Synopsis "Film Past Film Future: an enquiry into cinema and the imagination (in English)"
Film is an art with a future, but that future needs to be shaped by the past. FILM PAST FILM FUTURE is a call to attention: 120 years of film-making has produced a rich language for images and for their sequencing, a language that needs learning and improving if we are going to fulfil the potential of film. In exploring this idea, the particular focus of this book is on the cinematic imagination. Is it the spectator using his or her imagination in a creative manner to absorb the images presented? Or is it the spectator spellbound before the film-maker's imagination spilled out on the screen? In the first, the imagination is firmly in the minds of the spectators; in the second, in the mind of the filmmaker. FILM PAST FILM FUTURE ranges widely over the history of the cinema in all its forms to show how film-makers have exploited both their own imagination and that of the spectator to create compelling films.Part One covers the way the cinema has delved deep into the whole of the human condition to exploit the desires, fears and obsessions of people across the globe. It includes a major essay on battle films. It is capped by a long essay on the cinema and the Holocaust to illustrate the immense effort the cinema has made to represent the unrepresentable. Part Two gets to grip with the question of how the cinema is unique, in particular in the way in which it manipulates time. It identifies a weakness in the fact that film-makers have yet to develop more subtle and sophisticated ways of depicting interiority, and concludes with an assessment of how a Shakespeare might emerge in the cinema.In undertaking this journey, Tim Cawkwell draws on examples of films right from the invention of the cinema up to the present day, and across the complete spectrum of film-making: silent and sound; commercial, arthouse, experimental; narrative and documentary; long and short. Reference is made to drama, opera, literature and painting. Along the way it takes a swipe at the cinema of hyperbole from which we currently suffer, and outlines some of the drawbacks inherent in the theatrical stylistics that have held too great sway in much film-making.Film-makers are good at using their visual imagination in the creation of images; they need to use it more in the sequencing of shots.FILM PAST FILM FUTURE, written in a crisp and highly readable style, will stimulate anyone who takes an interest in and derives pleasure from watching films.TIM CAWKWELL is a film-maker ('Light Years' film diaries) and a freelance writer on film (co-editor of 'The World Encyclopaedia of Film' in 1972, 'The New Filmgoer's Guide to God' in 2014, website at www.timcawkwell.co.uk). 220 pages, 95,000 words, 122 b/w frame captures
