Murray Pomerance


Murray Pomerance is an independent Canadian film scholar and author living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Career

Pomerance was born in 1946 in Hamilton, Ontario and studied at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, the New School for Social Research, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and York University.
Pomerance has written extensively on film, cinematic experience, and performance, and has also edited and co-edited more than two dozen anthologies exploring cinema. He contributes regularly to print and online publications, including Film International, Senses of Cinema and FLOW. In addition, Pomerance is editor of the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers University Press and the “Horizons of Cinema” series at State University of New York Press and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, co-editor of both the “Screen Decades” and “Star Decades” series at Rutgers University Press.
His book Johnny Depp Starts Here has been translated into the French as Ici Commence Johnny Depp, and into the German as Johnny Depp: Betrachtungen zu einem Schauspieler.
Pomerance also writes fiction, and is a 1992 O. Henry Award winner. His work has appeared in New Directions, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, Chelsea, Confrontation, and Descant. He is the author, as well, of Ludwig Bemelmans: A Bibliography.
He was diagnosed with autism in the spring of 2018.
Pomerance has also been involved in film production, appearing in Brandon Cronenberg's Broken Tulips, and acting, writing, and composing for R. Bruce Elder’s Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World. In the summer of 2009, he appeared on Broadway in conjunction with a performance of The 39 Steps. In August 2013, his co-authored commentary appeared on the Criterion DVD of John Frankenheimer's Seconds. In October 2017 he appeared on BBC Radio 3's "Free Thinking."

Works published

  • Edge of the Screen
  • An Eye for Hitchcock, revised edition
  • A Silence from Hitchcock
  • Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience
  • Color It True: Impressions of Cinema
  • A Voyage with Hitchcock
  • The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure
  • Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor's Magic
  • A Dream of Hitchcock
  • Cinema, If You Please: The Taste of Memory, the Memory of Taste
  • Moment of Action: Riddles of Cinematic Performance
  • The Man Who Knew Too Much
  • Marnie
  • The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect
  • Alfred Hitchcock's America
  • Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema
  • The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory
  • Johnny Depp Starts Here
  • ''An Eye for Hitchcock''

    Edited

  • "The Color of Our Eyes," special issue of The New Review of Film and Television Studies, February 2017
  • The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema
  • Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s
  • A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home
  • City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination
  • Cinema and Modernity
  • American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations
  • BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen
  • Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film
  • ''Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century''

    Co-edited

  • Mervyn Leroy Comes to Town
  • Autism in Film and Television: On the Island
  • The Other Hollywood Renaissance
  • The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz
  • Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Vol. 1, America
  • Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Vol. 2, International
  • Hamlet Lives in Hollywood: John Barrymore and the Acting Tradition on Screen
  • Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice
  • George Cukor: Hollywood Master
  • Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema
  • A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film
  • From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings
  • Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth
  • Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood
  • Popping Culture
  • Closely Watched Brains
  • Bang Bang Shoot Shoot! Essays on Guns and Popular Culture
  • ''Pictures of a Generation on Hold''

    Fiction

  • Grammatical Dreams
  • A King of Infinite Space
  • The Economist
  • Tomorrow
  • Edith Valmaine
  • Savage Time
  • ''Magia d’Amore''