Film Hieroglyphs

by Tom Conley

Overview

At a time when traditional film theory privileged the purely visual, Film Hieroglyphs introduced a new way of watching film—examining the ways in which writing bears on cinema. Author Tom Conley gives special consideration to the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds with one another.Conley hypothesizes that major directors—Renoir, Lang, Walsh, Rossellini—tend unconsciously to meld history and ideology. Graphic elements are seen as simultaneously foreign and integral to the field of the image. From these contradictions hieroglyphs emerge that mark a design attesting to a hidden rhetoric and to configurations of meaning that cinema cannot always control.Tom Conley is Lowell Professor of romance languages and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Among his books is The Self-Made Map (1996), as well as translations of The Fold (1992) by Gilles Deleuze and In the Metro (2002) by Marc Augé, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816649709
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	12/27/2006
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.89(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Hieroglyphs Then and Now     ix
Introduction     xxiii
The Filmic Icon: Boudu sauve des eaux     1
The Law of the Letter: Scarlet Street     20
Dummies Revived: Manpower     46
The Nether Eye: Objective, Burma!     71
Facts and Figures of History: Paisan     102
The Human Alphabet: La bete humaine     130
Decoding Film Noir: The Killers, High Sierra, and White Heat     154
Epilogue     190
Appendix     195
Notes     217
Index     243