The Arts of Cinema

Martin Seel

Published by Cornell University Press 2018

The Arts of Cinema

Martin Seel
Translated by: Kizer S. Walker

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501724862

Overview
Contents

About this book

In The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film’s connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema’s singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films—from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacy—to demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel’s analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.

Author / Editor information

Martin Seel is Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy and aesthetics, including Aesthetics of Appearing. Kizer S. Walker is Director of Collections for Cornell University Library, Librarian for German Studies, and Managing Editor of the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought, copublished by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library.

Reviews

Peter Gilgen, Cornell University:

Martin Seel is undoubtedly among the most prominent and interesting aestheticians writing in Germany today, and his philosophical meditation on the cinema gives us a highly original and elegant account of film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience. The Arts of Cinema is beautifully written and will be accessible to a wide range of readers who have an interest in film or aesthetic theory.

Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art.

Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics.

An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful.

In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it.

In his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Opening Credits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Film as Architecture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	6
2. Film as Music Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
3. Film as Image Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
4. Film as Spectacle Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
5. Film as Narrative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
6. Film as Exploration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
7. Film as Imagination Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
8. Film as Emotion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
9. Film as Philosophy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
Closing Credits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Translator’s Note Kizer S. Walker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Name Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Film Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 180
Keywords: Literary Studies; Art History; Film

eBook

Published: July 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501724862