Böcker av Steven Rybin

Shots to the Heart explores how the work of the film actor inspires, provokes, and refigures our feelings and thoughts about the cinema. The book closely considers the art of film performance, the combined effect of actors' gestures, movements, and expressions, in relation to the viewer's sensitive and creative eye. As discrete moments of performative incarnation onscreen slowly accumulate, actors also become figures of meaning. For many viewers, the screen figures which result from performance are simply called "e;characters."e; But in thinking about cinema, the words "e;character"e; and "e;characterization"e; signal post-experiential abstractions: when we quickly identify characters or summarize characterization after seeing a movie, we are leaping over the emotions felt through our loving attention to the bodies flitting through a film. Such concepts can never replace a careful regard for what actors onscreen are actually doing, moment by moment, gesture by gesture. Shots to the Heart is finally not too concerned with the narrative machinations within which these gestures are inscribed, and even resists the attempt to assemble these descriptions of performance into a "e;full"e; account of the film as a whole. What Shots to the Heart does is let little moments of performance live on, in writing, as they are strung together alongside performative fragments from other films, in a kind of alternative, cinephilic account of what was felt as actors moved on the screen before us.

Michael Mann first made his mark as a writer for such television programs as Starsky and Hutch, Police Story, and Vegas. In 1981 he made his feature film directing debut with the James Caan thriller Thief, and in the 1980s he served as a writer and executive producer for the groundbreaking programs Miami Vice and Crime Story. Though he has delved into other genres, Mann's career as a writer, producer, and director has consistently focused on criminal activity, from small-time hoods and professional thieves to corporate manipulators and serial killers.In Michael Mann: Crime Auteur, Steven Rybin looks at the television programs and films that Mann has stamped with his personal signature. This book closely examines the themes and techniques used in films such as Manhunter, Heat, The Insider, and Collateral and connects these elements to his work on the non-genre films The Last of the Mohicans and Ali. A revised and significantly expanded edition of The Cinema of Michael Mann (2007), this book includes new chapters on Public Enemies and the big screen version of Miami Vice, as well as Mann's work on the shows Crime Story and Luck. Covering Mann's entire career, this book will be of interest to fans of the writer/director's body of work as well as to scholars of both film and television.