The Horse Who Drank the Sky : Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

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. The author argues in this book that what is most important for cinema is that we are alive with it and that 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