Felicity Colman (ed.): Film, Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema, philosophy, theory
Thoroughly intertwined, film and philosophy have a complex relationship between thought and perception, time and memory, as well as social, political, and aesthetic experiences. Philosophy has underpinned the creation of cinema while cinema, in turn, has redefined philosophical categories, rethought sex, gender, time and space, and created new concepts that illuminate phenomenology, metaphysics, and epistemology.
An ideal introduction for students, Film, Theory and Philosophy brings together leading scholars to provide a clear, detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. From continental philosophers to analytical philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, the essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But most importantly, the essays explore how cinema has shaped contemporary philosophy and how philosophy has led to a reappraisal of film. This collection will prove an invaluable reference and guide to readers interested in a deeper understanding of the issues and insights presented by the philosophy of film.
Publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009
ISBN 0773537007, 9780773537002
Length 404 pages
David Campany: Photography and Cinema (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, history of cinema, image, photography
What did the arrival of cinema do for photography? How did the moving image change our relation to the still image? Why have cinema and photography been so drawn to each other? Close-ups, freeze frames and the countless portrayals of photographers on screen are signs of cinema’s enduring attraction to the still image. Photo-stories, sequences and staged tableaux speak of the deep influence of cinema on photography.
Photography and Cinema a considers the importance of the still image for filmmakers such as the Lumière brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Mark Lewis, Agnès Varda, Peter Weir, Christopher Nolan and many others. In parallel it looks at the cinematic in the work of photographers and artists that include Germaine Krull, William Klein, John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman.
From film stills and flipbooks to slide shows and digital imaging, hybrid visual forms have established an ambiguous realm between motion and stillness. David Campany assembles a missing history in which photography and cinema have been each other’s muse and inspiration for over a century.
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2008
Exposures (London)
ISBN 1861893515, 9781861893512
Length 160 pages
Thomas Elsaesser, Malte Hagener: Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema
What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? That is the central question for film theory, and renowned film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener use this question to guide students through all of the major film theories—from the classical period to today—in this insightful, engaging book. Every kind of cinema (and film theory) imagines an ideal spectator, and then imagines a certain relationship between the mind and body of that spectator and the screen. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from ‘exterior’ to ‘interior’ relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from 1945 to the present, from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, ‘apparatus’, phenomenological and cognitivist theories.
Publisher Taylor & Francis Group, 2010
ISBN 041580101X, 9780415801010
Length 222 pages
Cristina Venegas: Digital Dilemmas: The State, The Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, cuba, film, internet, youtube
The contentious debate in Cuba over Internet use and digital media primarily focuses on three issues—maximizing the potential for economic and cultural development, establishing stronger ties to the outside world, and changing the hierarchy of control. A growing number of users decry censorship and insist on personal freedom in accessing the web, while the centrally managed system benefits the government in circumventing U.S. sanctions against the country and in controlling what limited capacity exists.
Digital Dilemmas views Cuba from the Soviet Union’s demise to the present, to assess how conflicts over media access play out in their both liberating and repressive potential. Drawing on extensive scholarship and interviews, Cristina Venegas questions myths of how Internet use necessarily fosters global democracy and reveals the impact of new technologies on the country’s governance and culture. She includes film in the context of broader media history, as well as artistic practices such as digital art and networks of diasporic communities connected by the Web. This book is a model for understanding the geopolitic location of power relations in the age of digital information sharing.
Publisher Rutgers University Press, 2010
New Directions in International Studies
ISBN 0813546877, 9780813546872
Length 229 pages
Jean-Luc Godard, Youssef Ishaghpour: Cinema. The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema
Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career in the industry. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century’s dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that – after the century of Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers – film and history are inextricably intertwined. Against this backdrop, Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. As the conversation develops, Godard expounds on his central concerns – how film can ‘resurrect the past’, the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an ‘art that thinks’. Cinema: the archaeology of film and the memory of a century is a dialogue between Godard and the celebrated cinphile Youssef Ishaghpour. Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime’s obsession with cinema and cinema’s lifelong obsession with history.
