Full Product Details
Author: James Naremore
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9780520071940
ISBN 10: 0520071948
Pages: 316
Publication Date: 29 August 1990
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Undergraduate
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
"""Each chapter is richly informed about the films and their various cultural intersections, so the reader has the sense of participating in a fascinating discussion that refuses the temptation of closure and eventually stops without concluding. If Naremore's book is, like the concept it describes, a bit of a baggy monster, it is well worth the encounter.""--""Choice"
Each chapter is richly informed about the films and their various cultural intersections, so the reader has the sense of participating in a fascinating discussion that refuses the temptation of closure and eventually stops without concluding. If Naremore's book is, like the concept it describes, a bit of a baggy monster, it is well worth the encounter. -- Choice
""Each chapter is richly informed about the films and their various cultural intersections, so the reader has the sense of participating in a fascinating discussion that refuses the temptation of closure and eventually stops without concluding. If Naremore's book is, like the concept it describes, a bit of a baggy monster, it is well worth the encounter.""--""Choice
A text on movie acting, to be read with handy VCR and cassettes stacked at your side, by the author of The Magic World of Orson Welles (1978). Naremore has many enjoyable passages in what in the end amounts to a laborious read. He begins with a history of the rhetoric of acting and how the earliest filmmakers attempted to break away from staginess and the proscenium. What happened is that acting in movies became a parading of expertise - an obvious mastery, skill, or inventiveness that is implied in the normative use of the word performance. What he strives for, in opening up certain famous performances, is an indirect commentary on the social and psychological foundations of identity - a commentary about which many readers may say, Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Meanwhile, they will enjoy his rich anatomizations of Lillian Gish's expertise in True Heart Susie, Charlie Chaplin's in The Gold Rush, Marlene Dietrich's in Morocco, James Cagney's in Angels with Dirty Faces, Katharine Hepburn's in Holiday, James Stewart's in Rear Window, Marlon Brando's in On the Waterfront, and Cary Grant's in North by Northwest, all of them marvelously alive under Naremore's psychoscope, which picks up practically cellular impressions of the actors' motives. Quite admirable detail - particularly about how Brando cleverly and sexily handles grieving Eva Marie Saint's glove in the playground scene, or even about Grant's bluish-gray socks as the airplane chases him in the crop-dusting sequence. Reading this is like waiting for a fastball that never comes, although the pitcher keeps you suckered by his reserve. Buy by all means - but be prepared. (Kirkus Reviews)
Author Information
James Naremore is director of the film studies program at Indiana University.
