- Finally finished my proposal draft, for better or for worse.

- Issues came up in my draft regarding reality/realism and its relation to the cinema and the city nexus. The basic problem is that I am trying to describe, I think, a phenomenological experience of seeing the city on film and I am mostly using the terms "realism" or "reality" or documentary for this experience, arguing that film both documents and imagines city space (or that there's something like a dialectic of documentation and imagination). On the imagination side, I slot the narrative/diegetic world that the film is supplying, putting the films I'm studying within a -- largely literary -- tradition of urban mystery. On the documentation side, I argue vaguely about cinema's photographic bases, its ability to communicate the idea "reality" photographically. But I think maybe what I actually mean here are the films' referential qualities, which may or may not have to do with photography/cinematography necessarily. Tom's essay "Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality," which I read today, is enormously helpful in sorting these things out. In it he argues that we rethink the proposition that the basis of cinematic realism lies squarely within the indexical nature of photography, which is its basis. Among other things, he argues that the indexical relation, wrongly ascribed to Bazin is not the only way to figure cinematic realism and points instead to experiences of cinematic motion as an alternative (one which encompass a lacuna in film theory - the consideration of animation as film). For this argument about motion an early article by Christian Metz is signficant. BUT, the most important, and somewhat liberating aspect of this essay, is the way it undoes the necessary relation between ideas about cinema's realism and photography, and points out that there are perhaps many other ways this relation can be understood (motion is only one avenue). 

"The chief limitation to the indexical approach to Bazin comes from the difference between a semiotics that approaches the photograph  (and therefore film) as a sign

and a theory like Bazin's that deals instead with the way that film creates an aesthetic 

world." (Gunning 33)

- Also, read preface to Phenomenology of Perception. 

Some sources to remember:

Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle - haven't looked at it yet, but it seems to be the writing on stalker film that I knew existed but could not find. Looks promising. 

David Bordwell's The Way Hollywood Tells It has what looks to be a useful chronology of important developments in Hollywood Film, 1960-2004. 

Update: The Vera Dika book is not helpful.