Jump to: navigation, search

Hitchcock Annual (1993) - Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler

Details

Links

Article

Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler. Barbara Bowman. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. xii + 171 pages. $42.95.

Reviewed by LELAND POAGUE

Few, I imagine, would dispute the claim that André Bazin's essay "Evolution of the Language of the Cinema" retains pride of place when it comes to modeling how viewers perceive and construe film space. Certainly it raised questions about the psychology of perception and interpretation with which we still struggle. Moreover, it raised those questions exactly by reference to the perceived dimensionality and duration of the film image. It is thus more than a little ironic that the current wear-worn orthodoxy on spatial "articulations" in film — which focuses on the way continuity cutting "positions" the viewing subject by shot/reverse shot sutures which have the effect of falsifying the "historical" space of the film in favor of presenting its "narrative" space to us, as if transparentlyhas taken up Bazin's ideas in such a way as to drop onscreen space largely off the critical agenda, however often critics find themselves discussing it in particular interpretive instances. Perhaps it is as much this critical void as the empty space of contemporary science fiction films that Barbara Bowman is referring to in the opening passages of Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler, wherein she declares, in quite teacherly terms, her desire to "orient" her students to the "classical" spatial strategies at work in the films of the directors under study, strategies which were no longer visible, on her view, after the demise of the studio system in the 195...

[ to view the rest of the article, please try one of the links above ]

Leland Poague, who teaches at Iowa State University and edited A Hitchcock Reader with Marshall Deutelbaum, is completing his book on Frank Capra for the Cambridge University Press.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Hitchcock_Annual_(1993)_-_Master_Space:_Film_Images_of_Capra,_Lubitsch,_Sternberg,_and_Wyler&oldid=129651’