Overhearing Film Dialogue

Rating:
Summary: essential reading
Review: You need only glance at the title of Sarah Kozloff's new book to realize that a major aspect of filmmaking has been utterly overlooked by scholars. It is only after you dive into the text, however, that Kozloff reveals how central dialogue has been to every aspect of Hollywood style and convention from editing devices to narrative strategies to genre patterns. In the tradition of the best formalist poetics Kozloff elaborates dialogue's essential role in the structuring of film texts. In the tradition of the most sophisticated and evenhanded feminist theory, Kozloff demonstrates how talk, gabbing, gossip, and silence have been gendered throughout the history of talkies. This book is a major scholarly contribution, yet it also manages to present arguments in lucid prose and hang theory on clear examples chosen from familiar films.