"The Analysis of Film", Raymond Bellour


Raymond Bellour (1939-) is a French film critic and theorist. Member of the CNRS, professor at Sorbonne, he created with Serge Daney, in 1991, Traffic magazine. The Analysis of Film is a collection of some of Bellour’s most classic essays. Influenced by Christian Metz, Bellour applies the concepts of structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis that revolutionized film criticism in the 1970s. What is most remarkable in his essays about Hitchcock's films as Marnie, Psycho and, above all, North by Northwest, is the detailed individual analysis of each shot in a sequence and how each camera position is reused throughout it, studying the gaze of the characters, symbologies that relate to psychoanalytic concepts and studies of symmetry and asymmetry. Always accompanied by stills and schemes that guide the reader, The Analysis of Film is a very curious and academic way of watching the cinema that will certainly make the viewer's eye be more attentive to filmic details in cinema.


Excerpts:
(Usually, we put here some excerpts of the book. However, as we believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, this time we'll only put a scheme that, we think, can give the dimenson of Bellour's genius and dedication.)

The scheme with each camera setup for the airplane attack scene on North by Northwest.

 Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fyVbka90NbvkIZ6ermo3GC-SoiXcFNP1/view?usp=sharing

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