Publisher's Synopsis
'One does not go to see them act,' James Baldwin wrote about the great iconic movie stars, 'one goes to watch them be.' It seems obvious. Where else besides the movies do you see other persons so intimately, so pressingly, so largely? Where else are you allowed such sustained and searching looks as you give to these strangers on the screen, whoever they really are? In life you try not to stare; but at the movies that's exactly what you get to do. It's this sort of amplified, heightened, sometimes transcendent 'seeing' that James Harvey explores in 'Watching Them Be'.
