Books.

"Corey could see the title on the cover. He didn't know much about philosophy but he sensed that the book was strictly for deep thinkers. It was Nietzsche, it was Thus Spake Zarathustra." That snippet from David Goodis's Night Squad comes from "Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir: Movies and the 'Death of God'," an extract from Mark T Conard's The Philosophy of Film Noir running at Metaphilm. Update: Chris Fujiwara reviews Noir for the Boston Globe.

Reviews and a reply at Film-Philosophy:

• "Part technical analysis and part introduction to film psychology," writes Andrew Court, Per Persson's Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery "will be instantly recognisable to those familiar with David Bordwell and Noel Carroll's 1996 Post-Theory. The rhetoric has been updated to exclude the polemical engagement with current theory that made Bordwell and Carroll's anthology so avowedly argumentative. But it remains familiar in its determination to develop a new reading of films, borrowing models from psychology and cognitive science, and departing from standard critical fare."

• Susan French Overstreet on Irving Singer's Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles and Renoir: "While these three artists operate very differently in the methods they employ to present the essence of the human condition, Singer is able to juxtapose their diverse styles against one another to present a dialogue about the importance of film as art in the last century."

• Thomas Wartenberg Engaging the Moving Image: "[Noel] Carroll's commitment to piecemeal theorizing proves to be quite productive, for it allows him to take up, in various of the chapters in this volume, issues that have not generally been explored by previous theories of film."

• Michael Grant on Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life: "It is a way of laying things out that derives from a course of lectures on Moral Perfectionism delivered by Cavell over the last decade and a half, in which the Tuesday lecture concerned certain central texts of moral philosophy, while the Thursday lectures were devoted to masterpieces of what Cavell sees as the Golden Age of American film, with the earliest film dating from 1934, the latest from 1949." Cavell replies. Almost cheerfully.

In the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Marshall Fine's Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American Independent Film: "[T]he material is riveting, the story moves briskly, and the real triumph lies in its central portrait. Cassavetes comes alive on the page, his restless spirit captured in all its contradictoriness."

Posted by dwhudson at January 28, 2006 2:52 AM