Historical — Volume 2: The largest means, spent on an ending
The scale of the epic used to weigh what disappears.
Your ebooks, ready now and whenever you want
- Download right after payment
- A copy by email, easy to find later
- Your personal library: sign in with your email and download again whenever you want
- PDF and EPUB for common devices, available from your library
The volume
Thousands of extras, four hours in the theater with a declared intermission, halls lit by candlelight, an imperial city opened to a film crew for the first time. None of it celebrates a conquest: it is there to weigh what disappears, and it manages to weigh it precisely because it is enormous. A bereavement told small stays a private fact; told with an army and with four hours of an audience's time, it becomes the vanishing of a world. One entrusts more than three hours of melodrama to a woman who never improves. One places its loudest scene at the exact center of its moral story and keeps going past the triumph. One puts thousands of extras at the service of a man who decides almost nothing. One spends its last hour at a party where not one destiny moves. The last announces how it ends in the first quarter of an hour.
The five films, and why they are here
Gone with the Wind
A colossus can rest on an unpleasant protagonist, provided that instead of sympathy she is given a recognizable hunger.
Ben-Hur
The action peak can sit far from the end, as long as a question is left to settle after the triumph.
The Last Emperor
A passive protagonist can carry an epic when everything taken from him changes who he is in other people's eyes.
The Leopard
Slowness as material: you have to stay in those rooms long enough to feel them on you when the lights go out.
Ran
Declaring the outcome within the opening minutes, and moving the audience from the seat of the fighters to that of the witnesses.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.