Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #719029 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Based in Paris, Michel Chion has written many books on the cinema, including a series of groundbreaking works on film sound as well as David Lynch (bfi, 1995) and Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey (bfi, 2000).

Customer Reviews

Really bad
Maybe it is Kubrick's fault, as Eyes Wide Shut is a very obtuse piece of work. As such, I really wanted to learn more about it themes and narratives and film techniques. The BFI books are generally very good, but this specific one is really bad. It is probably the worst piece of nonfiction I've encountered in a long time. Not to be unkind, but Chion provides endless pointless meandering unfocused crazy observations.

I would like to meet the editor who greenlighted this project and ask him or her some questions about that decision.

I think the vast majority of people who read this book will be extremely disappointed in it, as was I. sorry!

Not Very Eye Opening
EYES WIDE SHUT is a beautiful film filled, like most of Stanley Kubrick's movies, with a great deal of ambiguity open for rich interpretation. Michael Chion, the author of this BFI monograph, for the most part fails to deliver.

It is not so much that Chion, like the authors of other BFI movie analyses, devolves into unintelligible post-modernist babble. For the most part, Chion's writing is accessible to the average reader who may be unfamiliar with all the ins and outs of film school analysis. The problem is that Chion's analysis just seems rather empty. I may have gained a point or two out of this book, but not as much as I would have liked and not as much as others in the BFI series have provided.

A large part of the problem is the structure of the book. Chion breaks the book into 34 little subsections (in a book with only 88 pages of text and with a lot of pictures), each one providing a bite sized take on some aspect or another of the film. Yet these are not substantial enough to be satisfying and they are only loosely tied together. The lack of a central organizing structure takes its toll with the result being a book that is not as good as it should have been.

Kubrick's Final Masterpiece disected (well)
You really need to be a big fan of Stanley Kubrick to appreciate Eyes Wide Shut (the movie or the book). It covers the movie in extraordinary detail pointing out things I hadn't seen or thought of in the many viewings I've made of Kubrick's finale. It refers frequently to the novella it's based on, Traumnovelle, and draws a lot of comparisons to the fin-de-siecle original and the end-of-the-20th century contemporary setting of the movie. Loved this book. Buy it.