The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts. He posited three primary types of space in fiction cinema: the field of the screen, the psychological space of the actor, and the area of experience and geography that the film covers. This book brings together five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guediguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. It proposes that people think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Dumont's attraction to real settings and locality suggests a commitment to realism. New forms and surfaces of spectatorship provoke new sensations and engender new kinds of perception, as well as new ways of understanding and feeling space. The book interrogates Guediguian's obsessive portrayal of one particular city, Marseilles. Entering into the spaces of work and non-work in Cantet's films, it asks what constitutes space and place within the contemporary field of social relations. The book also engages with cultural space as the site of social integration and metissage in the work of Kechiche, his dialogues with diasporic communities and highly contested urban locales. Denis's film work contains continually shifting points of passage between inside and outside, objective and subjective, in the restless flux.
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The documentary diaries
Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker
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This book shows what happens from the birth of the idea until a film is completed. This means covering all the hurdles, and the bumps, and other obstacles along the way, including inspiration, proposal writing, finance and marketing. The book shows how the author developed, produced, and worked on seven films. Four are major documentaries, the fifth a feature-length docudrama, and two are works in progress. All have and had multiple problems. None of the completed films were easy to make. The book discusses the pros and cons of working with partners, and shows what happens when there is harmony, or where things break down through disagreements. The problem of raising a budget comes up in all the films, and is discussed most thoroughly in the book. The book also addresses the difficulties of working internationally, and shows how infinite patience and stubbornness can be required when working with a broadcast station. At the end of several of the chapters the author has also added a short section called 'Production notes.' These notes usually amplify and explain further some central problem raised in the chapter. One of the chapters in the book deals with the specifics of making one particular family film. The notes which follow, however, tell people about making family film in general.
‘'Why hadn't I understood that you don't choose documentary subjects, they choose you?' Alan Rosenthal states, unequivocally, in his recent book The Documentary Diaries (p. 23). It is a nugget of advice typical of the book as a whole and delivered in the easy going, rhetorical way that will be familiar to those who have followed Rosenthal's written work on documentary to date, in particularly his previous practical guides referenced below. For the pearl of wisdom is not found just in the idea, but in Rosenthal's articulation of it, and the characterisation of the documentary subject as a 'sly bastard of an idea' that 'comes up from behind and bashes you behind the ear' as you are 'sneaking along in your usual doze' (p. 23) tells us something about both creativity and the person doing the creating.'
Richard Wallace, University of Warwick
Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies
‘Alan Rosenthal doesn't make personal documentaries. Instead he writes autobiographical accounts of creating them; and he does so unashamedly in the guise of teacher, guide and practical theoretician. The documentary diaries is the latest in a unique series of memoirs-come-handbooks: a 'how-to' guide grounded in the realities of documentary production from the moment of personal inspiration to the aftermath of audience reception. Rosenthal is one of the few practitioners able to reflect on his filmmaking experience to such good effect.'
Brian Winston, University of Lincoln
‘Rosenthal's often wry reflections on a life in documentary filmmaking mix well-grounded insights into the challenges of the genre with sharp practical advice for those keen to try their hand.'
John Corner, University of Leeds
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The life of mise-en-scène
Visual style and British film criticism, 1946–78
This book explores the role of mise-en-scene in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. Mise-en-scene, and other ways of conceiving visual style, has been central to so many important debates that the writing examined in the book shaped the field in enduring ways. The book provides a cross-section of the British culture and its attitudes to film. It also considers a range of important contexts, from material conditions of film viewing (and therefore criticism) to the cultural and political shifts of 1956. The book further investigates the frequently asserted connection between literary criticism and the approaches developed in Movie. It identifies the range of different approaches to interpreting mise-en-scene advanced in Movie, drawing out sections on action, camera movement and placing, connections between different parts of the film, and a range of further debates. 'Tales of Sound and Fury' is an extraordinary article, and Elsaesser's appreciation of the plastic and expressive qualities of domestic melodrama and the broader melodramatic tradition is exemplary. In the early 1970s, writing on melodrama provided some of the richest expressions of mise-en-scene criticism. The book embodies a number of approaches which were to undermine the emergent interest in the interpretation of the film style. Melodrama criticism is a crucial focus for shifts in film criticism and theory, and for this history.
In the full-length treatment of the child in Spanish cinema, this book explores the ways that the cinematic child comes to represent 'prosthetic memory'. The cinematic children in the book retain traces of their mechanical origins: thus they are dolls, ventriloquists' dummies, cyborgs or automata. Moreover, by developing the monstrous undertones evoked by these mechanical traces (cinema such as 'Frankensteinian dream'), these films, in different ways, return repeatedly to a central motif. The central motif is the child's confrontation with a monster and, derivatively, the theme of the monstrous child. Through their obsessive recreation over time, the themes of the child and the monster and the monstrous child come to stand in metonymically for the confrontation of the self with the horrors of Spain's recent past. The book focuses on the cine religioso (religious cinema), in particular, Marcelino, pan y vino. The children of cine religioso appear like automata, programmed to love unconditionally an absent mother. The book then examines the Marisol's films from the 1960s and the way she was groomed by her creators to respond and engineer the economic and cultural changes of the consumerist Spain of the 1960s. It further deals with Victor Erice's El espiritu de la colmena and works through cinematic memories of this film in later works such as El laberinto del fauno, El orfanato and El espinazo del diablo. The films are seen to gesture towards the imaginary creation of a missing child.