An Invention without a Future
Essays on Cinema
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Book Presentation:
In 1895, Louis Lumière supposedly said that cinema is “an invention without a future.” James Naremore uses this legendary remark as a starting point for a meditation on the so-called death of cinema in the digital age, and as a way of introducing a wide-ranging series of his essays on movies past and present. These essays include discussions of authorship, adaptation, and acting; commentaries on Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, and Stanley Kubrick; and reviews of more recent work by non-Hollywood directors Pedro Costa, Abbas Kiarostami, Raúl Ruiz, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Important themes recur: the relations between modernity, modernism, and postmodernism; the changing mediascape and death of older technologies; and the need for robust critical writing in an era when print journalism is waning and the humanities are devalued. The book concludes with essays on four major American film critics: James Agee, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, and Jonathan Rosenbaum.
About the Author:
James Naremore is Emeritus Chancellors' Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His books include More Than Night, Acting in the Cinema, The Magic World of Orson Welles, The Films of Vincente Minnelli, and On Kubrick.
Press Reviews:
"Taken as a whole, An Invention Without a Future serves as a fantastic overview of conversations concerning film history, while providing thoughtful analyses of important Classical Hollywood films and styles."— Slant
"Every essay here is a polished gift from a master of the literary essay."— Observations on Film Art
"The collection of Naremore’s essays constitutes a beautiful tribute to, and incarnation of, the best possible futures for cinema scholarship today."— Film Quarterly
"James Naremore is one of the most deservedly admired critics of our time, and this collection presents an array of perceptive, readable essays on critical, historical, and theoretical topics that have never been more clearly and articulately explored." —David Sterritt, author of Spike Lee's America
"Reading over this collection of essays, I am struck by how important James Naremore's voice is to the field. The notion of the film scholar as critic is, as he says at one point, an idea that is under siege. Naremore’s robust, pellucid, and consistently perceptive critical intelligence is the antidote to this denigration of criticism." —Richard Allen, co-author of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema
> From the same author:
The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa (2025)
by James Naremore and Darlene J. Sadlier
Subject: Director > Pedro Costa
Letter from an Unknown Woman (2021)
Subject: One Film > Letter from an Unknown Woman
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1979)
Dir. James Naremore
Subject: One Film > The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
> On a related topic:
A Hidden History of Film Style (2015)
Cinematographers, Directors, and the Collaborative Process
Subject: Technique > Cinematography
The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 (2019)
Dir. Carol O'Sullivan and Jean-François Cornu
Subject: General
The Writers (2016)
A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild
Subject: Technique > Scriptwriting
Framework (2000)
A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, Third Edition
by Tom Stempel
Subject: Technique > Scriptwriting
A Short History of Film (2025)
by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Subject: History of Cinema
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