R. J. Cardullo Bücher

Alexander Bakshy (1885-1949) was a pioneering film critic, serving as the first movie critic for the Nation from 1927 to 1933 and becoming one of America’s first full-time professional film critics. Renowned for his foresight, he championed sound cinema in 1929 and played a crucial role in promoting film as an art form during the interwar years. As an innovative theorist, Bakshy applied self-reflexive modernism to cinema, emphasizing medium-awareness and anti-illusionism. The collection offers insightful commentary on significant films such as Chaplin’s City Lights, Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, alongside analysis of influential directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra. It also showcases Bakshy’s theoretical essays on film acting, experimental theaters, and the transition from silent to sound cinema. This anthology uniquely spans both silent and sound periods, embracing black-and-white and color films, and presents Bakshy’s modernist perspective, finally giving him the recognition he deserves, previously reserved for critics like James Agee. R. J. Cardullo, a former film critic for the Hudson Review and a seasoned educator, has authored and edited numerous works on film. He holds degrees from Tulane and Yale and currently resides in Finland with his wife and their dog, Bertie.

This book details the author's Italian-American beginnings in the New York of the 1950s and the profound effect that his extended, working-class family has had on his life. So great has this effect been that, as the author ages, he finds he thinks less of the momentous history through which he has lived, or of the intellectual life he has enjoyed, than of some things far more permanent, profound, and primordial: the people and places he knew as a youth, and that knew him; the baseball he played, the movies he loved (and the movie stars he spotted), the teachers he revered; the English his family learned as well as the Italian he unlearned, or lost in translation; the Mafiosi he met and marked; and the religion of his youth that he abandoned, yet that did not abandon him. Cardullo knows that he can't go home again: all he can really do is think about it, which he does so eloquently in Straight Out of Brooklyn.