Cinema of the Third Kind

Know about the book -

Cinema of the Third Kind is written by Gershon Reiter and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1978358695 (ISBN 10) and 9781978358690 (ISBN 13).

"The basic purpose of a film is one of illumination, of showing the viewer something he can't see any other way," Stanley Kubrick had stated when speaking of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first of his six highly-visual masterpieces that truly showed the viewer what he couldn't "see any other way." Beyond this, beyond film's "basic purpose" to show us what "we can't see any other way," a handful of films take it one step further by addressing seeing itself. As Kubrick's own Eyes Wide Shut attests, in focusing on the sense with which we see cinema, these self-reflexive films add another layer of meaning to the familiar "two kinds of cinemas." Namely, movie's entertaining story line and film's aesthetic subtext. By virtue of this subtle but distinct seeing subtext these infrequent films beget a third kind of cinema, what this eponymous book calls "cinema of the third kind." In this third kind of cinema, naturally enough, all hinges on the seeing subtext. Without it we "merely" have movies and films, the first two kinds' entertainment and art. With the reflexive seeing subtext, on the other hand, we have an added kind of cinema, one kind within another like three generations of nesting dolls. This distinct but subtle seeing subtext is the focus of "Cinema of the Third Kind." Through its detailed scene-by-scene analyses, the book takes a close look at how the subject of seeing is cinematically conveyed in four remarkable films, crafted by four of our finest filmmakers at the top of their game: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Spanning the latter half of the twentieth century, from 1953 to 1999, the four films tell different stories in four distinct time periods, according to each auteur's personal vision and cinematic style. Yet, however different they may be, in their innermost third layer all are reflexive films on seeing. Each in their own way, all deal with the age-old perception problem of seeing what we expect to see rather than what's before our eyes. All are cinemas of the third kind.