Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory

by Murray Pomerance

Overview

Explores our ways of watching film in light of socially organized forms of pleasure that date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Case studies include: Vertigo; The Passenger; A Matter of Life and Death; Clouds of Sils Maria; Personal Shopper; Call Me By Your Name; and Blow-Up. Intensive concentration on screen colour and effects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474428682
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/16/2018
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2020), Grammatical Dreams (2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018), among many other volumes, and editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books including The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020). He edits the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press and the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers. A Voyage with Hitchcock and Color It True: Impressions of Cinema are both forthcoming.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Beyond the Sea

2. A Barbaric Rose

3. Walk on the Wild Side

Intermezzo: Tell Me Again

4. A Million Things

5. Rhapsody in Green

Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Murray Pomerance is one of a small handful of cinema studies scholars who are wonderful writers and are masterful at structuring a chapter or a whole book so that at each point the reader is eager to discover what will come next, and is never disappointed. His prose is clear, accessible, and devoid of jargon. That is rare enough in cinema studies these days. Beyond that, it is pleasurable to read. This is crucial to its persuasiveness. Pleasure is the book's subject, after all, and the book's distinctive style is conclusive evidence that on this subject, the author knows whereof he speaks.

Professor William D. Rothman

Murray Pomerance is one of a small handful of cinema studies scholars who are wonderful writers and are masterful at structuring a chapter or a whole book so that at each point the reader is eager to discover what will come next, and is never disappointed. His prose is clear, accessible, and devoid of jargon. That is rare enough in cinema studies these days. Beyond that, it is pleasurable to read. This is crucial to its persuasiveness. Pleasure is the book's subject, after all, and the book's distinctive style is conclusive evidence that on this subject, the author knows whereof he speaks.

Editorial Reviews

"Pomerance's vision is uniquely his own; his stunning erudition jumps off the page with each fresh insight, each new way of looking at cinema and its concomitant disciplines. Pomerance's writing is rich, seductive, and sensuous, drawing the reader into a closer encounter with film and life itself." — W. W. Dixon, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, CHOICE

From the Publisher

Independent scholar Murray Pomerance is one of the most original and eclectic films critics working today. In the present volume Pomerance examines, in minute detail, such classic films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and also recent films like Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2016) and Personal Shopper (2017). Pomerance’s vision is uniquely his own; his stunning erudition jumps off the page with each fresh insight, each new way of looking at cinema and its concomitant disciplines. Pomerance’s writing is rich, seductive, and sensuous, drawing the reader into a closer encounter with film and life itself.

CHOICE - W. W. Dixon

Murray Pomerance is one of a small handful of cinema studies scholars who are wonderful writers and are masterful at structuring a chapter or a whole book so that at each point the reader is eager to discover what will come next, and is never disappointed. His prose is clear, accessible, and devoid of jargon. That is rare enough in cinema studies these days. Beyond that, it is pleasurable to read. This is crucial to its persuasiveness. Pleasure is the book's subject, after all, and the book's distinctive style is conclusive evidence that on this subject, the author knows whereof he speaks.

Professor William D. Rothman