Uncanny Cinema

Written with the roving intelligence and grace for which the author is known, Uncanny Cinema bracingly explores mysteries of spectatorship that are often shunted aside when we interpret films. Pomerance has us bask in the uncanniness that conditions how we engage with various elements of spectacle: charismatic characters, bodies in motion, flights of dream and memory, high-speed action, emotional contours of serial drama, and sights and sounds that evoke touch. Addressed to both cinephiles and scholars, this constantly intriguing book sends us back to popular films and television shows with refined attention to their resonant uncertainties. --Rick Warner, Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Murray Pomerance has written an astonishing book that journeys inside our entanglements with things we see on screen. His characteristic latticework of production insight and textual detail draws on a vast range of sources to fashion a book that is startling in its intellectual ambition and sobering in confronting us with the limits of expression in the face of what we see and hear in front of us. His prose carries the wicked lyrical intellect of Nabokov fused with the energy and allusive wit of Carlyle; he is the Montaigne of film studies, experimental, eloquent, and graceful: our friend and companion in each chapter's trips across the agony-wrought landscapes of viewing. --Jason Jacobs, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland, Australia