Life as We Show It: Writing on Film
Published by City Lights, 2009
Perfect bound softcover
First Edition
290 pages
8.5x5.5 inches
“An engrossing collection of fiction, memory and observation that shifts the creative prerogative from the producers of cinema to the imaginative life of its consumers, from the site of spectacle to the dreamlife of the spectator, from the writerly to the readerly (and Roland Barthes would surely cheer).”—Todd Haynes
“These passionate, vibrant essays, fragments and meditations burrow energetically into a rich and underexplored subject—how movies intersect with and interfere with and alter and define and sometimes even become our autobiographies. Staking out its turf in the netherland where film criticism meets personal history, Life As We Show It is by turns poignant and raunchy, heartfelt and creepy, and almost always provocative and inspiring. You'll leave its pages with a long list of movies to watch and rewatch, and a wealth of new ways to look at them.”—Mark Harris
Co-edited by Bian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn.
Introduction by Masha Tupitsyn.
Life As We Show It is a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right. The texts play with the trope that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?
Using different lenses and multiple angles, a diverse group of twenty-five acclaimed writers and thinkers including Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Brown, Lidia Yuknavitch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Stephen Beachy, Robert Gluck, Fanny Howe, Kevin Killian, David Trinidad, Veronica Gonzalez, Myriam Gurba, Abdellah Taïa, and Dodie Bellamy navigate the increasingly fine line between lived experience and representation in contemporary American culture, providing a provocative and thoughtful perspective on the relationship between film and viewer and the experience of viewing life through screen-tinted glasses.
