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Geoffrey O'Brien

Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002-2012 Hardcover – May 28, 2013

by Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

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“We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection—gathering the best of a decade’s worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics—ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age.

Here are 38 searching essays on contemporary blockbusters like Spider-Man and Minority Report; recent innovative triumphs like The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild; and the intricacies of genre mythmaking from Chinese martial arts films to the horror classics of Val Lewton. O’Brien probes the visionary art of classic filmmakers—von Sternberg, Fod, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Godard—and the implications of such diverse recent work as Farenheit 9/11, The Passion of Christ, and The Sopranos. Each of these pieces is alert to the always-surprising intersections between screen life and real life, and the way that film from the beginning has shaped our sense of memory and history.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Counterpoint
Publication date

May 28, 2013
Dimensions

6.1 x 1.4 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-10

1619021706
ISBN-13

978-1619021709
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows

"There is something for all movie lovers in this expertly written, often thought–provoking collection." —Library Journal

"The author's insights into these familiar icons are unfailingly intelligent and delivered in polished prose." —Kirkus

About the Author

Geoffrey O'Brien is editor-in-chief of the Library of America and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His latest books are Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. He is a widely published poet, critic, editor, and cultural historian and has been honored with a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Counterpoint (May 28, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1619021706
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1619021709
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.4 x 9.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #899,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #671 in Video Direction & Production (Books)
- #958 in Movie Direction & Production
- #1,307 in Art of Film & Video

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Darren Haber

Thoughtful and fun to read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 7, 2015

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Articulate, witty and very thoughtful (and accessible) essays on movies that bring to mind a slightly more cerebral Pauline Kael (in fact he writes about her here); definitely one of the best film critics out there right now. If you like David Thomson, Stanley Kaufmann, Kael, and other thoughtful film essayists, this should be a nice addition to your bookshelf/Kindle.

3 people found this helpful

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I. Brossard

Best recent collection of essays on film

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 11, 2013

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Typically brilliant essays by Geoffrey O'Brien, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of film and pretty much everything else. Don't miss it.

3 people found this helpful

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RoochakTop Contributor: Anime

Critique of Pure Reasonableness

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 28, 2013

It's perverse to suggest that nothing might give the flavor of Geoffrey O'Brien's new book of film writings better than the index, but here, in its entirety, is his entry for director Wes Anderson:

"Anderson, Wes: adventurousness, 289; anti-naturalism, 287-288; artistic vision, 288-289; BOTTLE ROCKET, 286; characters, 288; childhood, 286, 287, 288, 289; escape, 286; MOONRISE KINGDOM, 281, 286-289; unnatural excrescences, 287."

It's just too bad for me that I'd been reading Pauline Kael prior to picking up STOLEN GLIMPSES, CAPTIVE SHADOWS (it was the Library of America-sanctioned career retrospective The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael , to be exact), because the difference between reading Kael and reading O'Brien, apart from the latter's penchant for giving his books instantly forgettable titles, is the difference between being regaled by the life of the party and being addressed by the designated driver. The comparison is unfair to O'Brien who, besides being a poet and editor-in-chief of -- wait for it -- the Library of America, is the kind of intelligent, insightful, lucid, and passionless critic who can illuminate what you've seen but not excite you about what you haven't. Next to the almost erotic intellectual charge in Kael's writing, most critics would come off as cold fish, but it's O'Brien's immaculate coolness and precision that work against him at book length. Read more than three or four of these short essays at one sitting and mental fatigue begins to set in. I find myself yearning for at least the occasional vulgar or provocative statement that he's simply too fastidious to write.

What he does write, however, is worth reading, incisive observations expressed in meticulous and elegant prose. He watches the entropic final season of THE SOPRANOS and notes that "What began as the story of a potential healing became the description of the last stages of an incurable sickness. The images themselves darkened, as if the sun were removing itself permanently from northern New Jersey." A 2005 piece on THE WAR OF THE WORLDS finds H.G. Wells and Steven Spielberg uneasily sharing a landscape of anxiety, bounded by the trauma of Darwinism on one end and the trauma of 9/11 on the other. His liner notes for the Criterion Collection and its British counterpart, the Masters of Cinema, are uniformly excellent, and a single-paragraph prose poem on DETOUR (1945), in which the images come thick and fast, without letup, generates something uncharacteristically close to excitement.

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