Doubting Vision

Reviews / Votes

Classical film theory represents a rich body of work that is generally overlooked nowadays by contemporary scholars of cinema. In Doubting Vision, Malcolm Turvey demonstrates that this is a mistake. He identifies a hitherto ill-recognized strand of the tradition--the revelationist tradition--and he shows astutely how critical engagement with it has great significance for debates in contemporary film theory. * Noel Carroll, Temple University * In this philosophically acute and elegantly concise book, Turvey proves himself a bold and highly original interlocutor of the tradition of classical film theory. Anyone interested in the cognitive value of cinema, modernist aesthetics, and visual culture will find his study indispensable, and long overdue. * Edward Dimendberg, author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity * In this profoundly original book Turvey anatomizes with acuity and precision a third revelationist tradition of film theory alongside the familiar creationist and realist traditions and traces its persistence in contemporary writers such as Cavell and Deleuze. Further, he demonstrates how the roots of this tradition lie in the denigration of vision within modernism, a denigration that is based upon a conceptual confusion about the nature of seeing. This Turvey systematically extirpates with the tools of ordinary language philosophy. Written with remarkable lucidity and panache, Doubting Vision is an intellectual tour de force that is required reading for all film scholars and anyone who is interested in the history of modernism. * Richard Allen, New York University * Classical film theory represents a rich body of work that is generally overlooked nowadays by contemporary scholars of cinema. In Doubting Vision, Malcolm Turvey demonstrates that this is a mistake. He identifies a hitherto ill-recognized strand of the tradition--the revelationist tradition--and he shows astutely how critical engagement with it has great significance for debates in contemporary film theory. * Noel Carroll, Temple University * In this philosophically acute and elegantly concise book, Turvey proves himself a bold and highly original interlocutor of the tradition of classical film theory. Anyone interested in the cognitive value of cinema, modernist aesthetics, and visual culture will find his study indispensable, and long overdue. * Edward Dimendberg, author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity *