Life To Those Shadows

Nol Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history. Life to Those Shadows presents a critique of 'classical' approaches to film: the assumptions that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, and that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being. The view that film language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself, is also challenged here.Burch's major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed--in the capitalist and imperialist West between 1892 and 1929.

Softcover. English. University of California Press. 1990. ISBN: 9780520071445. 317 pp. Good. Book No: 55300