The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema

by Robert P. Kolker

Analyzes a variety of motion pictures which use innovative techniques, challenge the audience's opinions, and explore social and political issues

Genres: Film

448 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 1983

About the author

Robert Phillip Kolker, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. He is author of A Cinema of Loneliness, The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and the Reimagining of Cinema, and editor of 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays and The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely useful book from someone whose aesthetic I share almost not at all -- well, we both like Bunuel but Kolker's dismissals of the "obscurantists" I love (Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Herzog) kept *nearly* having me put the book down...except that his treatment of (leftist) international film from Italian Neorealism to the early eighties proved to be such a great way of organizing so many films that I've been thinking about for so many years (and, long ago, sometimes teaching). If you can forgive Kolker for believing that "serious cinema" and "Brechtian cinema" are pretty much the same thing (the sort of dimestore eighties American Marxism is something of an enjoyably nostalgic set-piece in its own right), you might find this a lovely touchstone, too. The passionate love he has for Godard and Fassbinder (to a lesser extent, Pasolini) I don't entirely share but nevertheless got quite and rather pleasantly caught up in. Terrific fun revisiting those films in this way -- even for someone who would require equally devout company to actually sit down and *watch* them again.

[SyphilisVictim · Rating 4 out of 5]

not bad

[Ilyas · Rating 3 out of 5]

writing's a bit dry