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Zusatztext " The Off-Screen , within the context of the invisible dimension of the "off," provides its readers with an insightful and incisive background of US cinema from Griffith to Tarantino. Apart from the obvious contribution to film studies, scholars in performance and visual studies will find themselves enthralled by Peretz's investigation of the frame." Informationen zum Autor Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Becoming Visionary (Stanford, 2007). Klappentext Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University! Bloomington. He is the author of Becoming Visionary (Stanford! 2007). Zusammenfassung By focusing on what is outside the frame, this book offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and Abstracts The Unframing Image chapter abstract The book opens its investigation of the category of the "off" by examining a paradigmatic painting of the early modern period, Rembrandt's The Sacrifice of Isaac . The painting is shown to involve a reflection on the historical significance of the modern category of the "off". The key element is the painting's attempt to differentiate the dimension of the outside the frame (the "off") of a modern painting from the outside the frame in a sacred image. While in the sacred image the outside is conceived as the divine, in the modern painting the outside marks the disappearance of the divine. This new dimension of the "off" is also conceived, due to its critique of the logic of the divine, as what allows for a liberation from the logic of sacrifice that guided the monotheistic religions. The Off-Screen: Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky chapter abstract The paradigmatic articulation for the modern age of the work of art's relation to the "off" is Hamlet . Hamlet's ghost, occupying the off-stage as the play begins, is a figure for the dimension of the "off-stage." The figure of the ghost appears with the disappearance of divine order, and the work of art, which now becomes fascinated with the new dimension of the "off," becomes the arena for showing ghosts, replacing the sacred work as an arena for showing the divine. In order to demonstrate the generality of this matrix the book engages in a discussion of Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Tarkovsky's Solaris which, much like Hamlet , show the emergence of the modern work of art to depend on the disappearance of divine order, associated in both works with the death of the father. 1 On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance chapter abstract This chapter consists of a reading of Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance . From the point of view of the development of cinematic grammar, Griffith is perhaps most famous for two things: for having basically invented cinematic montage—a logic of cinematic cutting—and for having liberated the location of the camera, no longer having it simulate the position of a theatrical audience, freeing it from occupying a constant center and distance in relation to which a stage opens. These inno...
