Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
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- Synopsis
- In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti examines film's nature and role in the twentieth century, an age obsessed with immediacy, worried about newness, eager for nearness and transparency, and torn apart by conflict. In its time, cinema negotiated the different needs of modernity, compared and united conflicting stimuli, and provided answers for everydayness. Film cultivated a personal gaze, intimately tied to the emergence of point of view, but also able to restore the immediacy of the real; a complex gaze, in which reality and imagination were combined; a piercing gaze, achieved by machine, and yet deeply anthropomorphic; an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to the spectator's orientation; and an immersive gaze, which gave the impression of being inside the seen world while also maintaining a sense of distance. Each of these gazes combined two different qualities and balanced them, resulting in a synthesis that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. As Casetti demonstrates, film proposed a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle, and is therefore the key to understanding the modern experience.
- Copyright:
- 2008
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780231511490
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 07/15/13
- Copyrighted By:
- Columbia University Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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