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The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium
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.
- GenresFilmNonfictionTheory
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 30, 2017
Easily one of the best books I have read, and not just in film!
February 2, 2025
Essential read for film buffs, covers chaplin, keaton, griffith, eisenstein, godard, scorsese, antonioni, etc. Super insightful!
November 21, 2007
This collection of essays by Perez, a film professor at Sarah Lawrence College in NY, was on sale at our university bookstore. I flipped the pages to see if he focused on films of interest and saw enough that I liked...
Perez is an engaging writer, with a rather avuncular style -- he seems to cut through the crap of "film theory" to make some interesting and pertinent observations about specific films, about categories of films (such as non-fiction films), and about the art of film in general. However, it does get somewhat heavy-going at times.
Each chapter featured a few "set-pieces", with the essays constructed around a meditation on a single film (or filmmaker), with some lunges into related territory. This was mostly a good strategy, with ideas coming fast and furious, and a fun ride in most chapters. However, when the film was unfamiliar (Dovzhenko's Earth, for example), the chapter seemed to go on forever, never latching onto a familiar image in this head. And, yes, friends, I forced myself to read every word.
For the record, the first two chapters on documentary and narrative, respectively, seem to cover the widest range of films and filmmakers. Then, we turn to Buster Keaton (Ch. 3), Murnau and Nosferatu (Ch. 4), Russian Filmmakers and Earth (Ch. 5), Renoir and A Day in the Country (Ch. 6), Westerns and Gangster Films (Ch. 7), Modernism, featuring Kiarostami's Close Up and Straub & Huillet's History Lessons (Ch. 8), Godard and Alphaville (Ch. 9), Antonioni and Eclipse (Ch. 10). All told, a nice mix of familiar and unfamiliar films and observations.
Perez is an engaging writer, with a rather avuncular style -- he seems to cut through the crap of "film theory" to make some interesting and pertinent observations about specific films, about categories of films (such as non-fiction films), and about the art of film in general. However, it does get somewhat heavy-going at times.
Each chapter featured a few "set-pieces", with the essays constructed around a meditation on a single film (or filmmaker), with some lunges into related territory. This was mostly a good strategy, with ideas coming fast and furious, and a fun ride in most chapters. However, when the film was unfamiliar (Dovzhenko's Earth, for example), the chapter seemed to go on forever, never latching onto a familiar image in this head. And, yes, friends, I forced myself to read every word.
For the record, the first two chapters on documentary and narrative, respectively, seem to cover the widest range of films and filmmakers. Then, we turn to Buster Keaton (Ch. 3), Murnau and Nosferatu (Ch. 4), Russian Filmmakers and Earth (Ch. 5), Renoir and A Day in the Country (Ch. 6), Westerns and Gangster Films (Ch. 7), Modernism, featuring Kiarostami's Close Up and Straub & Huillet's History Lessons (Ch. 8), Godard and Alphaville (Ch. 9), Antonioni and Eclipse (Ch. 10). All told, a nice mix of familiar and unfamiliar films and observations.
August 24, 2013
One of the best books about film I have ever read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews