The horse who drank the sky : film experience beyond narrative and theory / Murray Pomerance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pomerance, Murray, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xii, 257 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2008]

Summary:

What is most important about cinema is that we are alive with it. For all its dramatic, literary, political, sociological, and philosophical weight, film is ultimately an art that provokes, touches, and riddles the viewer through an image that transcends narrative and theory. In The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Murray Pomerance brings attention to the visceral dimension of movies and presents a new and unanticipated way of thinking about what happens when we watch them.

By looking at point of view, the gaze, the voice from nowhere, diegesis and its discontents, ideology, the apparatus system, invisible editing, cinematic performance, and the technique of overlapping sound, he argues that it is often the minuscule or transitional moments in motion pictures that penetrate most deeply into viewers' experiences. In films that include Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Man, Chinatown, The Graduate, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Jaws, M, Stage Fright, Saturday Night Fever, The Band Wagon, The Bourne Identity, and dozens more, Pomerance invokes complexities that criticism has rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.

Contents:

1 A Voluptuous Gaze 10

2 The Hero in the China Sea 36

3 A Great Face 62

4 The Smoke and the Knife 86

5 A Call from Everywhere 110

6 As Time Goes By 139

7 The Speaking Eye 166

8 Not an Unusual Story 187

9 The Horse Who Drank the Sky 206.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-245) and index.

ISBN:

9780813543277

0813543274

9780813543284

0813543282

OCLC:

171614620