Peretz (comparative literature, Indiana U.) places de Palma at the intersection of philosophy and film, seeking the logic governing the work of this director and a general philosophical examination of all the major categories of film with the intention of building a comprehensive theory of film. Peretz finds within Carrie new thinking about representation, particularly its wounding, within The Fury a dialog between passion and paranoia and, as a result, a rethinking of the frame and the screen, in Blow Out commentary on the memory of the outside, in which the camera performs as pornography and the cinema as scream. And in Femme Fatale a paradoxical happy ending in which cinema, or at least that of de Palma, may actually have a future. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses is an examination of the logic governing the work of a major American artist that is, at the same time, a general philosophical examination of the logic of meaning governing all the major filmic categories—frame, camera movement, editing cut, close-up, and the relations between vision and sound. How is one to think the significance of the art of film for philosophy? What would it mean to introduce film as a question into the heart of the philosophical enterprise? How would this transform our understanding of film, on the one hand, and of philosophy and the philosophical tradition, on the other? These are the questions that guide this project on the hitherto critically neglected but seminal film director Brian De Palma. Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses is located at the intersection of philosophy and film studies, and makes each of these disciplines productive and useful for each other in a new way. It is a concrete examination of the logic governing the work of a major American artist that is, at the same time, a general philosophical examination of the logic of meaning governing all the major filmic categories and is thus a comprehensive theory of film. Becoming Visionary develops a new matrix for thinking the relations between philosophy and film and, by extension, between philosophy and the arts
