Overview

In Cinema, If You Please, Murray Pomerance explores our ways of watching film in light of socially organized forms of pleasure that date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wedding the notion of pleasure in film viewing to the history of pleasure in the West, the book considers pleasure gardens and promenading; the history of oil painting and its display; the passion for travel and exposure to the exotic and strange; and forms of musical repetition and restatement. With in-depth studies of films like Vertigo, The Passenger, A Matter of Life and Death, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Call Me By Your Name and Blow-Up, this ground-breaking book draws the reader into the past and the present at once, joining an understanding of personal and visual delight to their cultural and historical roots.

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9781474428699

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Reviews

"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, University of Miami 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.--W. W. Dixon, University of Nebraska--Lincoln ""CHOICE"""

Author Information

"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."

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