A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form Book

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Murder and Montage

1   FRAMING FOR MURDER: CUT-INS AND CLOSE-UPS

The Human Face, the Murder Weapon, and the Close-Up

How Guns Get Attention in Film Theory

Case Study: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Heir of Genghis Khan (aka Storm over Asia, 1928)

Murder and Perspectival Scale: Eisenstein’s “Hidden Montage”

2   ACTING IN SILENTS: MURDER, MONTAGE, ANDTHE FILM ACTOR

The Body in Pieces

Man, Montage, and the Machine Aesthetic

Case Study: Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (1926)

The End of St. Petersburg (1927): Bringing Life to a Statue

Aural Montage and Pudovkin’s Deserter (1932)

Anatomy as Alphabet and the Occlusion of Interiority

Putting Stanislavsky Actors through the Montage Machine: Revolvers and Revolutionary Consciousness in The Mother (1926)

Coda: Eisenstein, Inner Speech, and Murder

3   MURDER OUTSIDE THE POETICS OF MONTAGE: ANDRÉ BAZIN AND JEAN RENOIR

André Bazin and the Preservation of Loss

Bazinian Ambiguity and the Murder Scene

Murder Scenes in Renoir’s Films of the1930s: An Overview

Case Study: Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

The Rules of the Game (1939)

A Montage of Distractions: Murder in La Chienne (1931), Toni (1935), La Bête humaine (1938), and La Marseillaise (1938)

Part Two: Murder and Genre

4   INDIVIDUAL AND SERIES

Montage and Genre

Manny Farber and the Logic of Genre

Case Study: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948)

“Cosmetics on a Cadaver”: James Agee on War Films

5   STYLIZATION AND MIMESIS

Murder as Stylization

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Style and the Man

Murder in the Mirror: The Shining (1980) and Dead Man (1995)

Conclusion: Hitchcock’s Aerial Views

Notes

Bibliography

Index