The Arts of Cinema - by Martin Seel (Paperback)

About the Book

In The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films--from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The...

Book Synopsis

In The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films--from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacy--to demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.

Review Quotes

An exciting work of 'philosophy meets cinema'--intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style--this book is both impressive and delightful.

-- "academicworld.net"

Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art.

-- "Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ)"

In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator's senses into it.

-- "Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio]"

In his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder.

-- "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"

Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics.

-- "Choice"

About the Author

Martin Seel is Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy and aesthetics, including Aesthetics of Appearing. Kizer S. Walker is Director of Collections for Cornell University Library, Librarian for German Studies, and Managing Editor of the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought, copublished by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library.