The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium

Rating:
Summary: Uncanny Critique
Review: GHilberto Perez has been the country's foremost if neglected film critic for a number of years now. For years, his film and fiction reviews in such a strange place as the usually staid if not conservative Hudson Review enlivened that venue and revitalized it. His reviews now for the Yale Review arew extraordinary in their stylish elegance, their wit, and their moral verve, if one can employ that seemingly oxymoronic phrase. Perez has a scope that is unusually large, and one feels, at once, assured that his attention to movies is neither escapist nor propagandistic. He eschews the reductionism of most theoretical work done today, and as a matter of fact makes the most subtle theoretical p[erspective against false theory. This does not in any way mean, as some might guess, that he is antagonistic to theory. He seems to hate stupidity most of all, and this entitles him to be called a poet among film critics. His love of the particular is such that his pobservations on shots, sequences, and film form at its most atomic or fleeting is rendered in bold, concrete and realized phrases. HYe is the only film critic alive today who can make a plot seem to have moral and visual diemsnions.By this I mean, he is never boring and he is always honest.

Perez's scope is seen in the very movies he underlines. He does not atte,mp[t to be falsely synoptic, but there is a sweep in him from the most experimental shadows of Sytraub to the German new wave and the American cowboy genre. I think it is not for nothing that he is able to embrace these phenomena without Procrustean dogmatics. Perez was raised in Cuba, and he recounts his love for cinema as a child. He was also a prodicigous cartoonist, and he has never lost his eagerness to caricature silly positions. He also has a love, in the broadest sense, for representation itself, and his college years were spent with the love of physics and science. I think his argumentation gains from his knowledge of science and his love of truth-telling. He has, from Cuba and his own "exile" in America, a perspective that seems more international than most. He is able to have a de;lectation for Amertican and German and New Wave cinema that never strikes one as provincial. But he has enough of what he calls, imn relation to Antonioni, the point of view of the stranger,m to make his readings fresh and strange, de-=automotized, as it were. His style is never pompous, but it is meant, uneerringly, to convince, even to conquer, and it does. He is aggressive in tirade and can destroy weakened critics of jargon and the academy./ This is not to say that he is not learned, and he does indeed represemnt for me the best in the academy as it tries to right itself or inflect itself with pluralist radiance. I would say that in his generaytoion he is the person least deformed by the false perspectives offered to all of us. And yet he has engulfed and digested and synthesized as much of semiotics and the best of continental theory.

I would add that for me, Perez succeeds because he has a combination of practical and theoretical criticism that makes him the best classroom model for prose. Do have your students buy this book at any levcel. Let the students at the udnergraduate level stretch a bit and enjoy his style. Let the graduate students realize what they are missing in their bound platiturfdes and dogmatics. And for all, the book should be a starting-point for debate and discussion. I think the best chapters are already classics: the essaays on Kirostami, Godard and Antonioni, for example, cannot be bettered in the literature as I know it. This book is not a simple volume but really a life's summa and should be taken extremely seriously. Of the l00 rewcent books on film that I have read in the last two decades, there is nothing that approaches this book. I would say again that it is arguably the best for its sanity and breadth, but it not merely "balanced" or Johnsonian. Perez has been willing to talke risks both in his select9ons and his deletions. He now demands a stremnuous reader, a creative reader. Will he get it? The health of film studies depends partly on that answer.

Rating:
Summary: Thank goodness!
Review: What a breath of fresh air this book is. Perez manages to tread the fine line between theory and practise with grace. A great survey of filmmakers and film theory alike. Gilberto Perez' personal style makes for a very acessible text, and he doesn't shy away from 'unpopular' rejections of theory he disagrees with. An extremely valuable resource for students of film that helps to make sense of the often complicated threads of film theory.