After over a century of existence, the cinema still has its mysteries.
Why, for example, is the job we call movie stardom unlike any other in
the world? How do films provide so much unconcealed information that we
fail to notice? What makes it hard to define what counts as "acting"?
How do movies like Casablanca and Breathless store the film and
world histories of their generations? How can we reconcile auteurism's
celebration of the movie director's authority with the camera's
automatism? Why have the last four decades of film criticism so often
neglected such questions? After beginning with an overview of film
studies, this book proposes a shift from predictable theoretical
approaches to models that acknowledge the perplexities and mysteries of
the movies. Deriving methods from cinephilia, Wittgenstein, Richard
Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Eleanor Duckworth, V. F. Perkins, and James
Naremore, Robert B. Ray offers close readings that call attention to
what we have missed in such classic films as La Règle du Jeu, It
Happened One Night, It's a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Holiday, The
Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, Breathless, and Tickets.