. He also reflects on the implications of this discovery, not only for Hitchcock scholarship but also for film criticism in general.

William Rothman

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