About the Book
This book is a series of seventeen mediations that revolve around the notion of the viewer’s placement at the edge of the screen. Every page is an opportunity to think about an aspect of film, or of film viewing, in new ways, and to begin reconsidering deeply ingrained ways of unthinkingly characterizing and accounting for what it is that we watch when we watch a film, what happens to us, and how we make sense of and appreciate it.
This volume follows from three others by the author: Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2020); The Film Cheat: Cinematic Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2021); and Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience (2022). All of these, including Edge of the Screen, meander and interrogate cinema as we watch it, both connecting us to and disconnecting us from the moment of pleasure.
Each meditation is characterized by a deep penetration of the inquiring, continually hungry authorial mind and a very extensive set of analyses of filmic moments from myriad films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Memento, Zabriskie Point, An American in Paris, Planet of the Apes (1968), Superman (1978), Possessed, The Jungle Book (1942), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The Toll of the Sea, Rope, and numerous others. These meditations are careful and philosophical as much as energetically ruminative, yet are written in an accessible style for all interested readers who both love cinema and wonder about that love.
Each chapter can stand alone, even though all work together to challenge perspectives on what we encounter, experience, think, and feel when we watch films. Across its chapters, Edge of the Screen takes on a wide range of topics: the ontology of film; the relation between characters, actors, and the figures who appear onscreen; film’s relationships to the other arts, especially painting but also novels and theatre; the passage of time in film, and its momentary character; film criticism, including deeply held values such as coherence; film’s relationship to mortality; and more.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Momentary
2. Breath
3. Suspension
4. They Figure Life
5. Here and There
6. To Have and to Hold
7. Muse of Incoherence
8. Speak, Anima
9. Rendezvous
Interlude: Tenderness
10. Clutter
11. Poison or Grapes?
12. A Claims Apartment
13. Speechless
14. Don’t Touch Me!
15. The Outcry
16. A Crafty Screen
17. Domain of Wraiths
Index
About the Author :
Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto, Canada, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Hitchcock Quartet (An Eye for Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock, A Voyage with Hitchcock, and A Silence from Hitchcock); Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience (Bloomsbury, 2022); Color It True: Impressions of Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022); The Film Cheat: Film Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020); Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (Bloomsbury, 2019); Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (Bloomsbury, 2018), and many other volumes including, with Matthew Solomon, The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis (2024). Pomerance’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, New Directions, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere; he is the author of Grammatical Dreams, A King of Infinite Space, and other books.
Review :
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
