While film scholarship began with discussions of aesthetics, for decades scholars have been delivering analytical summaries, descriptive narratives, and cultural critiques, rarely addressing
what movies look like or what is going on cinematically on the screen. We live in a world that is relentlessly optical. Bombarded by magazines, posters, advertisements, photographs, and films,
the eye has become the principal organ of modernity. But at the same time we have accelerated the pace of social change and social life, to such a degree that we move quickly past what we look
at. The glance has replaced the gaze. In this book, Pomerance asks us to resurrect the act of looking for a new approach to cinema. This book consists of 12 chapters on individual films,
foreign and American, with an extended introduction. Each essay focuses on a film, choosing one or more specific and hitherto unstudied moments as springboards from which to come to a new
understanding of the film as a whole, and filmic practice more generally.
