Murray Pomerance

Showing 1-12 of 21 items.

Thinking in the Dark

Cinema, Theory, Practice

Rutgers University Press

Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made the greatest impact on film scholarship today, including everyone from Sergei Eisenstein to Michel Foucault, from Judith Butler to André Bazin. Each chapter is written by an expert who explains a different theorist’s key ideas, then gives concrete examples of how they might be applied to both a classic film and a contemporary one. Ideal for teachers and students of film as well as contemporary and modern philosophy, critical theory and semotics, also of interest to the general reader exploring such topics.

  • Copyright year: 2015
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American Cinema of the 1960s

Themes and Variations

Rutgers University Press

In ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1960s examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent and experimental films. Among the films discussed are Elmer Gantry, The Apartment,West Side Story, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, Cape Fear, Bonnie and Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider.

  • Copyright year: 2008
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Star Decades Complete 11 Volume Set

Rutgers University Press

The Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now available as an eleven volume set: Movie Stars from the 1910s to the 2010s. 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.

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Screen Decades Complete 12 Volume Set

Rutgers University Press

The Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now available as an twelve-volume set: American Cinema from the 1890s to the 2010s. 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.

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The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz

University of Texas Press

Leading film studies scholars explore the astonishing range of Michael Curtiz, the most prolific director of studio-era Hollywood, whose nearly one hundred films include Casablanca, White Christmas, and Mildred Pierce.

  • Copyright year: 2018
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Tough Ain't Enough

New Perspectives on the Films of Clint Eastwood

Rutgers University Press

Clint Eastwood has appeared in virtually every major film genre and, at this late point in his career, has emerged as one of America’s most popular and respected—though controversial—filmmakers. Tough Ain’t Enough offers readers a series of original essays by prominent cinema scholars who explore the actor-director’s extensive career.  

  • Copyright year: 2018
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Cinematic Canines

Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

Rutgers University Press

Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of “man’s best friends” (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.

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Shining in Shadows

Movie Stars of the 2000s

Rutgers University Press

Shining in Shadows examines a wide range of Hollywood icons from a turbulent decade for the film industry and for America itself. Perhaps reflecting our own cultural fragmentation and uncertainty, Hollywood’s star personas sent mixed messages about Americans’ identities and ideals. With a multigenerational, international cast of stars, this collection presents a fascinating composite portrait of Hollywood stardom today.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Pretty People

Movie Stars of the 1990s

Edited by Anna Everett
Rutgers University Press

In the 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever. Pretty People examines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as the nation itself, signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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The Eyes Have It

Cinema and the Reality Effect

Rutgers University Press

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.

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The Horse Who Drank the Sky

Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

Rutgers University Press

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.

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City That Never Sleeps

New York and the Filmic Imagination

Rutgers University Press

New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness. From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger. 

  • Copyright year: 2007
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