Customer Reviews

Still Life: Hollywood Tableaux Photographs

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In the back of this book there's a very telling 1938 quote from William Eglinton, Chief of Camera and Stills for RKO: 'At the end of each scene, the director and his crew step aside for a brief moment and the still camera man poses the principals in the climax of that particular scene'. The sixty-two stills in the book are the best that Keaton and Heiferman selected from the many they looked at.

I liked the idea that the contents are roughly from the end of the Second World War to the early Sixties, a particularly glossy period for Hollywood and it shows in several of the stills showing sets. Many group shots are really frozen in time photos, looking like tableaus from a waxworks others look like 'candids' with the actors totally unaware of the camera.

I've had this book for some years and I still find it fascinating. The contents are just movie stills but present them in a large, square (twelve by twelve inches) beautifully designed and printed book with the use of a 200 screen on quality paper and the mundane becomes intriguing. Less is definitely more.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.