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American Medium: A New Film Philosophy
Paperback
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
PhilosophyDirectorsFilm Studies
ISBN13: 9781503644984
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Nov 18 2025
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
In this masterful new work, film critic and philosopher Eyal Peretz forges a new connection between the concept of America and the medium of film. Through exemplary close readings of six fundamental American films--John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette--Peretz demonstrates the way the connection between America and film is enabled through the development of a philosophical concept of medium that allows both America and film to be thought anew.
As Peretz shows, America can be understood as a medium providing a new framework for understanding human life in modernity--an era that's seen the demise of theology (or the death of god, as Nietzsche declared). Through incisive readings of the films mentioned above, Peretz shows each to function in its own singular fashion as an allegory of the way that America--that is, the demand to ground human life non-theologically--becomes the notion around which the medium of Hollywood film circulates.
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