Gilberto Perez

Gilberto Perez, Noble Professor of Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium.

Aphotograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière. The photograph was taken during the shooting of Lumière et compagnie, a film which, on the 100th anniversary of Lumière’s invention, enlisted...

Self-Illuminated: Godard’s Method

Gilberto Perez, 1 April 2004

“Godard and Miéville put together Ici et ailleurs (1976) out of pieces from Jusqu’à la victoire, a militant film about the Palestinian situation . . . it conveys on Godard’s part an unearned sense of being let down by the Palestinians on screen; like his revolutionism, his disillusionment with revolution has something brattish about it. When MacCabe later ‘asked him what he thought of politics’, Godard ‘mimed injecting a huge syringe into his arm’ and replied ‘Some people take drugs, some people take politics.’”

Building with Wood: Time and Tarkovsky

Gilberto Perez, 26 February 2009

The first film Andrei Tarkovsky shot outside the Soviet Union was Nostalghia – spelled that way because ‘nostalgia’ is too weak an equivalent for the Russian word, the Russian emotion. Made in Italy in 1982-83, it begins with a visit to the Tuscan church where Piero della Francesca painted his fresco of the pregnant Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto. But the scene...

House of Miscegenation: Westerns

Gilberto Perez, 18 November 2010

The hero of the Toy Story trilogy is a toy cowboy. In Toy Story 3 when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare centre, and a kindly bear welcomes them into a community of toys freed from their owners, the cowboy alone stays loyal to Andy; and when the toy bear turns out to be a dictator worse than any owner, the cowboy, who was never persuaded...

Letter

Comanche from Germany

18 November 2010

I regret that there was no acknowledgment of Diane Stevenson in my piece on the Western (LRB, 18 November). Diane is my wife, but her ideas about The Searchers weren’t tossed at me in marital conversation: they were presented in research papers at academic conferences. I had never heard of Quanah Parker, the historical Comanche chief of mixed race who was, as she established, the inspiration for...

The names of the actors appear briefly on a dark screen. We hear the sound of a car on a road. A title reads: ‘This film is based on a true story.’ Then we see a large American car...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences