Overview

Murray Pomerance's latest book explores an encyclopedic range of films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulty of conveying the experience of viewing cinema through words and the medium of text. From On the Waterfront to Marriage Story, Uncanny Cinema illuminates that words and writing are in perilous waters when applied to cinema, similar to ungestured talk. The book begins with this problem using Julian Jaynes’s thoughts on vocality and imagination before delving into three exploratory ‘movements’ arranged to alternately challenge, inspire, and confound the reader to question if we know what we think we know or even see what we think we see. The viewer is faced with disturbances, ruptures, and surprises that occur during the viewing experience, which Pomerance analyzes to stretch the sense of what we do and do not (or, possibly, cannot) know, particularly as we think, talk, and write about cinema.

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9781501398780

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Reviews

Written with the roving intelligence and grace for which the author is known, Uncanny Cinema bracingly explores mysteries of spectatorship that are often shunted aside when we interpret films. Pomerance has us bask in the uncanniness that conditions how we engage with various elements of spectacle: charismatic characters, bodies in motion, flights of dream and memory, high-speed action, emotional contours of serial drama, and sights and sounds that evoke touch. Addressed to both cinephiles and scholars, this constantly intriguing book sends us back to popular films and television shows with refined attention to their resonant uncertainties. --Rick Warner, Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Murray Pomerance has written an astonishing book that journeys inside our entanglements with things we see on screen. His characteristic latticework of production insight and textual detail draws on a vast range of sources to fashion a book that is startling in its intellectual ambition and sobering in confronting us with the limits of expression in the face of what we see and hear in front of us. His prose carries the wicked lyrical intellect of Nabokov fused with the energy and allusive wit of Carlyle; he is the Montaigne of film studies, experimental, eloquent, and graceful: our friend and companion in each chapter's trips across the agony-wrought landscapes of viewing. --Jason Jacobs, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland, Australia

Author Information

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Canada and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia. He is the author of many books, including A Silence from Hitchcock (2023), Color It True: Impressions of Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022), A Voyage with Hitchcock (2021), Grammatical Dreams (2020), The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (Bloomsbury, 2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018).

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