The Analysis of Film

This text brings together Raymond Bellour's now-classic studies of Hollywood film, Hitchcock's work - "The Birds", "Marnie", "Psycho", "North by Northwest" - and the role of the woman in western representation. But, finally, it is a book about cinema itself and the love for cinema that drives the passion for analysing the supreme art form of the 20th century. Bellour creatively rewords the ideas and methods of structuralism, semiology, and psychoanalysis to unravel the knot of significations that is the filmic text. The introductory chapter sketches out a history of the way the close analysis of film developed. And then, beginning with a study of the "Bodega Bay" sequence of "The Birds", the book goes on to examine every aspects of that singular critical practice, the analysis of film. The book is also a model of how to write about the intricacies of film narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing larger contextual issues of subjectivity, desire, and identificaiton in western cultural forms. A new, final chapter on D.W.
Griffith's "The Lonedale Operator" brilliantly demonstrates that the dynamics of repetition and alternation that Bellour discovered to be the heartbeat of Hollywood narrative film were already there in nascent form at the beginning of cinema.