Reality Transformed: Film and Meaning and Technique

by Irving Singer

A new look at film that succeeds in combining the realist and formalist sides of an ongoing debate. In Reality Transformed Irving Singer offers a new approach to the philosophy of film. Returning to the classical debate between realists and formalists, he shows how the opposing positions may be harmonized and united. Singer concentrates on questions about appearance and reality, the visual and the literary, and the interplay between communication as a goal and alienation as a hazard in films of every sort. In three exemplary chapters, he provides suggestive readings of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, and Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. Reality Transformed will interest the general reader as well as students in all fields related to film studies.

Genres: Film

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reality Transformed was easier to read than many other theoretical texts, which find themselves bogged down by "intellectual wording", but still brought forth a very stimulating discussion. The film breakdowns were compelling, and the conclusion felt meaningful both to the earlier text, but also poetically.

Really a 3.5. Read for a 2nd-year Film Theory course.

[Arthur Gailes · Rating 1 out of 5]

A long, boring treatise on film philosophies from the 1930s, discussing movies as though they stopped being made in the 1960s. But worse, nothing in this book actually gives any instruction that would make its reader a better, more thorough, more philosophical watcher of film. A mediocre waste of time.

[Leila Arten · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's alright. An ok starting point to film theory.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really didn't find the thesis to be coherent throughout the book, but it used The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Rules of the Game to be coherent; I'd give the writing a 3 and the choices a 5, thus the 4 stars up there.