Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A film tells its story not only through dialogue and actors' performances but also through the director's control of movement and shot design. Figures Traced in Light is a detailed consideration of how cinematic staging carries the story, expresses emotion, and beguiles the audience through pictorial composition. Ranging over the entire history of cinema, David Bordwell focuses on four filmmakers' unique contributions to the technique. In-depth chapters examine Louis Feuillade, master of the 1910s serial; Kenji Mizoguchi, the great Japanese director who worked from the 1920s to the 1950s; Theo Angelopoulos, who began his career as a political modernist in the late 1960s; and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker who in the 1980s became the preeminent Asian director. For comparison, Bordwell draws on films by Howard Hawks, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yasujiro Ozu, Takeshi Kitano, and many other directors. Superbly illustrated with more than 500 frame enlargements and 16 color illustrations, Figures Traced in Light situates its close analysis of model sequences in the context of the technological, industrial, and cultural trends that shaped the directors' approaches to staging.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• 1 Staging and Style
• 2 Feuillade, or Storytelling
• 3 Mizoguchi, or Modulation
• 4 Angelopoulos, or Melancholy
• 5 Hou, or Constraints
• 6 Staging and Stylistics
• Notes
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

A new work by Bordwell is always a special occasion for film studies. This book shows Bordwell at his formalist best, as he talks about staging in the work of directors Louis Feuillade, Mizoguchi Kenji, Theo Angelopoulos, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. A preliminary chapter provides a wide-ranging introduction to the problems of staging (sometimes called mise-en-scene), and the concluding chapter answers critics, real and imagined, who might insist that such a cross-cultural study needs more often to account for cultural specificity. Bordwell engages in occasional polemics, but this is mostly just a series of lucid and illuminating descriptions of visual style in these four directors, with comparisons to the work of many more. One can find a few good books in English on these directors already, among them Andrew Horton's The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (CH, Oct'97, 35-0817) and Donald Kirihara's Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s (1992), the latter based on a dissertation directed by Bordwell. But Bordwell has chosen four extremely important directors who, compared to figures like Jean Renoir or Alfred Hitchcock, have attracted relatively little extended criticism. As always, the book is copiously illustrated, so that the reader can follow every nuance of Bordwell's enjoyable lesson. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. S. C. Dillon Bates College