Noel Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history. "Life to Those Shadows" presents a critique of 'classical' approaches to film: the assumptions that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, and that[...]

This classic in film theory, presents a systematic study of the techniques of the film medium and of their potential uses for creating formal structures in individual films such as Dovzhenko's Earth, Antonioni's La Notte, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, Renoir's Nana, and Godard's Pierrot le Fou.[...]