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After this Raphael and Kubrick discussed how to add incident to the story. Raphael suggested that one solution might be to give the whole thing a dreamlike quality, but Kubrick insisted that the hero’s fantasies and the heroine’s dreams should be clearly distinguished from reality: “If there’s no reality, there’s no movie.”
-- Michel Chion, “Eyes Wide Shut”
Seeing how I enjoy exegetical works on literature, essentially books about books, I thought I might be able to expand on that and try my hand at books about films, which would still be books about stories, after all. I have never been a film buff or anything, but I enjoy movies, though I regard them as being very passive experiences, a kind of sleepy way to pass the time, or something to do while I am eating my meals.
Browsing through Amazon, I was fortunate enough to come across a series of little books by the British Film Institute. Maybe they are better called monographs, being just shy of a hundred pages. I think of them as long essays, but they are fun essays if you enjoy exegetical discussions.
I love books about stories - stories that I like anyway - because I doubtlessly miss more in books and movies than I would care to admit, and these essays help to bring that stuff to the surface, and when one really loves a particular story or characters, such discussions enable you to live more with them, to see more of them. And I come to enjoy the original story that much more, as it enriches rereading, or I guess rewatching in the case of movies.
If Michel Chion’s “Eyes Wide Shut” is a fair example of the rest of the series, then I have struck a rich vein of books indeed, and a number of them are now high on my wish list, and they are cheap, too!
-- Michel Chion, “Eyes Wide Shut”
Seeing how I enjoy exegetical works on literature, essentially books about books, I thought I might be able to expand on that and try my hand at books about films, which would still be books about stories, after all. I have never been a film buff or anything, but I enjoy movies, though I regard them as being very passive experiences, a kind of sleepy way to pass the time, or something to do while I am eating my meals.
Browsing through Amazon, I was fortunate enough to come across a series of little books by the British Film Institute. Maybe they are better called monographs, being just shy of a hundred pages. I think of them as long essays, but they are fun essays if you enjoy exegetical discussions.
I love books about stories - stories that I like anyway - because I doubtlessly miss more in books and movies than I would care to admit, and these essays help to bring that stuff to the surface, and when one really loves a particular story or characters, such discussions enable you to live more with them, to see more of them. And I come to enjoy the original story that much more, as it enriches rereading, or I guess rewatching in the case of movies.
If Michel Chion’s “Eyes Wide Shut” is a fair example of the rest of the series, then I have struck a rich vein of books indeed, and a number of them are now high on my wish list, and they are cheap, too!
