Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
In a recent international survey conducted by the online film journal Screening the Past, which invited film critics and scholars around the world to nominate the most important contributions to the field in the past decade, The Material Ghost tied for first place with Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form.
Gilberto Perez is a professor of film studies at Sarah Lawrence College and film critic for the Yale Review.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Film and PhysicsChapter 1. The Documentary ImageChapter 2. The Narrative SequenceChapter 3. The Bewildered EquilibristChapter 4. The Deadly Space BetweenChapter 5. The Meaning of RevolutionChapter 6. Landscape and FictionChapter 7. American TragedyChapter 8. History LessonsChapter 9. The Signifiers of TendernessChapter 10. The Point of View of a Stranger
What People are Saying About This
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere.
Stanley Cavell
Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book -- the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film.
Adrian Martin
The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Béla Balázs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez’s superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet?
Edward W. Said
A superb work of interpretation and understanding, unique in its capacity for remaining close to the concrete exigencies of the form as well as to various theoretical problematics. Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book.
From the Publisher
The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Béla Balázs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez’s superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet?—Adrian Martin
This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn't hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism—a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an art form. The book is really about nothing beyond the author's own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style. . . A work of transcendent intelligence.—Peter Matthews
A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere.—Jonathan Rosenbaum
Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book—the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching—accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film.—Stanley Cavell
Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book.—Edward W. Said
Peter Matthews
This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn't hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism—a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an art form. The book is really about nothing beyond the author's own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style. . . A work of transcendent intelligence.
