Cinema and Modernity

by Murray Pomerance (Introduction), Patrice Petro (Contributor), Krin Gabbard (Contributor)

The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a fragmentation of experience. Motion pictures––the quintessence of modernism––entered into this cultural, technical, and philosophical richness with a vast public appeal and a jarring new vision of what life could be.

In Cinema and Modernity , Murray Pomerance brings together new essays by seventeen leading scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. Among the many films considered are Detour, Shock Corridor, The Last Laugh, Experiment in Terror, The Great Dictator, Leave Her to Heaven, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut, Sunrise, The Crowd, The Shape of Things to Come, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Scarlet Street, Shadow of a Doubt, Stella Dallas, The Blue Angel, Sullivan’s Travels, and Catch Me If You Can.

Genres: Film

384 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2006

About the author

Murray Pomerance is a Canadian film scholar, author, and professor who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and in the joint program in communication and culture at Ryerson University and York University. He has written extensively on film, cinematic experience, and performance. Most recently he authored The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect, Tomorrow, Alfred Hitchcock's America, Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema and Edith Valmaine and is a co-editor of Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Pomerance is the editor and co-editor of more than a dozen books and the editor of several book series on film at Rutgers University Press and at the State University of New York Press.