Combining the moviegoer's passion with the philosopher's analytic precision, Irving Singer shows how cinema has reinvigorated myths from times past to become our new folklore. Step by step we discover how films gather their iconic power and authority from Ovid, Homer, and others. Singer switches his critical abilities to maximum wattage, revealing that films work their magic by putting the banal and the ordinary in touch with the sublime.
Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
In Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film, Irving Singer continues his philosophical exploration of the nature of love by posing the interesting question: How do movies modernize mythology. In the course of his discussion of the cinematic treatment of a variety of romantic myths, including Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus, Tristan and Iseult, Pygmalion and Galatea, and Don Juan, it becomes clear that cinephilia is one of the loves being explored in this book. Claiming to be neither film theory nor film history, Singer's book invites readers to participate in an exploration of figures who continue to capture our imaginations as a result of their moral and erotic complexity, figures such as the remade woman, the suffering female, the male hero, and falling men and women. Through close analyses of individual films, framed within a context of wide-ranging references to literary, theatrical, operatic and philosophical traditions, Singer invites us to reflect on romantic myth as a site of persistence and change.
Karen Beckman, Director, Cinema Studies, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
Cinematic Mythmaking is an important addition to Irving Singer's on-going studies of the art of the filmmaker as an exploration of perennial philosophic questions embodied in a new imaginative form. Here he navigates the relations between what is perhaps the oldest mode of narrative mythic thinking and the unique resources and constraints of our youngest art. He writes about this 'composite art' with an admirable balance of analytic lucidity and personal engagement. In his attentive, nuanced readings of exemplary films from the 1930s to the near present he demonstrates how these movies 'restore' and 'revive' our access to traditional ways of addressing the human condition. Avoiding any premature formulation of a Grand Theory or synoptic historical generalizations, Singer frames his questions with the precision of a philosopher and renders the imaginative experience of these films with the immediacy of a master critic.
Richard Macksey, Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University
[Singer's] book is best treated not as any kind of rigorous critical analysis, but rather as a rhapsodic excursion through a gallery of his favourite movies and cinematic themes aimed at sparking off similarly discursive enthusiasms in the reader. Writing it, he says, was 'life-enhancing and a great deal of fun'—and it is in that spirit that we are invited to respond.
Times Higher Education
