The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium [Paperback]

Gilberto Perez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 29, 2000

In a recent international survey conducted by the online film journal Screening the Past, which invited film critics and scholars around the world to nominate the most important contributions to the field in the past decade, The Material Ghost tied for first place with Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Béla Balázs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez’s superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet?

(Adrian Martin )

Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He never condescends to his audience or sacrifices his intellectual clarity, and most importantly he makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses. The virtues of his writing are quite rare.

(James Naremore Cineaste )

Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism that treats the complexities of film and the sensibilities of readers with equal understanding, consideration, and respect.

(David Sterrit Christian Science Monitor )

This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism--a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an art form. The book is really about nothing beyond the author’s own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style... A work of transcendent intelligence.

(Peter Matthews )

Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Antonioni's Eclipse, Ford's My Darling Clementine, Godard's Breathless. Perez's frame-by-frame analysis of them is always lucid and invigorating, reminding us why these films were considered classics from the first. Even better, Perez takes up lesser known films and filmmakers... The eclectic mixture of films is one the book's strengths, allowing Perez to write on a breadth of topics... Despite holding films to a high standard, Perez never comes off as a film snob; his readings remain rooted in a genuine and communicable love for the cinema.

(Jonathan Vogels The Republic of Letters )

In recent decades there has been no more cogent a rethinking of the physical and psychological experience of film as it evolved, both as a technology and as an art form. I want to read it again, soon.

(Nick James Sight & Sound )

Perez's book may strike some readers as anachronistic because it is about nothing but the author's love of movies, its pleasure lying in the sheer intensity of his intelligence. In so far as this wonderfully flexible and expansive thinker has a thesis, it's that the illusionist medium of cinema is endlessly poised between reality and abstraction... Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin.

(Sight and Sound )

Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating.

(Alfred Guzzetti Boston Book Review )

[Perez's] early and persistent love of film imbues The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, which moves gracefully from the documentaries of Robert Flaherty to the revolutionary epics of Alexander Dovzhenko to the pastoralism of Jean Renoir.

(Chronicle of Higher Education )

The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks; the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights.

(Michael Wood London Review of Books )

The section on [Iranian director Abbas] Kiarostami in Perez's new book, The Material Ghost, is the best comment I've seen on the subject.

(Stanley Kauffman New Republic )

Gilberto Perez's book, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (*****) ranks with the finest cinematic writing anywhere.

(Tony McKibben The List (Glasgow and Edinburgh) )

It is as fine a book on film as I have ever encountered, a hypermarché of insight, precise and lovely writing, information, and clear thinking. Page after page elaborates arguments so acute and aptly formulated that I have no doubt I'll be exploiting them in the classroom and in writing for the rest of my career.

(Lesley Brill Criticism )

A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere.

(Jonathan Rosenbaum )

Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism.

(David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor )

Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book—the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching—accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film.

(Stanley Cavell )

Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book.

(Edward W. Said )

Book Description

An engaging study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (November 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801865239
• ISBN-13: 978-0801865237
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #718,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uncanny Critique, December 1, 1999

By 

David Shapiro (Riverdale, NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Hardcover)

GHilberto Perez has been the country's foremost if neglected film critic for a number of years now. For years, his film and fiction reviews in such a strange place as the usually staid if not conservative Hudson Review enlivened that venue and revitalized it. His reviews now for the Yale Review arew extraordinary in their stylish elegance, their wit, and their moral verve, if one can employ that seemingly oxymoronic phrase. Perez has a scope that is unusually large, and one feels, at once, assured that his attention to movies is neither escapist nor propagandistic. He eschews the reductionism of most theoretical work done today, and as a matter of fact makes the most subtle theoretical p[erspective against false theory. This does not in any way mean, as some might guess, that he is antagonistic to theory. He seems to hate stupidity most of all, and this entitles him to be called a poet among film critics. His love of the particular is such that his pobservations on shots, sequences, and film form at its most atomic or fleeting is rendered in bold, concrete and realized phrases. HYe is the only film critic alive today who can make a plot seem to have moral and visual diemsnions.By this I mean, he is never boring and he is always honest.

Perez's scope is seen in the very movies he underlines. He does not atte,mp[t to be falsely synoptic, but there is a sweep in him from the most experimental shadows of Sytraub to the German new wave and the American cowboy genre. I think it is not for nothing that he is able to embrace these phenomena without Procrustean dogmatics. Perez was raised in Cuba, and he recounts his love for cinema as a child. He was also a prodicigous cartoonist, and he has never lost his eagerness to caricature silly positions. He also has a love, in the broadest sense, for representation itself, and his college years were spent with the love of physics and science. I think his argumentation gains from his knowledge of science and his love of truth-telling. He has, from Cuba and his own "exile" in America, a perspective that seems more international than most. He is able to have a de;lectation for Amertican and German and New Wave cinema that never strikes one as provincial. But he has enough of what he calls, imn relation to Antonioni, the point of view of the stranger,m to make his readings fresh and strange, de-=automotized, as it were. His style is never pompous, but it is meant, uneerringly, to convince, even to conquer, and it does. He is aggressive in tirade and can destroy weakened critics of jargon and the academy./ This is not to say that he is not learned, and he does indeed represemnt for me the best in the academy as it tries to right itself or inflect itself with pluralist radiance. I would say that in his generaytoion he is the person least deformed by the false perspectives offered to all of us. And yet he has engulfed and digested and synthesized as much of semiotics and the best of continental theory.

I would add that for me, Perez succeeds because he has a combination of practical and theoretical criticism that makes him the best classroom model for prose. Do have your students buy this book at any levcel. Let the students at the udnergraduate level stretch a bit and enjoy his style. Let the graduate students realize what they are missing in their bound platiturfdes and dogmatics. And for all, the book should be a starting-point for debate and discussion. I think the best chapters are already classics: the essaays on Kirostami, Godard and Antonioni, for example, cannot be bettered in the literature as I know it. This book is not a simple volume but really a life's summa and should be taken extremely seriously. Of the l00 rewcent books on film that I have read in the last two decades, there is nothing that approaches this book. I would say again that it is arguably the best for its sanity and breadth, but it not merely "balanced" or Johnsonian. Perez has been willing to talke risks both in his select9ons and his deletions. He now demands a stremnuous reader, a creative reader. Will he get it? The health of film studies depends partly on that answer.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank goodness!, September 5, 2004

By 

Natalie (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Paperback)

What a breath of fresh air this book is. Perez manages to tread the fine line between theory and practise with grace. A great survey of filmmakers and film theory alike. Gilberto Perez' personal style makes for a very acessible text, and he doesn't shy away from 'unpopular' rejections of theory he disagrees with. An extremely valuable resource for students of film that helps to make sense of the often complicated threads of film theory.