"Doru Pop's bold and erudite work conjures philosophers from Plato to Bergson to the newest inquiries into cinema's relationship with philosophy, examining how "thinking space" is created through the "evacuation" of elements usually considered constitutive of cinema. What is left - or what is created - when filmmakers renounce the concrete and the explicit? Using his unique cultural expertise, Doru Pop explores his country's celebrated recent cinema and its kinship with Dada, the other great aesthetic movement indebted to the Romanian fascination with the absurd and the incongruous. As Pop helps us understand how Romanian filmmakers unleash cinema's power and reveal its essence and capability, he also reminds us that experiencing cinema is ultimately meant to be a philosophical endeavor, an aesthetic form of struggle for meaning." -- Ioana Uricaru, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA "Doru Pop's book is subtle, astute, and precise, revealing how the cinematic and the metaphysical rely on the non-cinematic and the post-cinematic and the post-metaphysical to facilitate deep thinking and understanding. Pop offers a generous overview of the main questions and points of debate about how movies facilitate thinking. He not only sharpens the existing theoretical and conceptual toolbox in film studies about the epistemic functions of cinema, but also reveals Romanian New Wave films as inexhausted objects for theorizing and criticism." -- Alina Haliliuc, Associate Professor, Communication Department, Denison University, USA.