Research Seminar - The Plague of Fascination

The Plague of Fascination

Presented by Professor Murray Pomerance (Ryerson University)

Date: 27 April, 2018
Time: 3pm-4pm
Location: Digital Learning Space (Room 224, Level 2), Joyce Ackroyd Building (#37)

Abstract:

This talk will explore some historical roots and contemporary outcomes of a widespread cultural bias against spectatorial rapture in response to cinema:  performance and its vicissitudes; the suspicion of pleasure and its substitution by “cinephilia”; illumination as manipulation of belief; asceticism and effect. 

Presenter:

Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and the author of numerous volumes, most recently The Man Who Knew Too Much (BFI 2016) and Moment of Action: Riddles of Cinematic Performance (Rutgers 2016).  His book A Dream of Hitchcock is forthcoming.  He has edited or co-edited Close-Up, Hamlet Lives in Hollywood, Cinema and Modernity, A Little Solitaire, and more than two dozen other books.  He edits the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press and “Techniques of the Moving Image” at Rutgers.