In The Material Ghost, Perez draws on his life-long love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write an engaging study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory - a medium both lifelike and dreamlike, both documentary and fictional, where real details create imaginary worlds, where figures appear before us like actors on a stage and yet are removed from us like characters in a novel.

He investigates these complexities by discussing a breathtaking range of works from the earliest days of cinema to the present.

From the silent era, he explores the work of Keaton and Chaplin, Griffith and Eisenstein, the haunting anxiety of Murnau's Nosferatu and the epic lyricism of Dovzhenko's Earth. From the classic era of sound cinema, he discusses the searching realism of Jean Renoir and the memorable westerns of John Ford, Bunuel's corrosive documentary Land without Bread and Hitchcock's mesmerizing Vertigo.

From the sixties and seventies, he examines the shifting parables of Jean-Luc Godard and the arresting uncertainty of Antonioni's Eclipse, Straub and Huillet's reflective History Lessons and such explosive Hollywood films as The Wild Bunch and The Godfather. He also comments on the current scene, including the refashioned gangster films of Martin Scorsese and the philosophical realism of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.