Cinema, If You Please

Independent scholar Murray Pomerance is one of the most original and eclectic films critics working today. In the present volume Pomerance examines, in minute detail, such classic films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and also recent films like Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2016) and Personal Shopper (2017). Pomerance’s vision is uniquely his own; his stunning erudition jumps off the page with each fresh insight, each new way of looking at cinema and its concomitant disciplines. Pomerance’s writing is rich, seductive, and sensuous, drawing the reader into a closer encounter with film and life itself. -- W. W. Dixon, University of Nebraska--Lincoln * CHOICE *
Murray Pomerance is one of a small handful of cinema studies scholars who are wonderful writers and are masterful at structuring a chapter or a whole book so that at each point the reader is eager to discover what will come next, and is never disappointed. His prose is clear, accessible, and devoid of jargon. That is rare enough in cinema studies these days. Beyond that, it is pleasurable to read. This is crucial to its persuasiveness. Pleasure is the book's subject, after all, and the book's distinctive style is conclusive evidence that on this subject, the author knows whereof he speaks. -- Professor William D. Rothman, University of Miami