Description: Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.
Brief description: Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor in the Departments of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. His many books include Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema; An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France; and Cartographic Cinema.
Review Quotes:
"This is an extraordinary addition to silent and early sound film history. Conley has selected a group of films for investigation that--with the exception of The Revolt of Mamie Stover--are from the early stages of Walsh's career and have received, as far as I am aware, limited critical attention. Every chapter contains valuable discoveries, close readings of images, writing invasions of the visual realm, the cartographies of film space, and ample references to other filmmakers and writers whose work exhibits suggestive parallels with Walsh's own." -- George Toles, author of Curtains of Light: Theatrical Space in Film