Books by Sam B. Girgus

From generation to generation, three outstanding American Jewish directors-William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg--advance a tradition of Jewish writers, artists, and leaders who propagate the ethical basis of the American Idea and Creed.

'In this intellectually energetic and conceptually imaginative book, Sam Girgus halts at an intersection between film and existential philosophy to reflect on ways in which both relate to ideas of time. In a series of beautiful and perceptive analyses of particular films, Girgus finds time looped, chronologies diffused or the divergence of the camera's observation from the overt sense of story. By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's theories of spatial temporality, he finds new and unexpected ways of analysing the cinema, opening up its linearity into complex dimensions of space and further layering of time.' Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck University of London In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of 'delayed cinema' to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others. The sustained tension in film between (in Mulvey's phrase) 'stillness and the moving image' enacts a drama of existential emergence. The stillness of the framed image in relation to the moving image opens 'free' cinematic time and space for a fresh engagement with crucial ethical and cultural issues. With close readings of films such as The Bicycle Thieves, Two Days, One Night, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Revenant and The Age of Innocence, this book proposes a fresh approach to reading film in the context of emerging existential presence and the ethical imperative. Sam B. Girgus is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Cover image: The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese, 1993 (c) Columbia Pictures/Photofest Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-3623-6 Barcode

In 'Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image', Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of delayed cinema to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others.

Girgus defines the American idea as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions of democracy, equality, and republicanism and argues that writers of the New Covenant tradition challenged society to live up to its own imperatives for individual and cultural renewal.

This work attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "e;ontological adventure"e; of immediate experience and the "e;ethical adventure"e; of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self. In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "e;cinema of redemption"e; that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).