The Arts of Cinema

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.

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.

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

Martin Seel is undoubtedly among the most prominent and interesting aestheticians writing in Germany today, and his philosophical meditation on the cinema gives us a highly original and elegant account of film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience. The Arts of Cinema is beautifully written and will be accessible to a wide range of readers who have an interest in film or aesthetic theory.