The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

Murray Pomerance

Published by Rutgers University Press 2008

The Horse Who Drank the Sky

Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

Murray Pomerance

https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813544960

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 system of the apparatus, invisible editing, 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 many of the best of critics have rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.

Author / Editor information

MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent film scholar in Toronto and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Johnny Depp Starts Here and City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (both Rutgers University Press).

Reviews

A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field.

— Tom Conley, Harvard University

Today, the introduction of new media and non-theatrical viewing intersect with traditional theoretical approaches, making Pomerance's polemic all the more poignant.— Jennifer L. Fleeger, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

"Pomerance’s joy in celebrating the cinematic moment, whether visual or sonic, does not obscure his knack for sophisticated film analysis."— John Fidler, Senses of Cinema

A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field.

— Tom Conley, Harvard University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Overture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. A Voluptuous Gaze Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	10
2. The Hero in the China Sea Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3. A Great Face Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	62
4. The Smoke and the Knife Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
5. A Call from Everywhere Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
6. As Time Goes By Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
7. The Speaking Eye Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
8. Not an Unusual Story Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
9. The Horse Who Drank the Sky Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
Works Cited and Consulted Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 278
Illustrations
- Other: 4

eBook

Published: April 24, 2008
ISBN: 9780813544960