Favorites Of 1999

Thanks Chris and Johann. I've written an introduction and I'm about 20 pages into the Antonioni chapter. I've read a lot of Antonioni material lately and perhaps the key Antonioni debate in film studies is how one should read the images he uses to narrate. There is a group who advocates reading the images as simple metonyms, which goes hand in hand with thinking of him as a realist/documentarist director vs. others who advocate a more symbolic and metaphorical approach to interpretation that think of M.A. predominantly as a visual poet. There are many nuances to this issue, but I explain it in a dialectic, either/or fashion for the sake of clarity.

I'd be interested in seeing what you have to say about Antonioni. Is your topic still ambiguous endings? He was the sort of artist who must have been conscious of metaphorical implications, I should think, though the problem is, who decides what they are? Sometimes I guess Wittgenstein's famous "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" has to apply.

Very conscious indeed about metaphorical implications. The idea was not to have to impose voice-over narration or dialogue on characters who in reality would not be fully conscious of their feelings/conditions or able to put them into words. So Antonioni's impetus is not to use classic conventions of drama to put words into characters' mouths but to find visual correlatives for these emotions, hence the desire to utilize visual symbolism and other techniques to make images signify in and of themselves. You would not want to ignore this type of material in his movies.
My position is that metonymic versus symbolic reading is an either/or fallacy or a false dilemma. Thus it is a matter of moderation.
If you want to look at the Antonioni chapter, I can send you a first draft next month.

Okay, I'll be glad to look at it and comment.

Thanks. It's the first draft "dissertation version", before four critiques and revisions. I could also wait and send it when it has gone through the fire...

No you can send it early.

Thanks Chris.
Here's a post about the book on French Cinema published this year that includes a couple of my essays:
http://subtitleliterate.blogspot.com...ld-cinema.html

Directory of World Cinema: France (IB - Directory of World Cinema) Paperback
by Tim Palmer (Editor) , Charlie Michael (Editor)

The writer of the blog Marc St.-Cyr gives titles of a couple essays he contributed. But Neither the blog entry nor the Amazon listing gives names of other essays or of their authors.

You can find the contents on the third page down, and the list of films reviewed by clicking here and scrolling down almost to the end:
http://books.google.com/books?id=D12...page&q&f=false

It seems to find your name I have to go to page 192!

My name is also in another essay that appears earlier in the book but not included in this sample, and in the list of contributors which is included, I thing it's page 321. Currently I have only one assignment (because of the dissertation): a review of Sacha Guitry's Le poison for Film International journal (Pub. date is April 2014).