Bücher von Paul Coates

This book comprises what may be called exercises in ¿comparative cinemä. Its focus on endings, near-endings and ¿late style¿ is connected with the author¿s argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kie¿lowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Poläski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polanski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture analyses the contradictions and interaction between high and low art, with particular reference to Hollywood and European cinema. Written in the essayistic speculative tradition of Walter Benjamin and Thedor Adorno, this study also includes analyses of several key films of the 1980s.

The Gorgon's Gaze is an interdisciplinary study of recurrent themes in German cinema as it has developed since the early twentieth century. Coates explores the nature of expressionism and its persistence in the styles of such modern masters of Film noir as Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman.