Haunting the World

Essays on Film After Perkins and Cavell

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by Dominic Lash

Type

Essays

Subject

Theory

Keywords

philosophy, theory

Publishing date

2025 (July 01, 2025)

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Collection

SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 336 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

979-8-8558-0310-5

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Book Presentation:
Argues that the experience of the ordinary film viewer and the investigations of the film scholar or film philosopher are not necessarily so far apart.

In Haunting the World, Dominic Lash tries to show that taking films seriously in no way interferes with the pleasure we get from watching them. The book draws its title from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who saw "haunting the world" as something we are all prone to and who claimed that cinema's relationship with this tendency is both an "importance" and a "danger" of film. Specifically, Lash proposes that the work of Cavell and of the critic and scholar V. F. Perkins have valuable lessons to offer contemporary film studies, some of which are in danger of being neglected. Written in a lively and approachable style that makes philosophical ideas accessible without simplifying them, the book argues that film theory risks going awry when it dismisses or underestimates the experience of the ordinary film viewer. Haunting the World offers fresh accounts of fundamental topics, including description, experience, and agency, and examines in detail important films by Ildikó Enyedi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kelly Reichardt, and more.

About the Author:
Dominic Lash is the author of several books, including The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions and Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology after Modernism, and the coeditor, with Hoi Lun Law, of Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism: Philosophy, Theory, and the Individual Film.

Press Reviews:
"A vital, generous, and illuminating contribution not only to writing about Perkins and Cavell but to the further flourishing of accessible writing about film and its achievements. Dominic Lash has written a series of essays that offer each in its own marvelous way a fresh path for thinking about and experiencing cinema and the work of two of its most accomplished and important scholars." -- Jason Jacobs, University of Queensland

See the publisher website: State University of New York Press