The Arts of Cinema

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.

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.