Table Of ContentRobert Phillip Kolker
The Altering Eye
Contemporary International Cinema
THE ALTERING EYE
Robert Kolker is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of
Maryland and Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. His
works include A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg
Altman; Bernardo Bertolucci; Wim Wenders (with Peter Beicken); Film, Form
and Culture; Media Studies: An Introduction; editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho: A Casebook; Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays and
The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies.
http://www.virginia.edu/mediastudies/people/adjunct.html
Robert Phillip Kolker
THE ALTERING EYE
Contemporary International Cinema
Revised edition with a new preface and
an updated bibliography
Cambridge
2009
Published by
40 Devonshire Road, Cambridge, CB1 2BL, United Kingdom
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First edition published in 1983 by Oxford University Press.
© 2009 Robert Phillip Kolker
Some rights are reserved. This book is made available under the Cre-
ative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England &
Wales Licence. This licence allows for copying any part of the work
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ISBN Hardback: 978-1-906924-04-1
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-906924-03-4
ISBN Digital (pdf): 978-1-906924-05-8
Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use copyright
material:
The table “Dramatic Theatre-Epic Theatre” from Brecht on Theatre, edited
and translated by John Willett. Copyright © 1957, 1963, 1964 by Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. This tranlsation and notes © 1964 by John Wil-
lett. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, Inc., and Methuen London.
From “To Posterity” in Selected Poems, copyright 1947 by Bertold Brecht and
H.R. Hays; copyright 1975 by Stefan S. Brecht and H.R. Hays. Reprinted by
permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Ann Elmo Agency, Inc.
Films Sans Frontières for the cover image from Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados
(1950).
All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initia-
tive), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification
Schemes) Certified.
For
Linda
and
in memory of
Glauber Rocha
and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Preface to the New Edition ix
Preface to the 1983 Edition xvii
Introduction 1
1. The Validity of the Image 11
2. The Substance of Form 89
3. Politics, Psychology, and Memory 197
Notes 287
Annotated Bibliography 299
Select Bibliography on European Cinema Since 1983 307
Index 315
Acknowledgments
Although distribution of European and Latin American films in the
United States has fallen off in recent years, there are a number of small dis-
tributors who still acquire new material, add it to their collection of older
films, and help keep the tradition alive. I wish to thank the following dis-
tributors who supplied the films that made the writing of this book pos-
sible: Cinema Five, Corinth Films, Films Inc.-Audio Brandon, New Line
Cinema, New Yorker Films, Unifilm.
The motion picture division of the Library of Congress was, as always,
of great help, and the theater division of the American Film Institute gave
special assistance.
A number of people assisted me with ideas, research, and technical help,
by reading parts of the manuscript, and with good conversation. Thanks
especially to Peter Beicken, Maria Coughlin, Douglas Gomery, Danusia
Meson, Joe Miller, J. Douglas Ousley, David Parker, Stephen Prince, Adam
Reilly, Harvey W. Thompson, Jr. and Katherine S. Woodward, and to many
students who worked with me in courses and seminars in contemporary
European cinema at the University of Maryland. A Faculty Research Grant
from the University of Maryland allowed me a semester off to do the major
writing Sheldon Meyer and Stephanie Golden at Oxford University Press
provided support and knowledge that was invaluable for the original pub-
lication of this book. Thanks to Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti for their
work on the new edition.
While it is an easy matter to thank and acknowledge those whose per-
sonal intervention aided my work, it is less easy when it comes to the great
number of scholars and critics whose writing has been influential in form-
ing my ideas. The notes to the text indicate some of the debt and the bibli-
ography widens the range of acknowledgment, but can never complete it.
Preface to the New Edition
The Altering Eye is a book about the most fertile period of filmmaking
in the mid-twentieth century. This was a period of rediscovering cinema,
of returning to zero (as Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed) and advancing
beyond the conventions of the Hollywood style. Not merely advancing, but
revolting against it. On the level of form and with a vital, largely left-wing
political force, filmmakers worldwide explored their art, pushed its limits,
made it articulate, eloquent and complex. Audiences responded in kind,
their curiosity and desire meeting the imagination of filmmakers to form a
nourishing film culture.
While writing the book, there was every indication that the cinematic
phenomenon I was discussing was an ongoing process. But just before
publication, two of the major filmmakers discussed in the book died: the
Brazilian Glauber Rocha in 1981 and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982.
Their deaths seemed to signal, or at least occur simultaneously with, an
equally premature demise of the very film culture that swept across the
world from the end of WW II until that decadal moment. The New German
Cinema, the last movement in the wave that began with Italian neorealism
blew itself out. Its most talented member was dead. Werner Herzog and
Wim Wenders seemed to drift off into less creative spaces, though Herzog
has found his footing in a number of amazing documentaries. In France,
François Truffaut, a founder of the New Wave, died in 1983. Godard,
after having brought about the second seismic change in film after Italian
neorealism, went into a kind of exile and returned no longer as a perpetrator
of a new cinematic vision, but as a narcissist of form. (He may have been
this all along, but the formal experimentation he carried on in the 1960s
pressed forward on cinema worldwide and changed it; once changed,
Godard himself was changed—by the very cinema he helped create.)
It seemed that the energy that coursed through European and world
cinema in the 1960s and 1970s diminished. Some of it was transferred
to the United States, where an auteur cinema steered by the successes
