Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz

Laleen Jayamanne’s Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz takes an unusual approach, at least within film studies, in the analysis of four stylistically different filmmakers. The “spirit of the gift” in the title refers not only to what films offer the receptive viewer, but what films want or expect to elicit as a response from the viewer. Jayamanne takes the phrase “spirit of the gift” from anthropology; it refers to an offering that “imposes an intangible idea of the gift as an obligation to reciprocate it.” Jayamanne argues that certain films put the viewer in “a mode of reception that may be animated by the cognitive imagination.” It is this imaginative and synesthetic participation, the reciprocity of what is offered to the senses by the surface of a film, that Jayamanne focuses on in films by G.W. Pabst, Sergei...