Writ on Water

This eloquent book draws on the author's responses to a wide range of extraordinary films—"long takes" on Altman's Nashville, Godard's Hail Mary, Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren's masterful close readings blend profound philosophical reflections with a treasure trove of literary and artistic references to place film, in its relations to other arts, as one of the greatest aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays offer an original and powerful statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of what the author calls "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world. This important and much-needed book is no less than a celebration and affirmation of the very discipline of film criticism. One is left with one's appetite for film refreshed.