Raymond Bellour. The analysis of film

Raymond Bellour. The analysis of film / Ed.by Constance Penly. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. 303 p.The Analysis of Film brings together Raymond Bellour’s acclaimed studies of classical Hollywood film. It is at once a book about the methods of close film analysis, the narrative structure of Hollywood film, Hitchcock’s work – The Birds, Marnie, Psycho, North by Northwest – and the role of woman in Western representation. But, finally, it is a book about cinema itself, and the love for cinema that drives the passion for analyzing the supreme art form of the twentieth century.
The book is also a model how to write about the intricacies of film narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing the larger contextual issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in Western cultural forms. The final, added chapter on D.W.Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator brilliantly demonstrates that the dynamics of repetition and alternation that Bellour discovered to be the heartbeat of Hollywood narrative film were already there in nascent form at the beginning of cinema.Preface by Constance Penley
A Bit of History
l. The Unattainable Text
2. System of a Fragment (on The Birds)
3. The Obvious and the Code (on The Big Sleep)
4. Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest)
5. To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi)
6. To Enunciate (on Mamie)
7. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho)
8. To Alternate/To Narrate (on The Lonedale Operator)
Notes
Works by Raymond Bellour