Light Thoughts: Image, Reverie, Memory

Light Thoughts is about the interaction of thought between the spectator and the film in cinema; not just a matter of describing the play of a film as a thought process, but rather of formulating ideas about this interaction through detailed analysis of what is actually seen and heard in the cinema.

The chapters include explorations of: gaffes in performance, harmonized activity, and so-called “unison” action; the sale of gender roles and attitudes surreptitiously; the viewer’s way of (relentlessly) traveling forward through film; human gesture and the variant forms of comprehension it inspires; the cinematic onlooker—she who sees another person onscreen while we watch her seeing without knowing in any way how and what she takes in; the editorial technique of making the viewer wait for an explanation of what is being seen now; to long discussions of Antonioni, pointing to his camera movement in space and our affiliation with it; the problem of secrecy in cinematic narrative; the function and variability of the close-up insert; the problem of reading the image and handing the obvious; various confusions of narrative time; surveillance, doubt, and point of view; expression, meaning, and the face; and much more.

This book offers a series of original analyses of techniques used in films, which function as the basis for enhancing our understanding of cinema – if not as a medium specifically, then certainly as a medium used for telling stories and conveying the complexities of human character.