Film Hieroglyphs Tom Conley Table of Contents		$22.50 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4970-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4970-9
An innovative examination of the way we watch films—with a new introduction. At a time when traditional film theory privileged the purely visual, Film Hieroglyphs introduced a new way of watching film—examining the ways in which writing bears on cinema. Author Tom Conley gives special consideration to the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds with one another. Conley hypothesizes that major directors—Renoir, Lang, Walsh, Rossellini—tend unconsciously to meld history and ideology. Graphic elements are seen as simultaneously foreign and integral to the field of the image. From these contradictions hieroglyphs emerge that mark a design attesting to a hidden rhetoric and to configurations of meaning that cinema cannot always control. “A persuasive argument for renovating the ways we ‘read films.’” —Bulletin of the History of Medicine Tom Conley is Lowell Professor of romance languages and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Among his books is The Self-Made Map and Cartographic Cinema, as well as translations of The Fold by Gilles Deleuze, The Year of Passages by Réda Bensmaïa, and In the Metro by Marc Augé. 296 pages | 84 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Hieroglyphs Then and Now Introduction 1. The Filmic Icon: Boudu sauvé des eaux 2. The Law of the Letter: Scarlet Street 3. Dummies Revived: Manpower 4. The Nether Eye: Objective, Burma!  5. Facts and Figures of History: Paisan 6. The Human Alphabet: La bête humaine 7. Decoding Film Noir: The Killers, High Sierra, and White Heat Epilogue Appendix Notes Index