6/20/2023 0 Comments Bliss montage ling ma review![]() ![]() The story most explicitly about cinema is “Office Hours,” an examination of its female narrator’s close relationship with her film studies professor that makes an unexpected swerve into portal fantasy. Ma has identified “compromised pleasure” as a key theme of the collection, and the sense of brief and vivid joys set against a darker, more unsettling backdrop can be keenly felt throughout the book’s eight stories. It describes the brief intervals of happiness permitted to leading ladies in the old Hollywood genre of the “woman’s film” it is “a woman’s small piece of action, her marginal territory of joy.” This cinematic term may at first seem an odd title for Ling Ma’s often bleak and decidedly literary debut short story collection, but the bliss montage is an expressly temporary state of affairs, the snatch of pleasure claimed before a puritanical narrative brings things crashing down around its recipient. The term “bliss montage” was coined by film theorist Jeanine Basinger. ![]()
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