The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers indepth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.
PART I LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION 1. Retying the Threads 2. The Path and the Passeur 3. That Summer Feeling PART II SCENOGRAPHIES 4. Scenes 5. Wishful Thinking 6. Entities and Energies 7. Entranced PART III A CINEPHILE IN AUSTRALIA 8. No Flowers for the Cinephile: The Fates of Cultural Populism PART IV THE LYRICAL IMPULSE 9. Refractory Characters, Shards of Time and Space 10. The Trouble with Fiction 11. Ball of Fire: The Mysteries 12. The Ever-Tested Limit: Cinematic Apparitions 13. Delirious Enchantment PART V GENRE GAMES 14. Mr Big: Gangsters and Power 15. Unlawful Entries: Anatomy of a Film Cycle 16. Lady, Beware: Paths of the Female Gothic 17. Live to Tell: Teen Movies Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 18. In the Mood for (Something Like) Love 19. Shivers, Surprise and Discomfort: Sadism and Sublimation in Contemporary Cinema PART VI INTERVENTIONS 20. Making a Bad Script Worse: The Curse of the Scriptwriting Manual 21. The Offended Critic: Film Reviewing and Social Commentary 22. Wild Psychoanalysis of a Precarious, Unstable Reality PART VII ENVOI 23. No Direction Home: Creative Criticism 24. Farewells, Full Circles and Ellipses 25. My Back Pages 26. The File We Accompany, with Cristina 0/00lvarez Lopez Notes Sources of Texts Index
Accessing your eBook through Kortext
Once purchased, you can view your eBook through the Kortext app, available to download for Windows, Android and iOS devices. Once you have downloaded the app, your eBook will be available on your Kortext digital bookshelf and can even be downloaded to view offline anytime, anywhere, helping you learn without limits.
In addition, you'll have access to Kortext's smart study tools including highlighting, notetaking, copy and paste, and easy reference export.
To download the Kortext app, head to your device's app store or visit https://app.kortext.com to sign up and read through your browser.
NB: eBook is only available for a single-user licence (i.e. not for multiple / networked users).
