Kristi McKim

Despite its titular call for haste and excess (rush/more), this film challenges a capitalistic drive toward perfectionism—one that perpetually defers attainment—and celebrates the quiet connections, the earnest gestures of tenderness, that defy such passion and haste. A revision to Max’s “secret” (doing what you love for the rest of your life) and Cousteau’s exceptionalism, Rushmore celebrates not the doing but the loving, not the solitary genius but the polyvocal collective. In transforming perfectionism into attention, Rushmore models a way of loving and being that measures achievement not in acquisition of capital but in community-enriching acts of making. Drawing out Rushmore’s subtleties that soften, temper, ease, expand, and equalize the film’s haste and zeal, this book—built of ecocritical, phenomenological, and feminist ways of reading—models a generous attention learned from the film itself. In this regard, Rushmore moves from desperate efforts to force meaning toward the gentle emergence of small miracles, an ephemerality at the heart of cinematic experience.

Despite its titular call for haste and excess (rush/more), this film challenges a capitalistic drive toward perfectionism—one that perpetually defers attainment—and celebrates the quiet connections, the earnest gestures of tenderness, that defy such passion and haste. A revision to Max’s “secret” (doing what you love for the rest of your life) and Cousteau’s exceptionalism, Rushmore celebrates not the doing but the loving, not the solitary genius but the polyvocal collective. In transforming perfectionism into attention, Rushmore models a way of loving and being that measures achievement not in acquisition of capital but in community-enriching acts of making. Drawing out Rushmore’s subtleties that soften, temper, ease, expand, and equalize the film’s haste and zeal, this book—built of ecocritical, phenomenological, and feminist ways of reading—models a generous attention learned from the film itself. In this regard, Rushmore moves from desperate efforts to force meaning toward the gentle emergence of small miracles, an ephemerality at the heart of cinematic experience.

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens “on time,” whether to tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends). Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. Drawing from a variety of films—ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love—and expanding ecocriticism to include atmospheric change, this study casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring; both skies and screens become readable through interpreting changing phenomena.

This book offers close analyses of films in which attachment and detachment, intimacy and distance, ephemera and endurance—all components of cinematic time and love—might become more visible and meaningful. Love in the Time of Cinema studies theories of time (as history, narrative, modernity and mortality), love (as romance, cinephilia and photogénie), and film (in terms of close-ups, genre, and spectatorship). Including chapters on Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, Agnès Varda's Jacquot de Nantes and The Beaches of Agnès, Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life and Still Walking, Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms, and Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours, this book illustrates how both love and cinema enliven familiar forms, heighten our attention, and teach us to learn to love what passes and find meaning in what endures.