V. F. Perkins On Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism: ‘Play It Again’ or The Film World Under Inspection

In-depth review of posthumous publication V.F. Perkins on Movies, edited by Douglas Pye. It’s a path through the British film critic’s thoughts and main objects of desire, enhancing the importance of an almost invisible style, elegant mise-en-scène and a subtle rapport to material reality. The filmic worlds of namely Max Ophüls, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Frederick Wiseman are looked at with the analytical precision (the “dagger-gaze”) that this film critic’s writing deserves. Bazinian realism, the auteur theory and cinema as a kind of “gestural vocabulary” are also highlighted in this reading of Perkins’s critical art.