Bøker av Robert B. Ray

Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations. Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.

Ray offers close readings that call attention to what we have missed in such classic films as La Regle du Jeu, It Happened One Night, It's a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, Breathless, and Tickets.

An analysis of the ideologies and artistic conventions of American movies includes examinations of films such as Casablanca, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather.

Provocative and illuminating essays on Thoreau's masterwork, shedding new light on its enduring inspiration and philosophical depth. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents' house in Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin he built himself on the land of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He described his time there, just over two years, as an experiment in ';living deliberately.' His daily journal entries became the source material for Walden, a masterful meditation on the virtues of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and man's relationship to nature. In Walden x 40, Robert B. Ray adopts Thoreau's compositional method to explore some of the questions posed in Walden. Drawing connections to the works of poets and philosophers from Wordsworth to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Breton, Ray derives the inspiration for his 40 brief essays by exploring the pages of Walden in the same way Thoreau explored his own lifedeliberately.

In the 1920s, when film criticism was as new as the cinema itself, a particular way of thinking about the movies developed in Paris. This collection of essays discusses this mystery and others like it: Why did photography and the detective story originate at exactly the same time?