Colecție: Film

ISBN: 978-606-082-031-4

An apariție: 2024
Tip ediție: broșată
Format: A4
Pagini: 412

George Littera

 

Essays on Film

The present collection of texts, written by film professor and critic George Littera between 1964 and 2000 for various publications, chooses to organize itself thematically, at least on a first level, demonstrating Littera's interest and dexterity in writing equally well about broad theoretical issues (in the texts grouped in Chapter I), about the local film landscape, past and present (in Chapter II) and about leading figures and events in international cinema (in Chapter III).

If the first group of texts is structured around a few defining themes for the field of film studies, such as the specificity of the cinematic medium, the characteristics of major genres such as the melodrama or the musical, or elements of film language, the last article, on the major issues preoccupying the spheres of film criticism and theory between 1925 and 1935 in Romania, introduces us to the following two parts, where the ordering criterion of the chronology of the films discussed is added.

Due to this structure, we can trace how the history of the cinematic medium was mirrored in Littera's thought - a deep and exploratory thought, eager to address both the great topics of debate that marked his era, and genres and issues that seem minor at a superficial glance. Therefore, what the reader's attention is drawn to first are reflections on themes that either absorbed Western film studies (to which Littera proves very well attuned) or were dictated to some extent by the Eastern Bloc context (such as socio-political film or the question of the non-professional actor); but at a closer look, some very original interests emerge, constituting some of the rare pages in Romanian filmology on topics such as animated film (another configuration of his interest in the question of film auteurship, made more transparent by the control over the finished product that animation confers) or the pioneers of national cinema (these lasts texts also demonstrating a historiographical ambition, inasmuch as Littera wants to inscribe these filmmakers’ names in the history of the medium, despite the inaccessibility of their works, which he compensates for by synthesizing their critical reception in various press outlets of the time).

Finally, beyond the interest of the content itself, the selection of texts also highlights the elegance of Littera's prose, which is predominantly rigorous and restrained, with rare and all the more welcome bursts of lyricism

Colecție: Film

ISBN: 978-606-082-031-4

An apariție: 2024
Tip ediție: broșată
Format: A4
Pagini: 412

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