Robert B. Ray - Böcker

Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: "I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate." How would we go about finding those things? What method would enable us to retrieve them, and by doing so, to understand better how Hollywood films got made? The ABCs of Classic Hollywood attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American Studio System reached the peak of its economic and cultural power: Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis. To avoid the predictable generalizations that have plagued film studies, Ray works with the movies' details, treated as initially mysterious, but promising, clues: e.g., Grand Hotel's coffin and room assignments; The Philadelphia Story's diving board and license plate PA55; The Maltese Falcon's clocks and missing bed; Meet Me in St. Louis's violinist and ribboned cat. By producing at least 26 entries for each of these films (one for every letter of the alphabet), Ray demonstrates that a movie's details contain the record of the work and ideas that produced them, the endless negotiation between commercial efficiency and seductive enchantment. In our unconscious memories, we recognize something in the movies, something tantalizing and just out of reach. This book unlocks those memories, making them conscious and explicit, so that they will help us understand the most powerful and important storytelling system ever designed.

Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: "I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate." How would we go about finding those things? What method would enable us to retrieve them, and by doing so, to understand better how Hollywood films got made? The ABCs of Classic Hollywood attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American Studio System reached the peak of its economic and cultural power: Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis. To avoid the predictable generalizations that have plagued Film Studies, Ray works with the movies' details, treated as initially mysterious, but promising, clues: e.g., Grand Hotel's coffin and room assignments; The Philadelphia Story's diving board and license plate PA55; The Maltese Falcon's clocks and missing bed; Meet Me in St. Louis's violinist and ribboned cat. By producing at least 26 entries for each of these films (one for every letter of the alphabet), Ray demonstrates that a movie's details contain the record of the work and ideas that produced them, the endless negotiation between commercial efficiency and seductive enchantment. In our unconscious memories, we recognize something in the movies, something tantalizing and just out of reach. This book unlocks those memories, making them conscious and explicit, so that they will help us understand the most powerful and important storytelling system ever designed.

How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural StudiesRobert B. RayForeword by James NaremoreChallenges accepted ideas about film and cultural studies.In the 1920s, when film criticism was as new as the cinema itself, a particular way of thinking about the movies developed in Paris. The cinema, this theory suggested, turns on photography's automatism, the revolutionary fact that for the first time in human history a perfect representation of the world can be produced by accident. Moreover, the camera's gaze has the potential to transform ordinary objects—a telephone, a letter on a desk, a woman's face—into spellbinding images, swarming with details whose precise appeal remains unpredictable. By the 1930s, this theory of photogénie (photogenia) had vanished from most serious writing about film. Why did this disappearance occur? In this collection of essays, Robert B. Ray discusses this disappearance and other mysteries like it: Why did photography and the detective story originate at exactly the same time? Why has some of the most prominent academic writing about the cinema resisted anything but "scientific" accounts of the movies? What counts as "knowledge" in film studies or any intellectual discipline? What do the French Impressionists have in common with the Sex Pistols? How did Douglas Sirk's critically ignored melodramas become "subversive critiques of bourgeois ideology"? How did the fate of Sirk's movies help us understand postmodernism and the avant-garde? In taking up these questions, Ray's essays challenge certain ideas about film and cultural studies, while arguing for a mode of writing about the movies and experimental art that would respect the abidingly mysterious effect of their images and sounds.Robert B. Ray, Director of Film and Media Studies and Professor of English at the University of Florida, is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930–1980 and The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.ContentsForeword by James NaremoreImpressionism, Surrealism, and Film Theory: Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets LostThe Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of KnowledgeSnapshots: The Beginnings of PhotographyTrackingHow to Start and Avant-GardeHow to Teach Cultural StudiesThe Best Way to Understand PostmodernismThe Mystery of Edward HopperFilm and LiteratureConclusion

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents' house in Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin on land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After 26 months he transformed his stay in the woods into one of the most famous events in American history. In Walden x 40, adopting Thoreau's own compositional method, Robert B. Ray takes up several questions posed in Walden. Thoreau developed his books from his lectures, and his lectures from his almost-daily journal notations of the world around him, with its fluctuating weather and appointed seasons, both forever familiar and suddenly brand new. Ray derives his 40 brief essays from the details of Walden itself, reading the book in the way that Thoreau proposed to explore his own life—deliberately. Ray demonstrates that however accustomed we have grown to its lessons, Walden continues to be as surprising as the November snowfall that, Thoreau reports, "covered the ground . . . and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter."

Robert B. Ray examines the ideology of the most enduringly popular cinema in the world--the Hollywood movie. Aided by 364 frame enlargements, he describes the development of that historically overdetermined form, giving close readings of five typical instances: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. Like the heroes of these movies, American filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, American cinema tries to have it both ways. Although Hollywood's commercial success has led the world audience to equate the American cinema with film itself, Hollywood filmmaking is a particular strategy designed to respond to specific historical situations. As an art restricted in theoretical scope but rich in individual variations, the American cinema poses the most interesting question of popular culture: Do dissident forms have any chance of remaining free of a mass medium seeking to co-opt them?

Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller All the President’s Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film’s achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President’s Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.

Ray offers closereadings 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.