In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.
This book identifies a new methodological strategy for the interpretation of film philosophizing. Many recent works in film philosophy, adopting the approach identified with the term film as philosophy, have considered film as capable of doing philosophy. Focused on the basic relationship between film and filmgoer, the proposed method is founded on the concept of the film world. Combining Merleau-Ponty’s and Ricœur’s philosophies, and reconsidering Goodman’s theory of worldmaking, the film world becomes the hermeneutic horizon from which film philosophical thought can emerge. The book shows how Ricœurian methodology has the potential to provide a valuable resource for film studies by inviting scholars to consider film interpretation in terms of film world hermeneutics.
On cover: A critical checklist of more than 1600 must-see midnight movies, classics, silents, epics, camp favorites, cult picks, sleepers, video smashes, and more.
Tim Cawkwell’s knowledge and experience of the cinema has been poured into his writings about it. Originally published in 2004, this new edition sees some substantial revisions: some previous material has been dropped and a lot of new material has been added, especially on more recent films. The whole text has been very significantly reshaped with the addition of images to support Tim’s writing. Dozens of films are referred to in this book, which finds new insights into the variety of religious narratives that different countries have produced. Those receiving more in-depth consideration include such masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Rome Open City, Diary of a Country Priest, Winter Light, The Gospel According to St Matthew, Three Colours: Red, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Night Of The Hunter, The Funeral, The Samurai, A Man Escaped, In The Fog, The Word, Babette’s Feast, Silent Light, Andrei Roublev, The Colour of Pomegranates, Mother and Son, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Searchers, Hail Mary, The Banishment, Dead Man Walking, Tree of Life, Into Great Silence, A Canterbury Tale and Philomena. The aim of this new edition is both to explore the way religious narrative has produced a number of masterpieces from such major film-makers as Bresson, Dreyer, Rossellini, Tarkovsky and Kieślowski, but also to reflect on the way the core ideas of Christianity such as salvation, martyrdom and redemption continue to surface in films. Tim also explores the way that a cultural shift towards doubt about the value of religion and even hostility towards Christianity itself has revealed itself in films. Tim describes the way the different denominational contexts of Christianity such as Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy differentiate films coming out of those contexts and considerably enrich the whole picture. The book pays particular attention to the way films are conceived and created with a view to illuminating their virtues as a visual medium. It is written in a sinewy but clear style and commends itself to anyone interested in the history of the cinema and in cultural changes since the Second World War.
'Filmosophy' is a manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces 20th century ideas of film as thought into a practical theory of 'film-thinking', arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic 'intent' about the characters, spaces, and events of film.
The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables examines the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have been celebrated for their powerfully affecting social realist films. Though the Dardenne brothers’ films rarely mention religion or God, they have received wide recognition for their moral complexity and spiritual resonance. This book brings the Dardennes’ filmography into consideration with theological aesthetics, Christian ethics, phenomenological film theory, and continental philosophy. The author explores the brothers’ nine major films—beginning with The Promise (1996) and culminating in Young Ahmed (2019)—through the hermeneutics of philosopher Paul Ricoeur. By using Ricoeur’s description of "parable" as a "narrative-metaphor" which generates an existential limit-experience, Joel Mayward crafts an innovative Ricoeurian hermeneutic for making theological interpretations of cinema. Drawing upon resources from three disciplinary spheres—theology, philosophy, and film studies—in a dynamic interweaving approach, Mayward proposes that the Dardennes create postsecular cinematic parables which evoke theological and ethical responses in audiences’ imaginations through the brothers’ distinctive filmmaking style, what is termed "transcendent realism." The book ultimately demonstrates how the Dardenne brothers are truly doing, not merely depicting, theology and ethics through the cinematic form—it presents film as theology, what Mayward refers to as "theocinematics." This is valuable reading for scholars of theology, philosophy, and film studies, as well as film critics and cinephiles interested in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers.
