The art houses and cinema clubs of his youth are gone, but the films that D. A. Miller discovered there in the 1960s and '70s are now at his fingertips. With DVDs and streaming media, technology has turned the old cinematheque's theatrical offerings into private viewings that anyone can repeat, pause, slow, and otherwise manipulate at will.
In Second Time Around, Miller seizes this opportunity; across thirteen essays, he watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he first saw in them but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing frames, or simple censorship. At last he has an unobstructed view of the gay leather scene in Cruising, the expurgated special effects in The H-Man, and the alternative ending to Vertigo. Now he can pursue the finer details of Chabrol's debt to Hitchcock, Visconti's mystificatory Marxism, or the unemotive emotion in Godard.
Yet this recaptured past is strangely disturbing; the films and the author have changed in too many ways for their reunion to be like old times. The closeness of Miller's attention clarifies the painful contradictions of youth and decline, damaged prints and flawless restorations.
Industry Reviews
A humanizing assurance that art, memory, and desire are timeless. * Choice *
From writer D.A. Miller, this book is maybe the most CriterionCast book to have ever been made . . . For those who think far too much about what streaming and technological advances mean for film restoration and cinephilia, this is far and away the must-own book of the season. -- Joshua Brunsting * CriterionCast *
So glad we met, the old song says, the second time around, and Miller's accounts of his first and second (and more) sights of film constitute a whole admirable viewing practice: attentive, reflective, witty, personal, historical. Once you've visited what he calls his old and new cinematheques-the one with poor prints in art houses and film clubs, the immaculate one on DVD at home-you may not want to go anywhere else. Or at least not go anywhere without remembering where you've been. -- Michael Wood, author of Film: A Very Short Introduction
At once mine shaft and pleasure dome, the cinema in Second Time Around comes before us as a new art form, a form whose genius resides not in dialogue or duree but in its generation of a solitary Image-seductive, exorbitant, magnificent, and always psychically expensive. As thrilling as his accounts of the "second time around" are D. A. Miller's revelations of the first time round-glimpses of a precocious, film-obsessed boy with his face and hands forever pressed against the screen. -- Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Harvard University
Second Time Around is a master class in close (re-)reading-a practice that the discipline of film studies has nearly forgotten. It is also a cinephile's spiritual autobiography, except that D. A. Miller's version of cinephilia, thank goodness, is never precious or stuffy or completist. His brilliant and energetically patient attention to the cinematic artifact and to his own experience of observing it exemplifies the possibility of regarding art without guarding against it-of making ourselves vulnerable, again and again, to the unforeseen. The book reminds us that Miller is one of our greatest critics and most brilliant writers. -- John David Rhodes, author of Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film
Miller provides little context for his particular film choices. He does not have to: whether he "enjoys" the
films or not, they are connected to his personal history, making the book readable and engaging. His insights are sharp and decisive, but he does not ask the reader to agree or disagree. Miller simply allows us to become outside spectators to his rewatching experience, and brings us into his
lifelong curiosity surrounding film. * Film Matters *
