The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers indepth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Part I Letters of Introduction
- 1. Retying the Threads
- 2. The Path and the Passeur
- 3. That Summer Feeling
- Part II Scenographies
- 4. Scenes
- 5. Wishful Thinking
- 6. Entities and Energies
- 7. Entranced
- Part III A Cinephile in Australia
- 8. No Flowers for the Cinephile:
- Part IV The Lyrical Impulse
- 9. Refractory Characters, Shards of Time and Space
- 10. The Trouble with Fiction
- 11. Ball of Fire
- 12. The Ever-Tested Limit:
- 13. Delirious Enchantment
- Part V Genre Games
- 14. Mr Big
- 15. Unlawful Entries:
- 16. Lady, Beware
- 17. Live to Tell
- 18. In the Mood For (Something Like) Love
- 19. Shivers, Surprise and Discomfort
- Part VI Interventions
- 20. Making a Bad Script Worse:
- 21. The Offended Critic:
- 22. Wild Psychoanalysis of a Vicarious, Unstable Reality
- Part VII Envoi
- 23. No Direction Home:
- 24. Farewells, Full Circles and Ellipses
- 25. My Back Pages
- 26. The File We Accompany
- Sources of Texts
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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