Bücher von Steven Rybin

Shots to the Heart explores how the work of the film actor inspires, provokes, and refigures our feelings and thoughts about the cinema. The book closely considers the art of film performance, the combined effect of actors' gestures, movements, and expressions, in relation to the viewer's sensitive and creative eye. As discrete moments of performative incarnation onscreen slowly accumulate, actors also become figures of meaning. For many viewers, the screen figures which result from performance are simply called "e;characters."e; But in thinking about cinema, the words "e;character"e; and "e;characterization"e; signal post-experiential abstractions: when we quickly identify characters or summarize characterization after seeing a movie, we are leaping over the emotions felt through our loving attention to the bodies flitting through a film. Such concepts can never replace a careful regard for what actors onscreen are actually doing, moment by moment, gesture by gesture. Shots to the Heart is finally not too concerned with the narrative machinations within which these gestures are inscribed, and even resists the attempt to assemble these descriptions of performance into a "e;full"e; account of the film as a whole. What Shots to the Heart does is let little moments of performance live on, in writing, as they are strung together alongside performative fragments from other films, in a kind of alternative, cinephilic account of what was felt as actors moved on the screen before us.

Few other contemporary Hollywood filmmakers fit the category of 'genre stylist' as well as Michael Mann, the director of such films as Heat, The Insider, Ali, Collateral, Manhunter, Thief, and Miami Vice. Mann's film style marks him as a director who chooses the iconographic backdrop of a genre as a canvas upon which he and his collaborators can craft a unique cinematic vision. The Cinema of Michael Mann traces the innovative and under-explored stylistic contours of Mann's work, the director's inflection upon and innovation within preexisting genre frameworks, and the relationship of both style and genre to issues of authorship and film criticism. Steven Rybin's critical study of Mann's cinema, and the importance of the filmmaker's themes to our contemporary world, is valuable for both film scholars and cinephiles alike.

As the director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, Terrence Malick has created a remarkable body of work that enables imaginative acts of philosophical interpretation. Steven Rybins Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film looks closely at the dialogue between Malicks films and our powers of thinking, showing how his work casts the philosophy of thinkers such as Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin, Edgar Morin, and Immanuel Kant in new cinematic light. With a special focus on how the voices of Malicks characters move us to thought, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film offers new readings of his films and places Malicks work in the context of recent debates in the interdisciplinary field of film and philosophy. Rybin also provides a postscript on Malicks recently-released fifth film, The Tree of Life.