A visual conundrum in Nicholas Ray’s bigger than life

old_uid13051
titleA visual conundrum in Nicholas Ray’s bigger than life
start_date2013/11/22
schedule11h-13h
onlineno
location_infoPavillon Pasteur
summaryIn an earlier talk, “Imagined Seeing and the Rhetoric of Narrative Film,” I argued that many aspects of the ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ of a given film are best understood as products of a kind of ‘visual rhetoric’. That is, relevant movie audiences are persuaded that the narrative events in the movie—the events in a certain segment, for instance--are most aptly imagined as falling within a certain pattern of explanation and valuation. In this talk, I use Nicholas Ray’s 1956 melodrama Bigger than Life as a striking example of the claim in question. In the course of defending my approach to this movie, I provide a relatively close examination of the film as a whole and of a certain remarkable segment in particular, arguing for the interpretative strategy that, in my opinion, illuminates the opacity of the segment most naturally. Of course, I also try to link this specific interpretation to some of my broader claims about the ‘visual rhetoric of movie narrative.’
responsiblesSchlenker