Film Fables traces the history of modern cinema. Encyclopedic in scope, Film Fables is that rare work that manages to combine extraordinary breadth and analysis with a lyricism which attests time and again to a love of cinema. Jacques Ranciere moves effortlessly from Eisenstein's and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann's Westerns to Ray's romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini's neo-realism to Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema and Marker's documentaries. The Film Fable shows us how, between its images and its stories, the cinema tells its truth.
Prologue: A Thwarted Fable Part I: FABLES OF THE VISIBLE 1. Between the age of the theatre and the television age 2. Eisenstein's Madness 3. A Silent Tartuffe 4. From One Manhunt to Another: Fritz Lang Between Two Ages 5. The Child Director Part II: CLASSICAL NARRATIVE, ROMANTIC NARRATIVE 6. Some Things To Do: The Poetics of Anthony Mann 7. The Missing Shot: The Poetics of Nicholas Ray Part III: IF THERE IS A CINEMATOGRAPHIC MODERNITY 8. From One Image to Another? Deleuze and the Ages of Cinema 9. Falling Bodies: Rossellini's Physics 10. The Red of La Chinoise: Godard's Politics Part IV: FABLES OF THE CINEMA, (HI)STORIES OF A CENTURY 11. Documentary Fiction: Marker and the Fiction of Memory 12. A Fable Without a Moral: Godard, Cinema, (Hi)stories List of Films Sources and Acknowledgments
