Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar - Couverture souple

Harvey, James

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0865478325 ISBN 13 : 9780865478329

Editeur : Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl, 2015

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Praise for Watching Them Be. Harvey, in astute observations and rich descriptions, attempts to put words around the ineffable force of star power. --Andrea Denhoed, The New Yorker[Watching Them Be] is a model of what film criticism always was at its best and what it continues to be at its best: the intersection of rare sagacity and insight with ever rarer literary and stylistic grace. --Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News. Harvey's meticulously close reading of movies illuminatingly analyzes both the controlling sensibility of stars and the viewer's process of intense watching. --Kirkus. Watching Them Be is James Harvey's best book, and consequently one of the best film books ever. The tender, penetrating gaze of the true movie lover, the depth of historical knowledge, the beauty of the prose style, the keen judgment about cinematic passages that range from the ridiculous to the sublime (sometimes simultaneously)--all add up to a delight, something of a miracle, in fact. And it's not just about movies; it's filled with a mature philosophical perspective and moral wisdom about isolation, connection, desire, limitation, transcendence, being--in short, the human condition. --Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head. James Harvey's new book, Watching Them Be, is splendid. His observations about actors, actresses, and the stories they animate are profound and powerfully convincing. --Paula Fox, author of News from the World. There are few pleasures available to adults right now deeper than settling into James Harvey's deliriously acute readings of the movies. Whether he's fixing on the grown-upness of Garbo, the surprising desolation of John Wayne, or the grave clowns of Godard, Harvey has a unique ability to make us understand how much our watching actors has shaped our own ways of being in the world. There are times--and this is one of them when I think James Harvey may be the best writer working in America, and that he has chosen the movies --Various

Présentation de l'éditeur :

One does not go to see them act, James Baldwin wrote about the great iconic movie stars, one goes to watch them be. It seems obvious...Where else besides the movies do you get to see other persons so intimately, so pressingly, so largely? Where else are you allowed such sustained and searching looks as you give to these strangers on the screen, whoever they really are? In life you try not to stare; but at the movies that's exactly what you get to do, two hours or more-safely, raptly, even blissfully. It's this sort of amplified, heightened, sometimes transcendent seeing that James Harvey explores in Watching Them Be. Marvellously vivid and perceptive, and impressively erudite, this is his take on how aura is communicated in movies. Beginning where Roland Barthes left off with the face of Greta Garbo and ending with Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar (and its inscrutable nonhuman star), Harvey moves nimbly and expertly through film history, celebrating actors and directors who have particularly conveyed a feeling of transcendence. From Marlene Dietrich to John Wayne to Robert De Niro, from Nashville to Jackie Brown to Masculine/Feminine and the implicitly or explicitly religious films of Roberto Rossellini and Carl Theodor Dreyer, this is one man's personal, deeply felt account of the films that have changed his life. They will also, Harvey suggests, change yours.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0865478325
• ISBN 13: 9780865478329
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 400