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Shots to the Heart
For the Love of Film Performance
by Steven Rybin
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Book Presentation:
This book continues the author's project, begun in the 2017 monograph Gestures of Love, of exploring the place of film actors in an emotional and thoughtful reception of movies. Shots to the Heart aims to provide both concrete critical engagements with moments of performance as well as philosophical explorations of and reflections on the implications of a love for performance in viewing cinema.
Shots to the Heart explores how the work of the film actor inspires, provokes, and refigures our feelings and thoughts about the cinema. The book closely considers the art of film performance, the combined effect of actors’ gestures, movements, and expressions, in relation to the viewer’s sensitive and creative eye. As discrete moments of performative incarnation onscreen slowly accumulate, actors also become figures of meaning. For many viewers, the screen figures which result from performance are simply called “characters.” But in thinking about cinema, the words “character” and “characterization” signal post-experiential abstractions: when we quickly identify characters or summarize characterization after seeing a movie, we are leaping over the emotions felt through our loving attention to the bodies flitting through a film. Such concepts can never replace a careful regard for what actors onscreen are actually doing, moment by moment, gesture by gesture. Shots to the Heart is finally not too concerned with the narrative machinations within which these gestures are inscribed, and even resists the attempt to assemble these descriptions of performance into a “full” account of the film as a whole. What Shots to the Heart does is let little moments of performance live on, in writing, as they are strung together alongside performative fragments from other films, in a kind of alternative, cinephilic account of what was felt as actors moved on the screen before us.
About the Author:
Steven Rybin is an associate professor of film studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Press Reviews:
“Here is an example of that rare book in Film Studies: one that dares to bring the academic rigor of the film scholar into contact with the adoring pleasure of the cinephile. In Shots to the Heart, Steven Rybin eloquently and convincingly—indeed lovingly—explores the elusive, ineffable quality of what is so often simply (dis)regarded as the ‘actor’s magic’.”—Daniel Varndell, Professor, English Literature, University of Winchester, UK.
“This is a meditation on not only the love of performance but also the love of writing about cinema itself. Rybin interweaves personal reflection and incisive analysis in such a way that the reader is compelled, in turn, to retrace their own relationship to beloved moments in film. Eloquent and thought-provoking.”—Ana Salzberg, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Visual Culture, University of Dundee, Scotland.
“A little book with big ideas and a wonderful addition to scholarship on performance, auteur theory, and star studies.”—MatthewLeggatt, Lecturer, Department of English, Creative Writing and American Studies, University of Winchester, UK.
“Shots to the Heart: For the Love of Film Performance engages with some of the leading authorities on film performance and cinephilia in a lucid manner. Steven Rybin’s love for writing shines through every page, and the articulation of a love of film performance as a way of moving across a film is particularly compelling, enacted as it is through the style of writing.”—Professor Sarah Cooper, Film Studies Department, King’s College London, UK.
“Taking a novel approach to the study of film performance, Rybin’s Shots to the Heart theorizes audiences’ emotional responses to performers. Rybin eloquently articulates what it means to ‘fall for’ an actor and provides a range of case studies to illustrate the special affection that film performances can instill in viewers.”—Jennifer O’Meara, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College, USA.
See the publisher website: Anthem Press
> From the same author:
Stellar Transformations (2022)
Movie Stars of the 2010s
Dir. Steven Rybin
Subject: On Films > Per period
Geraldine Chaplin (2020)
The Gift of Film Performance
by Steven Rybin
Subject: Actor > Geraldine Chaplin
Gestures of Love (2018)
Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema
by Steven Rybin
Subject: Genre > Romantic films
Hamlet Lives in Hollywood (2017)
John Barrymore and the Acting Tradition Onscreen
Dir. Murray Pomerance and Steven Rybin
Subject: Actor > John Barrymore
The Cinema of Hal Hartley (2016)
Flirting with Formalism
Dir. Steven Rybin
Subject: Director > Hal Hartley
Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground (2015)
Nicholas Ray in American Cinema
Dir. Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel
Subject: Director > Nicholas Ray
> On a related topic:
Transatlantic Cinephilia (2023)
Film Culture between Latin America and France, 1945–1965
Subject: General
For the Love of Cinema (2017)
Teaching Our Passion in and Outside the Classroom
Dir. Rashna Wadia Richards and David T. Johnson
Subject: General
Moving Pictures and Classic Images (2004)
Memories of Forty Years in the Vintage Film Hobby
Subject: General
From Ciné-goûters to Screenings for Cinephilie (2022)
The Cinemas of the Instituts and the Alliances françaises
by Giusy Pisano
Subject: Sociology
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