The Horse Who Drank the Sky
Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory
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Book Presentation:
What is most important about cinema is that we are alive with it. For all its dramatic, literary, political, sociological, and philosophical weight, film is ultimately an art that provokes, touches, and riddles the viewer through an image that transcends narrative and theory. In The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Murray Pomerance brings attention to the visceral dimension of movies and presents a new and unanticipated way of thinking about what happens when we watch them.By looking at point of view, the gaze, the voice from nowhere, diegesis and its discontents, ideology, the system of the apparatus, invisible editing, and the technique of overlapping sound, he argues that it is often the minuscule or transitional moments in motion pictures that penetrate most deeply into viewers' experiences. In films that include Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Man, Chinatown, The Graduate, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Jaws, M, Stage Fright, Saturday Night Fever, The Band Wagon, The Bourne Identity, and dozens more, Pomerance invokes complexities that many of the best of critics have rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.
About the Author:
MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent film scholar in Toronto and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Johnny Depp Starts Here and City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (both Rutgers University Press).
Press Reviews:
A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field.
— Tom Conley
"Pomerance’s joy in celebrating the cinematic moment, whether visual or sonic, does not obscure his knack for sophisticated film analysis."
— John Fidler
Today, the introduction of new media and non-theatrical viewing intersect with traditional theoretical approaches, making Pomerance's polemic all the more poignant.
— Jennifer L. Fleeger
> From the same author:
Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town (2025)
Dir. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer
Subject: Director > Mervyn LeRoy
The Biggest Thing in Show Business (2024)
Living It Up with Martin & Lewis
by Murray Pomerance and Matthew Solomon
Subject: Actor > Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin
Autism in Film and Television (2022)
On the Island
Dir. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer
Subject: Sociology
The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020)
Dir. Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
Subject: Countries > United States
The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz (2018)
Dir. R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
Subject: Director > Michael Curtiz
Close-Up (2018)
Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International
Dir. Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens
Hamlet Lives in Hollywood (2017)
John Barrymore and the Acting Tradition Onscreen
Dir. Murray Pomerance and Steven Rybin
Subject: Actor > John Barrymore
Moment of Action (2016)
Riddles of Cinematic Performance
Thinking in the Dark (2015)
Cinema, Theory, Practice
Dir. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer
Subject: Theory
George Cukor (2015)
Hollywood Master
Dir. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer
Subject: Director > George Cukor
Hollywood's Chosen People (2012)
The Jewish Experience in American Cinema
Dir. Daniel Bernardi, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Murray Pomerance
Subject: Countries > United States
Shining in Shadows (2011)
Movie Stars of the 2000s
Dir. Murray Pomerance
Subject: On Films > Per period
A Little Solitaire (2011)
John Frankenheimer and American Film
Dir. Murray Pomerance
Subject: Director > John Frankenheimer
Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue (2011)
Eight Reflections on Cinema
Subject: Director > Michelangelo Antonioni
American Cinema of the 1950s (2005)
Themes and Variations
Dir. Murray Pomerance
Subject: On Films > Per period
Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice (2001)
Cinemas of Girlhood
Dir. Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance
Subject: Sociology
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls (2001)
Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century
Dir. Murray Pomerance
Subject: Sociology
> On a related topic:
Cinema as a Worldbuilding Machine in the Digital Era (2022)
Essay on Multiverse Films and TV Series
Subject: Theory
Fractal Narrative (2014)
About the Relationship Between Geometries and Technology and Its Impact on Narrative Spaces
Subject: Theory
Film and Knowledge (2002)
Essays on the Integration of Images and Ideas
Dir. Kevin L. Stoehr
Subject: Theory
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