Edge of the Screen

This book is a series of seventeen mediations 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 characterizing and accounting for what it is that we watch when we watch a film, what happens to us, and how we make sense of and appreciate it.

This volume follows from three others by the author: Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2020); The Film Cheat: Cinematic Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2021); and Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience (2022). All of these, including Edge of the Screen, meander and interrogate cinema as we watch it, both connecting us to and disconnecting us from the moment of pleasure.

Each meditation is characterized by a deep penetration of the inquiring, continually hungry authorial mind and a very extensive set of analyses of filmic moments from myriad films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Memento, Zabriskie Point, An American in Paris, Planet of the Apes (1968), Superman (1978), Possessed, The Jungle Book (1942), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The Toll of the Sea, Rope, and numerous others. These meditations are careful and philosophical as much as energetically ruminative, yet are written in an accessible style for all interested readers who both love cinema and wonder about that love.

Each chapter can stand alone, even though all work together to challenge perspectives on what we encounter, experience, think, and feel when we watch films. Across its chapters, Edge of the Screen takes on a wide range of topics: the ontology of film; the relation between characters, actors, and the figures who appear onscreen; film’s relationships to the other arts, especially painting but also novels and theatre; the passage of time in film, and its momentary character; film criticism, including deeply held values such as coherence; film’s relationship to mortality; and more.