The New Yorker: The Eloquent Screen

Tribute to Gilberto Perez, author of The Eloquent Screen from The New Yorker

A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us

Gilberto Perez, who died in 2015, at the age of seventy-one, was one of the great scholars and theorists of the cinema. His peers agreed: they cited his book “The Material Ghost,” from 1998, as the most influential work of cinema studies of that decade—tied with Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Histoire(s) du Cinéma.” He was also my teacher, and, later, my friend. I studied under him at Princeton in the late nineteen-seventies, where he was the one and only professor of cinema studies. 

 

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