A Grammar of Murder by Karla Oeler
The dark shadows and offscreen space that force us to imagine violence we cannot see. The real slaughter of animals spliced with the fictional killing of men. The missing countershot from the murder victim's point of view. Such images, or absent images, Karla Oeler contends, distill how the murder scene challenges and changes film. Reexamining works by such film-makers as Renoir, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Jarmusch, and Eisenstein, Oeler traces the murder scene's intricate connections to the great breakthroughs in the theory and practice of montage and the formulation of the rules and syntax of Hollywood genre. She argues that murder plays such a central role in film because it mirrors, on multiple levels, the act of cinematic representation. Death and murder at once eradicate life and call attention to its former existence, just as cinema conveys both the reality and the absence of the objects it depicts. But murder shares with cinema not only this interplay between presence and absence, movement and stillness: unlike death, killing entails the deliberate reduction of a singular subject to a disposable object. Like cinema, it involves a crucial choice about what to cut and what to keep.
"Karla Oeler exhibits a lively, searching, and penetrating intelligenceIn A Grammar of Murder she takes a fresh and illuminating look at various representations of violence - their form as well as their content - in films ranging from the Soviet montage school to Jean Renoir, from classical Hollywood to the work of such mavericks as Stanley Kubrick and Jim Jarmusch." - Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College"
Karla Oeler is associate professor of film studies at Emory University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226617947 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226617947 |
| Title | A Grammar of Murder |
| Author | Karla Oeler |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2009-12-01 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |