Professor Murray Pomerance

This book is a series of seventeen meditations that revolve around the notion of the viewer’s placement at the edge of the screen. Every page is an opportunity to think about an aspect of film, or of film viewing, in new ways, and to begin reconsidering deeply ingrained ways of unthinkingly characterising and accounting for what it is that we...

A thrilling tale of anxiety and moral extremity, Marnie (1964) cemented Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as a master of suspense and the visual form. Murray Pomerance here ranges through the many tortuous and thrilling passages of Marnie, weaving critical discussion together with production history to reveal Marnie as a woman in flight from her self, her past, her love, and the...

Murray Pomerance offers an illuminating account of one of Hitchcock's most intriguing and successful films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day. Through a close reading of the film alongside analysis of its complex production history, Pomerance's analysis highlights its darkest nuances, and its themes of musicality, gendered power, and cultural strangeness. He proposes...

Murray Pomerance's latest book explores an encyclopaedic 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 On the Waterfront to Marriage Story, Uncanny Cinema illuminates that words and writing are in perilous waters when applied to cinema, similar to ungestured talk. The book begins...