Gilberto Perez
Gilberto Perez was an American Professor of Film Studies. Perez grew up in Havana, Cuba, where he was exposed to an eclectic international mix of films. He is the son of Federico Gilberto Pérez y Castillo and Edenia Mercedes Guillermo y Marrero. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to study engineering. As an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became interested in theoretical physics. For Gil, theoretical physics was appealing because of its ability to explain the world around him: why a moving bicycle doesn't tip over. During the summer, he worked at American Science and Engineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, analyzing rocket trajectories. At MIT, he became well known for his sometimes pretentious column of movie reviews in The Tech. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he enrolled in Princeton University as a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics, but his interest in film began to overtake his interest in physics. As with his work in physics, he always had his own sensibility as to the importance of film criticism. As a film critic, he wanted to understand how and why the film functioned - why the bicycle/film didn't tip over.
He was the head of the film history department at Sarah Lawrence College from 1983-2015. He died January 6, 2015 at the age of 71. Gil is survived by his wife, Diane Stevenson, and a brother, Jorge Pérez y Guillermo. During 21 years he was brother-in-law to Princess Christina of the Netherlands; her offspring: two nephews, Bernardo Guillermo and Nicolás Guillermo, and a niece, Juliana Guillermo.
Awards
- Noble fellowship for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the Museum of Modern Art.
- Mellon Faculty fellowship at Harvard University.
- Weiner Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Missouri.
Books
- The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, The Johns Hopkins University Press
- The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, University of Minnesota Press
Articles and Film Reviews
1969: "Jacques Becker: Two Films", Sight & Sound 38:3.
1971: "F.W. Murnau: An Introduction", Film Comment 7:2. Reprinted in the anthology Passport to Hollywood.
"Twenty-four Times a Second", Sight and Sound 40:4.
1972: "The Chaplin Revue", Film Comment 8:3
1975: "All in the Foreground: A Study of Dovzhenko's Earth", The Hudson Review 28:1.
1977: "The Narrative Sequence", The Hudson Review, 30:1, 80-92. Reprinted in New Observations, No. 36, Winter 1985-86.
"Narrative Voices" , The Hudson Review 30:4 ; a section reprinted in a volume of the anthology Contemporary Literary Criticism.
1978: "The Interior of the Decorator" , New York Arts Journal 11.
"Modernist Cinema: The History Lessons of Straub and Huillet", Artforum 17:2. Reprinted, at Jean-Marie Straub's own request, in the accompanying booklet to the retrospective of the films of Straub and Huillet at the Public Theater, New York City, November 1982.
"Something to Look up to" 8.
1979: "Fiction Chronicle" , The Hudson Review 32:3.
"Film Chronicle: Days of Heaven", The Hudson Review 32:1.
"Herzog's Nosferatu", New York Arts Journal 16. Reprinted in a volume of the anthology Contemporary Literary Criticism.
"Up Close" , New York Arts Journal 13.
1980: "Kubrick's Fearful Geometry" , New York Arts Journal 19
"These Days in the Holocene" The Hudson Review 33:4 ; a section reprinted in a volume of the anthology Contemporary Literary Criticism.
1981: "The Bewildered Equilibrist: An Essay on Buster Keaton's Comedy", The Hudson Review 34:3.
"The First and Other Persons" , The Hudson Review 34:4.
"A Note on Buñuel's Narrative", Artery 5:1.
1982: "Between Life and Art" , The Hudson Review 35:2.
"The Thread of the Disconcerting" , Sight and Sound 52:1, 58-61.
1983: "Atget's Stillness", The Hudson Review 36:2.
1984: "The Camera and the Subject", New Observations 27.
1985: "A Question of Point of View", Sight and Sound 54:2, 133-4.
1986: "Godard's Tenderness", Raritan, 6:1, 63-83.
1988: "The Madwoman in the Loft: Fatal Attraction", The Hudson Review, 41:1, 197-202.
1989: "Landscape and Fiction: Jean Renoir's Country Excursion", The Hudson Review, 42:2, 237-60.
1991: "Bell-Bottom Blues" , The Nation Feb. 18.
"In the Beginning" , The Nation November 4.
"The Point of View of a Stranger, an essay on Antonioni's Eclipse", The Hudson Review, 44:2, 234-62.
1992: "The Cult of the Colt" , The Nation, September 14.
1993: "The Frontier Dialectic", The Nation, October 25.
"It's a Wonderful Life" , The Nation, January 4/11.
"Nosferatu", Raritan, 13:1, 1-29.
1994: "The Centenary of Jean Renoir", The Yale Review 83:4.
"A Man Pointing: Antonioni and the Film Image", The Yale Review, 82:3, 38-65.
1996: "Film in Review: The Gangster's Enterprise", The Yale Review, 84:3, 186-95.
1997: "Film in Review: The Edges of Realism" , The Yale Review, 85:1, 171-84.
"Film in Review: The Liberal Imagination" , The Yale Review, 85:3, 175-87.
"Films, The Material Ghost", Raritan, 16:4, 106-26.
1998: "Cinema in Review: Victor Nunez and Ulee's Gold", The Yale Review, 86:2, 174-85.
"L'or et le miel", Trafic 28.
"La sequenza narrativa", Quaderni 2.
"Theory and Aesthetics in Film Scholarship" - 'In the Study of Film, Theory Must Work Hand in Hand With Criticism', Chronicle of Higher Education 45:11, 6-7.
1999: "An Actor and a Director Whose Bond Was, Well, Mad" , The New York Times, Sunday, November 7.
"Cinema in Review: Spectacle and Surveillance", The Yale Review 87:1, 182-92.
"Film in Review: Ghosts of the City: Films of Ernie Gehr", The Yale Review 87:4, 173-88.
"Obsessed by Place, and Finding One on a Frontier" , The New York Times, Sunday, March 21.
"Slices of Cake" , London Review of Books, 21:16, 19 August.
2000: "Toward a Rhetoric of Film: Identification and the Spectator", Senses of Cinema - on-line journal 5.
Forthcoming: "Film in Review: Bad Boys", The Yale Review 88:2.
Articles from the London Review of Books
How We Remember Terrence Malick 12 September 2013Bourgeois Nightmares: Michael Haneke 6 December 2012
House of Miscegenation: Westerns 18 November 2010
Building with Wood: Time and Tarkovsky 26 February 2009
Self-Illuminated: Godard's Method 1 April 2004
It's a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie 27 June 2002
Looking for Imperfection: John Cassavetes 23 August 2001
"Who is this Ingrid Bergman?": Stroheim and Rossellini 14 December 2000
So Close to the Monster: The Trouble with Being Cuban 22 June 2000
Slices of Cake: Alfred Hitchcock 19 August 1999