"No serious student of film should miss the great work collected in this
volume."--W. A. Vincent, Choice
"When so much writing about film is based on overall impressions or
shadowy memories, on notes scribbled in the dark or published shot
breakdowns that are often overgeneralized or even inaccurate, it is
refreshing to be confronted with such scholarly work, characterized by a
genuinely attentive eye and a punctilious observation of detail. This
long-awaited collection, gathering Bellour's ground breaking studies
into one volume, will surely be a crucial source of inspiration for
future generations of film scholars." --Peter Wollen, Bookforum
The Analysis of Film brings together Raymonds Bellour's now classic
studies of classic Hollywood film. It is at once a book about the
methods of close film analysis, the narrative structure of Hollywood
film, Hitchcock's work--The Birds, Marnie, Psycho, North by
Northwest--and the role of the woman in western representation. But,
finally, it is a book about cinema itself and the love for cinema that
drives the passion for analyzing the supreme art form of the twentieth
century.
Bellour creatively reworks the ideas and methods of structuralism,
semiology, and psychoanalysis to unravel the knot of significations that
is the filmic text. The introductory chapter sketches out a history of
the way the close analysis of film developed. And then, beginning with a
study of the Bodega Bay sequence of The Birds, the book goes on to
examine every aspect of that singular critical practice, "the analysis
of film."
The book is also a model of how to write about the intricacies of film
narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing larger
contextual issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in Western
cultural forms. A new, final chapter on D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale
Operator brilliantly demonstrates that the dynamics of repetition and
alternation that Bellour discovered to be the heartbeat of Hollywood
narrative film were already there in nascent form at the beginnings of
cinema.
