Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics by Mark Polizzotti

Alfred Jarry’s Ubu and Alain Resnais’s Nim. Bob Dylan’s tightrope walks and Alfred Hitchcock’s vertigo. Flaubert’s kicks against idiocy and Cocteau’s embrace of death. The enduring appeal of Surrealism and the failures of intellectual culture. In these thirteen essays, Mark Polizzotti brings fresh readings to topics both mainstream and esoteric. Drawing on three decades of critical writings, Jump Cuts ranges across a broad swath of subjects—film, music, literature, translation, the pitfalls of biography, the current dilemma of the humanities—to map the creative act as it strains to fulfill our eternal, unrequited yearning for transcendence.  "As I read Mark Polizzotti's Jump Cuts I kept wanting to talk back to the book —not because there was anything wrong; I just wanted to engage further. Polizzotti's understanding of Surrealism and its consequences—of an enormous amount of twentieth-century culture—is exceptionally broad and deep, and his prose is clear and sharp. His book is a gas,