《电影的奥秘》带领我们进行一场穿越电影历史的主题过山车之旅，为我们描绘了这一不明确的领域。几位导演和影评人对电影视觉的本质进行了猜测，作家卡夫卡、弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫和琼•迪迪恩，艺术家萨尔瓦多•达利、乔治•格罗兹和费尔南•莱格，作曲家阿诺德•勋伯格和德米特里•肖斯塔科维奇也对通过文章参与了这场辩论。本书从默片的大胆创新入手，探讨了法国超现实主义和德国表现主义的影响，阐述了西部片、恐怖片和音乐剧等好莱坞类型片的魅力，最后探讨了动态影像在我们这个视觉泛滥的社会中的命运。

Cinema has always been excited by speed, and it enjoys sending the body on furious kinetic chases; at the same time, it stealthily probes our minds, invading our dreams and titillating our desires. Although this is an art kindled by light and inflamed by colour, it is nurtured by darkness and can reduce life to an insubstantial shadow-play. Either way, as Peter Conrad argues in this brilliant book, the movie camera has given us new eyes and changed forever our view of reality.

The Mysteries of Cinema sets out to map this ambiguous territory by taking us on a thematic rollercoaster-

ride through movie history. Directors and critics speculate about the nature of cinematic vision, and there are contributions to the debate from writers like Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, artists including Salvador Dali, George Grosz and Fernand Leger, and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. The book begins from the audacious innovations of silent film, and examines the influence of French surrealism and German expressionism; it accounts for the appeal of Hollywood genres like the Western, the horror film and the musical, and ends by considering the fate of the moving image in our visually glutted society.

Combining contagious enthusiasm with an eye for the subjective quirks of filmmakers and the allure of favourite performers, Conrad delivers an astonishing addition to the literature on the seventh art.