Murray Pomerance

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.

The Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now available as an eleven-volume set: American Cinema from the 1890s to the 2000s. Each volume presents a group of original essays analyzing the impact of cultural issues on the cinema and the impact of the cinema on society. Every chapter explores a spectrum of particularly significant motion pictures and the broad range of historical events to provide a continuing sense of the decade as it came to be depicted on movie screens across the nation.

The Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now available as a ten-volume set: Movie Stars from the 1910s to the 2000s. Each volume presents original essays that analyze the movie star against the background of American cultural history. As icon, as mediated personality, and as object of audience fascination and desire, the Hollywood star remains the model for celebrity in modern culture, representing a combination of achievement, talent, ability, luck, authenticity, superficiality, and even ordinariness.

The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a fragmentation of experience. Motion pictures––the quintessence of modernism––entered into this cultural, technical, and philosophical richness with a vast public appeal and a jarring new vision of what life could be.

In Cinema and Modernity, Murray Pomerance brings together new essays by seventeen leading scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. Among the many films considered are Detour, Shock Corridor, The Last Laugh, Experiment in Terror, The Great Dictator, Leave Her to Heaven, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut, Sunrise, The Crowd, The Shape of Things to Come, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Scarlet Street, Shadow of a Doubt, Stella Dallas, The Blue Angel, Sullivan’s Travels, and Catch Me If You Can.

The Eyes Have It explores those rarified screen moments when viewers are confronted by sights that seem at once impossible and present, artificial and stimulating, illusory and definitive. Murray Pomerance takes readers on an illuminating filmic journey through a vast array of cinematic moments, technical methods, and laborious collaborations from the 1930s to the 2000s to show how the viewer’s experience of “reality” is put in context and willfully engaged.