Non-Fiction Books

"Let me tell you a story," each film seems to offer silently as its opening frames hit the screen. But sometimes the film finds a voice―an off-screen narrator―for all or part of the story. From Wuthering Heights and Double Indemnity to Annie Hall and Platoon , voice-over narration has been an integral part of American movies. Through examples from films such as How Green Was My Valley , All About Eve , The Naked City , and Barry Lyndon , Sarah Kozloff examines and analyzes voice-over narration. She refutes the assumptions that words should only play a minimal role in film, that "showing" is superior to "telling," or that the technique is inescapably authoritarian (the "voice of god"). She questions the common conception that voice-over is a literary technique by tracing its origins in the silent era and by highlighting the influence of radio, documentaries, and television. She explores how first-person or third-person narration really affects a film, in terms of genre conventions, viewer identification, time and nostalgia, subjectivity, and reliability. In conclusion she argues that voice-over increases film's potential for intimacy and sophisticated irony.

Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, "When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue." Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films―from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs --this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.

When Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ nearly fifty years ago, they did so in the name of freedom. They could never have foreseen that its indiscriminate embrace by many film theorists would turn the anti-authorship stance into a restrictive orthodoxy. Sarah Kozloff daringly advocates a new paradigm, a theory of film authorship that takes into account flesh-and-blood filmmakers, including their biographies, their intentions and their collaborations. Building upon scholarship by Noël Carroll, Paisley Livingstone, Robert Carringer and Paul Sellors, Kozloff argues that we watch films in large part to feel a sense of communion with the people behind them. Writing with clarity and verve, Kozloff moves gracefully back and forth between film history and film theory. She offers an extended examination of The Red Kimona (1925) in order to demonstrate how knowledge about the people who created this intriguing early feminist movie can change a viewer’s interpretation. She also weaves in the voices of numerous filmmakers, revealing these artists’ thoughtful intentionality. Kozloff has written a refreshingly straightforward defence of authorship and intentional creative agency. Academics and their students, who have been told for the past forty years that the idea of the author is pernicious, badly need to hear what she says. She has a welcome ability to deal concisely with jargon-encrusted theory and is very good at pointing out the historical inaccuracies, logical weaknesses, evasions and contradictions in familiar arguments. Her book is a deceptively simple, well-reasoned intervention in the field. —James Naremore, author of An Invention without a Future: Essays on Cinema (2014) Sarah Kozloff is Professor of Film on the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Best Years of Our Lives in the BFI Film Classics Series (2011), Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) and I nvisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (1988). Her articles and chapters appear in numerous journals, anthologies and textbooks.

Director, screenwriter and comic genius, Preston Sturges has been an influence on filmmakers ranging from Orson Welles to the Coen brothers. The first person to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, he wrote and directed some of the most bizarre, controversial, and downright hilarious comedies of the 1940s, including Sullivan’s Travels and Hail the Conquering Hero . He may be the most talented Hollywood filmmaker yet to receive the critical recognition he deserves. The Films of Preston Sturges is a pioneering collection of essays by world-famous scholars that chart Sturges’ contributions to Hollywood cinema, revealing his pivotal status as an early writer-director, exploring his inimitable style, and making a bold case for his ongoing influence today. Reawakening interest in this filmmaker’s life and works, this book will remind readers why Sturges’ movies remain not only immensely enjoyable, but of great cultural significance as well.