Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Questions of Cinema by Stephen Heath ISBN: 0-253-15914-8 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: December, 1985 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: An Exemplary Work of Academic Arrogance
Comment: The essays in this book come out of the time period when critical theory was the hottest thing around in academia. One unfortunate characteristic of this kind of writing is its dense, deliberately obfuscatory styling. A brief example will give a more than adequate idea of the whole: "Everything and nothing, the film is perpetually splitting, the division of the place of the spectator as subject in the troubling of sight and look."
There are two profound problems with this kind of writing. The first is that the claims Heath makes simply aren't true, or at the very least cannot ever be proven as such. How is a film, any film, "perpetually splitting?" How can anyone say that a film divides the place of the spectator? Heath assigns radical functions and attributes to film that are simply unsupported. His ideas do make an odd kind of sense, and are at least generally comprehensible and discussable, but the problem is that they are absolutely not grounded in reality at all. He is problematizing things that should not and ultimately cannot be problematized, such as the relation between viewer and film. There is no problem here: there is a viewer, and there is a film. Neither is split nor splitting, nor do they embody any of the other ridiculous attributes Heath assigns to them. How can anyone possibly say that a film is "everything and nothing?" Such a statement is empty and meaningless. The question that MUST be asked w/r/t this kind of writing is: How is any of it true?
The second major problem is the style of writing itself. It is dense and obfuscatory, and purposefully so. The problem is that Heath's work purports to be scholarship. The goal of scholarship is to instruct and elucidate. Heath's writing, on the other hand, mystifies and confuses. True scholarship, good scholarship, has no business doing anything other than informing its readers in the clearest and most succinct way possible. If you think otherwise, if you'd like to "problematize" this statement, then you've probably spent too much time in a graduate Humanities program. I've heard it argued that a benefit of writing in this fashion is that it leaves room for interpretation and multiple meanings, rather than trying to claim a monopoly on truth and understanding. This argument, however, is bogus: If you're a scholar, and you'd like to leave room for interpretation and multiple meanings, you simply say "This can be interpreted in multiple ways. Here are some of them: 1... 2... 3... etc." No need for tortuous prose, pretentious theory-speak, or inane puns. Being dense and confusing is the proper work of poets, writers, and artists of all kinds, NOT of scholars.
It is painfully easy to see why so many artists scoff at critics' interpretations of their works after reading some of Heath's ridiculous articles. This book is a monumental piece of poor scholarship and academic arrogance, and should be used as a prime example (along with everything by Derrida and Lacan!) of how NOT to write or "think" for generations of future scholars to come.
Rating: 5
Summary: Core Cinema Studies
Comment: This is one of the core texts to emerge out of the journal Screen published by SEFT - most of the texts appeared in Screen during the 1970's and early 80s. At this time heath was probably the most important academic film critic writing in English. his written output was and is sparse but the quality is exteemely high. The critical direction of the pieces in the book are along the lines of assigning Lacanian psychoanalysis, Metzian cinematic theory etc... read this and then have another look at classical hollywood output.
 |
Title: The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema by Christian Metz, Chriatian Metz, Annwyl Williams ISBN: 0253203805 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: February, 1986 List Price(USD): $17.09 |
 |
Title: Narration in the Fiction Film by David Bordwell ISBN: 0299101746 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: December, 1989 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
