The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium

by Professor Gilberto Perez

"Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book." -- Edward W. Said In The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. "The images on the screen," he writes, "carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another the material ghost." "Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating." -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review "A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum "Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism." -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor "Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin." -- Sight & Sound "The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks; the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film." -- Stanley Cavell "Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses." -- James Naremore, Cineaste

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Theory

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1998

Reviews

[Shubhendu Trivedi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books I have read, and not just in film!

[Yi Jian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential read for film buffs, covers chaplin, keaton, griffith, eisenstein, godard, scorsese, antonioni, etc. Super insightful!

[Art · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays by Perez, a film professor at Sarah Lawrence College in NY, was on sale at our university bookstore. I flipped the pages to see if he focused on films of interest and saw enough that I liked...

Perez is an engaging writer, with a rather avuncular style -- he seems to cut through the crap of "film theory" to make some interesting and pertinent observations about specific films, about categories of films (such as non-fiction films), and about the art of film in general. However, it does get somewhat heavy-going at times.

Each chapter featured a few "set-pieces", with the essays constructed around a meditation on a single film (or filmmaker), with some lunges into related territory. This was mostly a good strategy, with ideas coming fast and furious, and a fun ride in most chapters. However, when the film was unfamiliar (Dovzhenko's Earth, for example), the chapter seemed to go on forever, never latching onto a familiar image in this head. And, yes, friends, I forced myself to read every word.

For the record, the first two chapters on documentary and narrative, respectively, seem to cover the widest range of films and filmmakers. Then, we turn to Buster Keaton (Ch. 3), Murnau and Nosferatu (Ch. 4), Russian Filmmakers and Earth (Ch. 5), Renoir and A Day in the Country (Ch. 6), Westerns and Gangster Films (Ch. 7), Modernism, featuring Kiarostami's Close Up and Straub & Huillet's History Lessons (Ch. 8), Godard and Alphaville (Ch. 9), Antonioni and Eclipse (Ch. 10). All told, a nice mix of familiar and unfamiliar films and observations.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books about film I have ever read.