Uncanny Cinema

Murray Pomerance's latest book explores an encyclopedic range of films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulty of conveying the experience of viewing cinema through words and the medium of text. From <i>On the Waterfront </i>to <i>Marriage Story </i> <i>Uncanny Cinema</i> illuminates that words and writing are in perilous waters when applied to cinema similar to ungestured talk. The book begins with this problem using Julian Jaynes's thoughts on vocality and imagination before delving into three exploratory 'movements' arranged to alternately challenge inspire and confound the reader to question if we know what we think we know or even see what we think we see. The viewer is faced with disturbances ruptures and surprises that occur during the viewing experience which Pomerance analyzes to stretch the sense of what we do and do not (or possibly cannot) know particularly as we think talk and write about cinema