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(More customer reviews)You need only glance at the title of Sarah Kozloff's new book to realize that a major aspect of filmmaking has been utterly overlooked by scholars. It is only after you dive into the text, however, that Kozloff reveals how central dialogue has been to every aspect of Hollywood style and convention from editing devices to narrative strategies to genre patterns. In the tradition of the best formalist poetics Kozloff elaborates dialogue's essential role in the structuring of film texts. In the tradition of the most sophisticated and evenhanded feminist theory, Kozloff demonstrates how talk, gabbing, gossip, and silence have been gendered throughout the history of talkies. This book is a major scholarly contribution, yet it also manages to present arguments in lucid prose and hang theory on clear examples chosen from familiar films.
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Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, "When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue." Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films--from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs--this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film.
Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film.The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.
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