Edge of the Screen

Reviews / Votes

A singular voice in cinema studies, Pomerance again thrills us with a delicate, granular study of elements of the film-viewing experience that we often take for granted. Circling around motifs and gestures that condition our encounter with the screen, this book delightfully enacts the kind of aesthetic attention it contemplates, somehow making its idiosyncrasies of observation feel like our own. Pomerance exercises our cinephilic memory and imagination well beyond the films sampled in the text. This is essayistic writing in the truest, rarest, most adventurous sense of the word. * Rick Warner, Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA * As indefatigable author literally dozens of thoughtful, insightful, original, and elegantly written books, each exemplary in its scholarship and intellectual rigor, and as anthology and series editor par excellence, Murray Pomerance is second to none in terms of the magnitude and value of his contributions to the serious study of cinema. Edge of the Screen is exemplary of Pomerance's writing is to say that it is essential reading for all readers who love cinema and would like to understand why. * William Rothman, Professor, Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Miami, USA * Edge of the Screen is a jewel of a book. Murray Pomerance is exceptionally skilled at taking aspects of film experience that might be described as ordinary but that for some reason we have never thought about carefully or systematically, and showing, with intoxicating verve and an extremely wide range of reference, what can be done with them. Whether his topic is breathing or not breathing along with film characters, eternal repetition of actors entwined with their roles in movie narratives that are the same but different over time, touching and prohibitions against it, clutter, incoherence, gestural completion, camera faith, or tenderness in comedy, Pomerance's meditations are filled with stunning surprises. Pomerance's style is as witty as it is erudite, and he seamlessly blends his close readings of film with theoretical perspectives from many neighboring disciplines: among them, literature, sociology, philosophy, and art history. As I go from one bravura demonstration to the next, I feel that I am both making fresh discoveries and recognizing questions that have always floated at the edge of my mind, waiting to be pursued in exactly this fashion. * George Toles, Distinguished Professor of Film and Literature, University of Manitoba, Canada * Edge of the Screen invites us to think about what is on the screen, and our relationship to it, from a range of new, surprising, and provocative perspectives. Each chapter is offered as a meditation on the nature of film and how it works upon us, and Pomerance takes the idea of meditation seriously. We are not driven to determine answers or force solutions to what is puzzling about cinema, but to be with our experience more fully, clearly, and deeply, so that we may come to know what we see, how we see it, and how it moves us, in new ways. * Elliott Logan, Lecturer in Bachelor of Media Communication, Monash University, Australia * Edge of the Screen is an original, playful, and poetic reflection on the particularity of cinematic experience that engages with an impressive range of films from across the history of the medium. * Matthew Noble-Olson, /Lecturer II, Department of Film, Television, and Media, University of Michigan, USA *