When Roger Ebert died in April, 2013, it marked the end of an era--he was the last of the superstar movie critics who emerged in the 1960s in the wake of the success of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. In The Rhapsodes David Bordwell traces this phenomenon back to four important writers: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Each defended an idea of the artistic worth of Hollywood cinema. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an adept, engaging mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical ...
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When Roger Ebert died in April, 2013, it marked the end of an era--he was the last of the superstar movie critics who emerged in the 1960s in the wake of the success of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. In The Rhapsodes David Bordwell traces this phenomenon back to four important writers: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Each defended an idea of the artistic worth of Hollywood cinema. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an adept, engaging mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in Romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial intelligence to bear on Hollywood; he saw movies as a narrative art operating through striking visual expression. Tyler, of Surrealist inclinations, treated Hollywood films as a collective hallucination that invited both audience and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. Why Rhapsodes ? As Bordwell explains, it s by analogy with the ancient reciters of verse who, inspired by the gods, became carried away. The tag aims to emphasize the offbeat, passionate nature of their vernacular prose. Bordwell s own prose displays his customary erudition, clarity, and brio, demonstrating both his critical acuity and his skill as a cultural historian. He lays the groundwork for his analysis in an introduction and two general chapters concerning the writers cultural and critical milieu and then devotes a single chapter to each of them. In Afterlives he considers their legacy, particularly their importance in helping initiate the change in taste that occurred in film culture in the the 1950s and 1960s. In brief, what Bordwell provides in his essayistic exploration is both an appreciation of these four writers and an explanation of how they reflected and expanded the ways in which films were understood and discussed."
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