Il y a bien eu, dans le refus d'un culte des images en Europe latine, la construction d'un dogme des images portant prescription de leur usage conforme à leur pouvoir d'évocation du passé (un art de mémoire), aux manipulations de figures dans la machinerie des rêves. La théologie et les philosophies en ont fait l'instrument approché de toute connaissance conçue comme la lecture d'un tableau, possible parce que nous en participons par notre nature. Que signifient les formules de la création (...) : l'homme a été fait comme une image? l'homme a été créé selon le mode des images? Dieu a créé l'homme à son image, ou encore, il l'a fabriqué par une image? (shrink)

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of (...) movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individuals personal memory confronts the cinemas ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaksfigures that are fundamental to Schefers conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefers emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers "The Gods" in 31 brief essays on film stills and "The Criminal Life" with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefers book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)