{"id":33705,"date":"2016-03-28T21:42:45","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T02:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=33705"},"modified":"2016-09-02T18:07:39","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T23:07:39","slug":"threefer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/28\/threefer\/","title":{"rendered":"Threefer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bordwell-cover-design<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

First,\u00a0there\u2019s this:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/isthmus.com\/screens\/movies\/film-scholars-david-bordwell-and-kristin-thompson\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks to Laura Jones and the Isthmus staff for this profile. Among the stills they didn\u2019t use is one of Kristin and me with Robert Altman. I interviewed him\u00a0for a screening of The Player<\/em> at the Walker Art Center in 1992. Why waste the scan?<\/em> I thought, so I put it below.<\/p>\n

Second,\u00a0there\u2019s the pleasant fact that my book The Rhapsodes<\/em> <\/a>will be available\u00a0on 4 April, Kristin\u2019s birthday. It\u2019s an essayistic study of four American film critics who, I think, prepared the way for the film-reviewing explosion\u00a0of the 1960s.<\/p>\n

I like to say that good film criticism offers not only opinions but information and ideas. Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler met that standard. The book tries to show that they had intriguing notions\u00a0about American cinema and its aesthetic. They were superb writers as well. Although each man’s style was unique, they all wrote with a\u00a0gleaming\u00a0exuberance. The result, as the title suggests, is\u00a0a controlled wildness, a quality captured I think in the book’s epigraph by Robert Lewis Stevenson:<\/p>\n

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m very grateful to the University of Chicago Press, particularly my editor Rodney Powell, manuscript editor Kelly Finefrock-Creed, and Senior Promotions Manager\u00a0Melinda Kennedy. Deep thanks as well to my initial readers Jim Naremore and Chuck Maland, and to the people who kindly endorsed the book: David Koepp, Manohla Dargis, and Philip Lopate.<\/p>\n

More background on the book is here<\/a>. I hope to offer some ideas about film criticism today\u00a0in an upcoming entry.<\/p>\n

Third, later this week Kristin and I are moving to Manhattan for three months. (Whoopee!) She\u2019ll be working on her Amarna statuary project with her collaborator, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I\u2019ll be doing research, mostly on Hollywood in the 1940s, while watching movies, seeing friends, and blogging. I’ll give some talks as well. One, presented\u00a0at Sacred Heart University<\/a> and at Tufts<\/a>,\u00a0is drawn from the 1940s book. I\u2019ll discuss\u00a0The Rhapsodes<\/em> at the 92nd<\/sup> Street YMCA<\/a> and the Museum of the Moving Image<\/a> in Astoria (details on the last yet to be finalized). Maybe I\u2019ll see you at one of these get-togethers?<\/p>\n

\"Altman<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here: First,\u00a0there\u2019s this: http:\/\/isthmus.com\/screens\/movies\/film-scholars-david-bordwell-and-kristin-thompson\/ Thanks to Laura Jones and the Isthmus staff for this profile. Among the stills they didn\u2019t use is one of Kristin and me with Robert Altman. I interviewed him\u00a0for a screening of The Player at the Walker Art Center in 1992. Why waste the scan? I thought, so I put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,42,74,210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s-hollywood","category-books","category-film-criticism","category-the-rhapsodes-american-film-critics-of-the-1940s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33705"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33714,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33705\/revisions\/33714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}