From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general. "Peretz's landmark discussion of the off-screen goes well beyond the technical definitions of Bazin, Bonitzer, or Deleuze. In his hands, the off-screen becomes the philosophical lynchpin of a new way of addressing modern art and the poetics of the modern image." -- Alessia Ricciardi ― Northwestern University "Think you know what a frame is? Well, this inspired book radically unframes and reframes the notion. Frames, Eyal Peretz brilliantly shows, are a negotiation with the specters, angels, or ghosts that works of art―from Bruegel to Tarantino―carry around as their (off-)trail." -- Peter Szendy ― University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. "Peretz reconstructs a sweeping genealogy of the frame – as that which is both in and outside – from the painted image to the theatrical stage to the cinematic screen itself. Peretz's project is an idiosyncratic endeavor in the best sense of the word, blending art theory, film theory, and philosophy, without taking shelter in the philological and historicist micropolitics of each respective discipline..." -- Sulgi Lie ― Texte zur Kunst " The Off-Screen , within the context of the invisible dimension of the "off," provides its readers with an insightful and incisive background of US cinema from Griffith to Tarantino. Apart from the obvious contribution to film studies, scholars in performance and visual studies will find themselves enthralled by Peretz's investigation of the frame." -- Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari ― The Drama Review Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Becoming Visionary (Stanford, 2007). The Off-Screen An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame By Eyal Peretz STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5036-0072-0 Contents Illustrations, THRESHOLD, The Unframing Image, PART 1: THE OFF-SCREEN: SHAKESPEARE, BRUEGEL, TARKOVSKY, PART 2: THE ORIGIN OF FILM, 1. On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, 2. The Actor of the Crowd — The Great Dictator: Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang, PART 3: ON FILM GENRE, 3. Howard Hawks's Idea of Genre, 4. What Is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1 The Off-Screen Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky Who's there? With this question that opens Hamlet — perhaps the paradigmatic work of art in the age we have come to call modernity — something new is announced: the haunting of the world — the apparition of a ghost searching for a place, seeking to be heard — at the heart of the work of art. What is the nature of this ghost, and what does it want from us? What is the nature of its connection to the modern work of art — and to film in particular? Staging Ghosts "Who's there?" is perhaps the most fundamental question of what we can call the modern condition. The question itself is already a response to something that precedes it, to a disturbance that might or might not — and this is its constitutive ambiguity — address, that is, mean to call, intentionally draw the attention of the one who responds. The reason for the ambiguity of the disturbance is the unrecognizability of its source. Who, or what, brings disturbance — where does it come from, and for what reason? It is unknown, unseen. But precisely this unrecognizability, which produces a lack of certainty regarding for whom it is meant, constitutes such disturbance as a new kind of address — if we now understand being addressed as becoming implicated in the question of one's identity. Those who are thus addressed are disturbed in their very identity; they do not know whether the disturbance was meant for them or not. They are no longer sure who they themselves are, what their own place in a world of meaning is. If one reads Hamlet 's ope