Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Murder and Montage
1 FRAMING FOR MURDER: CUT-INS AND CLOSE-UPS
The Human Face, the Murder Weapon, and the Close-Up
How Guns Get Attention in Film Theory
Case Study: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Heir of Genghis Khan (aka Storm over Asia, 1928)
Murder and Perspectival Scale: Eisenstein’s “Hidden Montage”
2 ACTING IN SILENTS: MURDER, MONTAGE, ANDTHE FILM ACTOR
The Body in Pieces
Man, Montage, and the Machine Aesthetic
Case Study: Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (1926)
The End of St. Petersburg (1927): Bringing Life to a Statue
Aural Montage and Pudovkin’s Deserter (1932)
Anatomy as Alphabet and the Occlusion of Interiority
Putting Stanislavsky Actors through the Montage Machine: Revolvers and Revolutionary Consciousness in The Mother (1926)
Coda: Eisenstein, Inner Speech, and Murder
3 MURDER OUTSIDE THE POETICS OF MONTAGE: ANDRÉ BAZIN AND JEAN RENOIR
André Bazin and the Preservation of Loss
Bazinian Ambiguity and the Murder Scene
Murder Scenes in Renoir’s Films of the1930s: An Overview
Case Study: Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)
The Rules of the Game (1939)
A Montage of Distractions: Murder in La Chienne (1931), Toni (1935), La Bête humaine (1938), and La Marseillaise (1938)
Part Two: Murder and Genre
4 INDIVIDUAL AND SERIES
Montage and Genre
Manny Farber and the Logic of Genre
Case Study: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948)
“Cosmetics on a Cadaver”: James Agee on War Films
5 STYLIZATION AND MIMESIS
Murder as Stylization
Mildred Pierce (1945)
Style and the Man
Murder in the Mirror: The Shining (1980) and Dead Man (1995)
Conclusion: Hitchcock’s Aerial Views
Notes
Bibliography
Index