Cinematic Flashes Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood [Paperback]

Cinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of cinephiliac historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural fragments rather than composing grand narratives, this unorthodox history of the films of the studio system reveals how classical Hollywood emerges as a disjointed network of accidents, excesses, and coincidences.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Inventing Cinephiliac Historiography
1. Sonic Booms: 1929 and the Sensational Transition to Sound
2. Show Stoppers: 1937 and the Chance Encounter with Chiffons
3. Signature Crimes: 1946 and the Strange Case of the Lost Scene (as Well as the Stranger Case of the Missing Auteur)
4. Apocalyptic Antennae: 1954 and the End of Storytelling
Conclusion: The Cinephiliac Return

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Rashan Wadia Richardss Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood both treats and is itself the product of the authors cinephilia, that fervent, devotional, sometimes rabid love for movies once professed by critics such as Susan Sontag and the New Wave devotees of Cahiers du cinema. As Richards traces, this cinephiliac passion was to be suppressed by the sober film theorists of the 1970s, who argues the necessity of destroying cinematic pleasure in order to understand its mechanisms. In recent years, cinephilia has experienced something of a revival, due no doubt to the technological tools that have enabled a new generation of scholars and critics to access vast archives of film material.10th October 2013

Rashna Wadia Richards is Associate Professor and T. K. Young Chair of English at Rhodes Colls.