Translated by John Howe
Publisher Berg Publishers, 2005
Talking images series
ISBN 1845201973, 9781845201975
Length 143 pages
Noël Carroll: Theorizing the Moving Image (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde film, avantgarde, cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema, television
Theorizing the Moving Image brings together a selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the past two decades. In this volume, Noël Carroll examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, and comedy, and such topics as sight gags, film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll’s essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new approach to film theory.
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1996
Cambridge Studies in Film
ISBN 0521460492, 9780521460491
Length 426 pages
Steven Shaviro: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales (2010)
Filed under paper | Tags: · affect, capitalism, cinema, critique, emotion, film, labor, music, music video, neoliberalism, philosophy, post-cinema
Steven Shaviro: “The new issue (14.1) of the open-access journal Film-Philosophy is now online.
Featured in this issue as an ‘extended article’ (it comes out to 100 pages!) is my latest: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.
The article is freely available for download; it comprises about two thirds of my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Affect, appearing sometime later this year from Zero Books. (The book version will include two additional chapters: one on Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer, and a general conclusion).” (from author’s blog)
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Jeffrey Skoller: Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, avant-garde film, cinema, experimental film, film, film theory, history of cinema
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.
Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films.
Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664232X, 9780816642328
Length 233 pages
Catherine Lupton: Chris Marker. Memories of the Future (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, documentary film, film, history of cinema
Chris Marker is one of the most extraordinary and influential film-makers of our time. In landmark films such as Letter from Siberia (1958), La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1982) and Level Five (1996), he overturned the conventions of the cinema, confounding normal distinctions between documentary and fiction, private and public concerns, writing and visual recording, and the still and moving image. Yet these works are only the better-known elements of a protean career that to date has spanned the second half of the twentieth century and encompassed writing, photography, film-making, video, television and the expanding field of digital multimedia.
Catherine Lupton traces the development and transformation of Marker’s work from the late 1940s, when he began to work as a poet, novelist and critic for the French journal Esprit, through to the 1990s, and the release of his most recent works: the feature film Level Five and the CD–ROM Immemory. She incorporates the historical events, shifts and cultural contexts that most productively illuminate the different phases of Marker’s career. He stands out as a singular figure whose work resists easy assimilation into the mainstream of cultural and cinematic trends.
Marker’s oeuvre moves in circles, with each project recycling and referring back to earlier works and to a host of other adopted texts, and proceeds by way of oblique association and lateral digression. This circular movement is ideally suited to capturing and mapping Marker’s abiding and consummate obsession: the forms and operations of human memory. Chris Marker: Memories of the Future itself aims to capture something of this movement, in forming a comprehensive analysis and overview of this modern master’s prolific and multi-faceted career.
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2005
ISBN 1861892233, 9781861892232
Length 256 pages
Virgilio Tosi: Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · chronophotography, cinema, film, history of cinema, scientific cinema
This classic history of early film and photography, first published in 1984, describes the scientific impulses behind sequence photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and E.J. Marey, whose work led directly to the birth of cinema. Now entitled Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, the book has been updated to include recent research in the field. The English translation was done by BUFVC Library and Database Manager Sergio Angelini. The BUFVC is the distributor of the English-language version of the film series THE ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC CINEMATOGRAPHY, which Tosi produced over 1990-1993 to complement his written researches. The BUFVC has produced a DVD edition of the films, to mark the publication of the English edition of the book.
Publisher British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005
Film Studies series
ISBN 0901299758, 9780901299758
Length 234 pages
Michael North: Camera Works. Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avantgarde, cinema, film, history of cinema, history of photography, literature, modernity, photography
“Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored.
Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the avant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work , through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920’s.
Subseguent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls “spectroscopic gayety,” the enjoyable diorientation of the senses by machine perception, turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway. Together, these chapters offer a new and substantially different account of the relationship between modern American literature and the mediatized society of the early twentieth century.
With a comprehensive introduction and detailed particular readings, Camera Works substantiates a new understanding of the formal and historical bases of modernism. It argues that when modern literature and art respond to modernity, on a formal level, they are responding to the intervention of technology in the transmission of meaning, an intervention that unsettles all the terms in the essential relationship of human consciousness to the world of phenomena.
