American Medium: A New Film Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2025).
American Medium aims to forge a new connection between the concept of “America” and the medium of film through a theoretical reading 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. 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. American film makes visible and activates the medium called America.
Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at IU Bloomington and the author of several books that span the history of the arts in modernity from the Renaissance to our own days, books which, by trying to redraw the relation between philosophy and the arts aim to articulate a new, existential place for art, beyond both its pre-modern sacred understanding and its modern understanding as aesthetic.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Comparative Literature.