Cinema Against Spectacle

Jean-Louis Comolli is a French writer, editor, and film director. He was editor of Cahiers du cinéma in 1965-73. Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.

• Preface (Philip Rosen) Introduction (Daniel Fairfax) Yes we were utopians; in a way, I still am...: Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli Cinema against Spectacle I. Opening the Window? II. Inventing the Cinema? III. Filming the Disaster? IV. Cutting the Figure? V. Changing the Spectator? Technique and Ideology Introduction I. On a Dual Origin The ideological place of the base apparatus Birth = deferral: the invention of the cinema II. Depth of Field: the Double Scene Bazin's surplus realism The work of transparency For a materialist history of the cinema For the first time... III. Primitive Depth of Field IV. Effacement of Depth/Advent of Speech V. Which Speech? Appendix I: Cinema/Ideology/Criticism Appendix II: Machines of the Visible Glossary of Terms, Publication History, Filmography, Bibliography,Translator's Notes, Index.

Hopefully this intelligent edition will make Comolli and his work more visible to contemporary readers, while also positing the development of a more 'scientific' ideological critique not just of individual films, but of cinema and the society of the spectacle as a whole. - William Brown in New Review of Film and Television Studies