The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium

Abstract

Gilberto Perez's love of film dates back to his childhood in Havana, great town for going to the movies. His favourite theatre was the Capri, which showed an astonishing variety of films from all over the world. And his regular companion at the movies was his father, a doctor who brought a passion for literature the arts to his enjoyment of film - passed that sensibility to his son. I grew up with the movies as art, writes Perez, and with art not as something stuffy affected but as something vital, like the movies. In The Material Ghost, Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write an engaging study of films filmmakers the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex richly contradictory - a medium both lifelike dreamlike, both documentary fictional, where real details create imaginary worlds, where figures appear before us like actors on a stage yet are removed from us like characters in a novel. He investigates these complexities by discussing a breathtaking range of works from the earliest days of cinema to the present. From the silent era, he explores the work of Keaton Chaplin, Griffith Eisenstein, the haunting anxiety of Murnau's Nosferatu the epic lyricism of Dovzhenko's Earth. From the classic era of sound cinema, he discusses the searching realism of Jean Renoir the memorable westerns of John Ford, Bunuel's corrosive documentary Land Without Bread Hitchcock's mesmerizing Vertigo. From the sixties seventies, he examines the shifting parables of Jean-Luc Godard the arresting uncertainty of Antonini's Eclipse, Straub Huillet's reflective History Lessons such explosive Hollywood films as The Wild Bunch The Godfather. He also comments on the current scene, including the refashioned gangster films of Martin Scorsese the philosophical realism of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.