Cinema, If You Please The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory

In Cinema, If You Please, Murray Pomerance explores our ways of watching film in light of socially organized forms of pleasure that date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wedding the notion of pleasure in film viewing to the history of pleasure in the West, the book considers pleasure gardens and promenading; the history of oil painting and its display; the passion for travel and exposure to the exotic and strange; and forms of musical repetition and restatement. With in-depth studies of films like Vertigo, The Passenger, A Matter of Life and Death, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Call Me By Your Name and Blow-Up, this groundbreaking book draws the reader into the past and the present at once, joining an understanding of personal and visual delight to their cultural and historical roots.

Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University.