The Horse Who Drank the Sky by Murray Pomerance

What is most important about cinema is that we are alive with it. For all its dramatic, literary, political, sociological, and philosophical weight, film is ultimately an art that provokes, touches, and riddles the viewer through an image that transcends narrative and theory. In The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Murray Pomerance brings attention to the visceral dimension of movies and presents a new and unanticipated way of thinking about what happens when we watch them.

By looking at point of view, the gaze, the voice from nowhere, diegesis and its discontents, ideology, the system of the apparatus, invisible editing, and the technique of overlapping sound, he argues that it is often the minuscule or transitional moments in motion pictures that penetrate most deeply into viewers' experiences. In films that include Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Man, Chinatown, The Graduate, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Jaws, M, Stage Fright, Saturday Night Fever, The Band Wagon, The Bourne Identity, and dozens more, Pomerance invokes complexities that many of the best of critics have rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.

About the Author
MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent film scholar in Toronto and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Johnny Depp Starts Here and City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (both Rutgers University Press).

Reviews
A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field. -- Tom Conley * Harvard University *
A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field. -- Tom Conley * Harvard University *
"Pomerance's joy in celebrating the cinematic moment, whether visual or sonic, does not obscure his knack for sophisticated film analysis." -- John Fidler * Senses of Cinema *
Today, the introduction of new media and non-theatrical viewing intersect with traditional theoretical approaches, making Pomerance's polemic all the more poignant. -- Jennifer L. Fleeger * Quarterly Review of Film and Video *



Book Information
ISBN 9780813543284
Author Murray Pomerance
Format Paperback
Page Count 278
Imprint Rutgers University Press
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Weight(grams) 397g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm