Overview

Argues that the experience of the ordinary film viewer and the investigations of the film scholar or film philosopher are not necessarily so far apart. In Haunting the World, Dominic Lash tries to show that taking films seriously in no way interferes with the pleasure we get from watching them. The book draws its title from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who saw ""haunting the world"" as something we are all prone to and who claimed that cinema's relationship with this tendency is both an ""importance"" and a ""danger"" of film. Specifically, Lash proposes that the work of Cavell and of the critic and scholar V. F. Perkins have valuable lessons to offer contemporary film studies, some of which are in danger of being neglected. Written in a lively and approachable style that makes philosophical ideas accessible without simplifying them, the book argues that film theory risks going awry when it dismisses or underestimates the experience of the ordinary film viewer. Haunting the World offers fresh accounts of fundamental topics, including description, experience, and agency, and examines in detail important films by Ildikó Enyedi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kelly Reichardt, and more.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dominic Lash
Publisher:   State University of New York Press
Imprint:   State University of New York Press
ISBN:  

9798855803129

Pages:   336
Publication Date:   02 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Naive Film Criticism Part One. V. F. Perkins 1. Film as Film in the Twenty-First Century 2. V. F. Perkins and the Redescription of Films Part Two. Stanley Cavell 3. ""Not Yet the Last"": On a Paragraph by Stanley Cavell 4. Cavellian Reflections on Privacy, Consent, and Expression in Ildiko Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl) 5. (Re)producing Marriage: Stanley Cavell and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread 6. Experience, Skepticism, and Idolatry in Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Lash, and Stanley Cavell Part Three. Figurations 7. The Shape of It All: Priorities and Completeness in Nicole Brenez's Work on Abel Ferrara 8. Rupture, Suture, Nietzsche: Impossible Intersubjectivity in Ridley Scott's Alien 9. Hypnosis-Images: Indiscernibility and Hypnotic Agency in Gilles Deleuze's Heart of Glass Part Four. Tarkovsky and Reichardt 10. ""You Can't Imagine How Terrible It Is to Make the Wrong Choice"": Faith, Agency, and Self-pity in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker 11. Kelly and Andrei in the Zone 12. ""A Fair Curve from a Noble Plan"": Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women Notes Works Cited Filmography Index

Reviews

""A vital, generous, and illuminating contribution not only to writing about Perkins and Cavell but to the further flourishing of accessible writing about film and its achievements. Dominic Lash has written a series of essays that offer each in its own marvelous way a fresh path for thinking about and experiencing cinema and the work of two of its most accomplished and important scholars."" — Jason Jacobs, University of Queensland

Author Information

Dominic Lash is the author of several books, including The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions and Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology after Modernism, and the coeditor, with Hoi Lun Law, of Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism: Philosophy, Theory, and the Individual Film.

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