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2005
Oxford scholarship online
ISBN 0195173562, 9780195173567
Length 255 pages
William Uricchio (ed.): We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · balkans, europe, european union, film, identity, imagined community, literature, mass media, photography, public broadcasting, television
This volume explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault-lines and fissures of the ever-shifting collectivities that constitute Europe. At the centre of this dynamic are human beings, who, as makers and users of media, negotiate identities, affiliations and meanings.
The collection explores how ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations and languages overlap one another, interact within individuals and define communities. Whether triggered by individual desires or shared fantasies, these dynamic collectivities make use of media in very different ways. Addressing topics such as films and television programmes, the Euro, photographs, postcards or public monuments, contributors reflect on this notion of ‘new collectivities’, not in an individualistic sense or collectively as nations but as multiple and shifting identities. With this as a starting point, the volume interrogates the processes that create and shape identity and characterize Europe as it physically expands and administratively consolidates. Essays explore media texts as sites of dreams and longed for identities, and articulate the fears and tensions surrounding the uses of transnational media, whether for purposes of cultural homogenization or isolation.
Drawing on novels, films and the press, the volume demonstrates the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform and give shape to the present. We Europeans? Media, Representation, Identities addresses a scholarly readership with an interest in textual analysis and policy issues regarding media, identity and the many vantage points of Europe.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
Volume 6 of Changing media–changing Europe series
ISBN 1841502073, 9781841502076
Length 224 pages
Gábor Bódy 1946-1985. A Presentation of his Work (1987) [English/Hungarian]
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · cinema, experimental film, film, hungary, video, video art
Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.
This publication appeared on the occasion of the Gábor Bódy life-work exhibition organized in Budapest at the Ernst Museum, the Tinódi Cinema and the Palace of Exhibitions, January 19 – February 8, 1987.
Project and coordination: László Beke, Miklós Peternák
Publisher: Budapest: Mucsarnok, 1987
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Forum: Edinburgh University Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts 8: Technologies (2009)
Filed under journal | Tags: · art history, film, literary theory, media studies, technology
Technologies allow us to interrogate what material objects, techniques and systems of knowledge are made and how they are produced.
The 8th issue of Forum engages with a range of questions concerning the definitions, meanings, applications and representations of technologies. The three guest articles by distinguished technology scholars deal with technologies and embodiment in Doctor Who, Marcuse’s aesthetics, and the figure of the independent inventor. The following articles explore the significance of technologies across the fields of literary and film studies, history and art history as well as media studies.
The wide variety of articles from different disciplines highlight the interdisciplinary nature of technologies, and the complexity of the term ‘technology’ itself.
Issue 8, Spring 2009 – Technologies
Editorial board: Ally Crockford, Lena Wanggren, Jack David Burton, Jana Funke, Kim Treharne Richmond, Ana Salzberg.
Publisher: University of Edinburgh, Graduate School of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
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Comment (0)Janet Staiger, Sabine Hake (eds.): Convergence Media History (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · convergence, film, mass media, media culture, media history, media studies, new media, television
Convergence Media History explores the ways that digital convergence has radically changed the field of media history. Writing media history is no longer a matter of charting the historical development of an individual medium such as film or television. Instead, now that various media from blockbuster films to everyday computer use intersect regularly via convergence, scholars must find new ways to write media history across multiple media formats. This collection of eighteen new essays by leading media historians and scholars examines the issues today in writing media history and histories. Each essay addresses a single medium—including film, television, advertising, sound recording, new media, and more—and connects that specific medium’s history to larger issues for the field in writing multi-media or convergent histories. Among the volume’s topics are new media technologies and their impact on traditional approaches to media history; alternative accounts of film production and exhibition, with a special emphasis on film across multiple media platforms; the changing relationships between audiences, fans, and consumers within media culture; and the globalization of our media culture.
Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2009
ISBN 0415996619, 9780415996617
Length 212 pages
