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James Zborowski, Timothy Corrigan, Describing Cinema, Screen, Volume 66, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaf011
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Extract
Describing Cinema is a slim volume, comprising mostly a series of short chapters, typically between seven and nine pages, each of which analyses a single film. At the end of his introductory chapter, Corrigan offers these analyses as a ‘series of short rhetorical snapshots’, and, by way of sketching his approach, invokes the figure of the flaneur (p. 25). The Romantic prioritisation of self-expression is established earlier, when Corrigan declares an intention to give ‘more than usual free reign to the more subjective and independent force of […] descriptions’, and asserts that he is ‘interested in bold, even creative, descriptions’ (p. 10).
The book’s descriptive method of evoking vivid visual fragments sometimes succeeds in capturing the tone and the experience of a film. Take, for example, this passage from near the beginning of the chapter on In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000) – the film whose own stylistic approach is probably most amenable to Corrigan’s way of seeing:
How […] does description engage a film that moves relentlessly through repeated and unresolved anticipations, where anticipation becomes a shimmering and evanescent mood, a holding of the breath, a rhythmic blur, a souvenir of something that never has happened or will happen. How does one describe a mood that never becomes an action, like a rehearsal of a scene that will never be acted on a real stage, which is for me the mesmerizing luxury of […] In the Mood for Love. (pp. 130–31)
