Pretty - (Film and Culture) by Rosalind Galt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Film culture often rejects visually rich images, treating simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as the more provocative, political, and truly cinematic choice. Cinema may challenge traditional ideas of art, but its opposition to the decorative represents a long-standing Western aesthetic bias against feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal, colonial perspective--which treats decorative style as foreign or sexually perverse--filmmakers, critics, and theorists have often denigrated colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions in cinema.

Condemning the exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scène, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements-styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from the experimental films of Derek Jarman to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge!, the pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, communicating distinct sexual and political identities. Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, uniquely able to figure cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art theory, film theory, and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, shimmering with threads of political agency.

Review Quotes

Brilliantly engaging and absolutely knowledgeable. This is a key work.... Highly recommended.-- "Choice"

One of the most attractive features of Galt's book is her ability to corral so many different iterations of art and film criticism and provide so many examples from world cinema, effecting in the end a general theory of world cinema, of a pretty world cinema.--Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California

Remarkably wide-ranging and engagingly intricate. Rosalind Galt's argument is bold, its mode of argumentation sure and convincing. This very original take on culturally received and culturally determining ideas and emotions surrounding visual pleasure is long overdue. Galt's book is a necessary contribution to the study of the image in film and visuality studies.--Brigitte Peucker, author of The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film and Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts

About the Author

Rosalind Galt is senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map and coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories.