Renoir auguste

THE THING HAPPENS: TEN YEARS OF WRITING ABOUT THE MOVIES

1993 · 23790 — New York City NY: Grove Press 1993. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket. New York City NY: Grove Press 1993. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 400 pages. Retrospective collection of essays on subject. One of the absolute best books on the art and achievement of film-making of the 20th century. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. Presents Terrence Rafferty's "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About The Movies". His first and thus far only collection of indispensable film criticism. Brilliantly conceived and eloquently written with probing insight encyclopedic knowledge and exacting yet always fair judgment. The title comes from James Agee the pioneering film critic who compared and contrasted as he often did the difference between "laborious" writing which is descriptive at best and a film's "immediate" impact that is the visceral sensation one experiences while watching - and then "reliving" - a film: The thing happens "before our eyes" as Stanley Kauffmann once observed and made the title of HIS own greatest book of film criticism. Incidentally this central insight about the film medium derives originally and famously from Walter Benjamin. Rafferty's sumptuous 400-page book is served in three courses beginning with a great Essay on Jean Renoir surely THE filmmaker of life's sensuous creative and intellectual appetites followed by a much more measured section on "Directors" and concludes with scintillating "Movies" piquant reviews of films from the last quarter of the 20th century Renoir's "successors" when they are at their best. Rafferty is a "hedonist/humanist" of a critic who loves life and has little patience for narrowly "aesthete" nihilistic film directors like Peter Greenaway whom he feels obligated to write about in order to demolish the self-referring closed-circuit film-making Greenaway epitomizes. "Agee Farber and Kael are his peers" Guillermo Cabrera Infante. An absolute "must-have" title for Terrence Rafferty collectors. What a find: This was the personal copy of Clay Felker the late great magazine and literary editor of several major American magazines notably Esquire which he helped make more literate and literary. As was his custom he signed his name in black ink-pen on the inside front cover discreetly hidden from view by the front DJ flap. This title is a great collection. This is the only such signed association copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean crisp and bright. Please note: Terrence Rafferty did NOT tour to promote his book. Copies available online have very serious flaws because they were avidly read or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. One of the most brilliant film critics of the 20th century and our time. Some of the greatest film artists of our time. A fine copy. SEE ALSO STANLEY KAUFFMANN AND PAULINE KAEL TITLES IN OUR CATALOG. ISBN 0802114857. Grove Press hardcover