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
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
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
David Norman Rodowick: The Virtual Life of Film (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digitalm film, film, history of cinema, ontology, photography
As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema–and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.
Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists–at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century–and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN 0674026683, 9780674026681
Length 193 pages
Jacques Rancière: Film Fables (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, documentary film, film, film theory, history of cinema
Film Fables traces the history of modern cinema. Encyclopedic in scope, Film Fables is that rare work that manages to combine extraordinary breadth and analysis with a lyricism which attests time and again to a love of cinema.
Jacques Ranciere moves effortlessly from Eisenstein’s and Murnau’s transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang’s confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann’s Westerns to Ray’s romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini’s neo-realism to Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema and Marker’s documentaries.
The Film Fable shows us how, between its images and its stories, the cinema tells its truth.
Translated from the French by Emiliano Battista
Series: Talking images series
Publisher Berg Publishers, 2006
ISBN 184520168X, 9781845201685
Length 196 pages
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Comment (0)Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, cinema, film, history of cinema, history of music, music, music video, sound, television, video art
In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.
Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.
Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Foreword by Walter Murch
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1994
ISBN 0231078986, 9780231078986
Length 239 pages
Richard Abel, Rick Altman (eds.): The Sounds of Early Cinema (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, history of cinema, music, silent cinema, sound, theatre
The first book to examine the variety of sounds that accompanied so-called silent cinema.
The Sounds of Early Cinema is devoted exclusively to a little-known, yet absolutely crucial phenomenon: the ubiquitous presence of sound in early cinema. “Silent cinema” may rarely have been silent, but the sheer diversity of sound(s) and sound/image relations characterizing the first 20 years of moving picture exhibition can still astonish us. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the pre-arranged (as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets). The practice of mixing sounds with images differed widely, depending on the venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London or Paris versus the newest palace cinema in New York City) as well as on the historical moment (a single venue might change radically, and many times, from 1906 to 1910).
Contributors include Richard Abel, Rick Altman, Edouard Arnoldy, Mats Björkin, Stephen Bottomore, Marta Braun, Jean Châteauvert, Ian Christie, Richard Crangle, Helen Day-Mayer, John Fullerton, Jane Gaines, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Jeff Klenotic, Germain Lacasse, Neil Lerner, Patrick Loughney, David Mayer, Domi-nique Nasta, Bernard Perron, Jacques Polet, Lauren Rabinovitz, Isabelle Raynauld, Herbert Reynolds, Gregory A. Waller, and Rashit M. Yangirov.
Richard Abel is Ellis and Nell Levitt Professor of English at Drake University, where he teaches cinema/media/cultural studies. His most recent book is The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (California, 1999), which was a finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Currently he is editing the Routledge Encyclopedia of Early Cinema.
Rick Altman is Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. After publishing Film/Genre (British Film Institute, 1999), which won the SCS Katherine Singer Kovacs award, he edited a special issue of IRIS 27 (Spring 1999) on the “State of Sound Studies.” His current projects include a book on the silent cinema soundscape, a DVD devoted to illustrated song slides, and performances by his troupe, The Living Nickelodeon.
Publisher Indiana University Press, 2001
ISBN 0253214793, 9780253214799
Length 327 pages
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Siegfried Zielinski: Audiovisions. Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital cinema, film, history of cinema, television
The production, distribution, and perception of moving images are undergoing a radical transformation. Ever-faster computers, digital technology, and microelectronic are joining forces to produce advanced audiovision -the media vanishing point of the 20th century. Very little will remain unchanged.
The classic institutions for the mediation of film – cinema and television – are revealed to be no more than interludes in the broader history of the audiovisual media. This book interprets these changes not simply as a cultural loss but also as a challenge: the new audiovisions have to be confronted squarely to make strategic intervention possible.
Audiovisions provides a historical underpinning for this active approach. Spanning 100 years, from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century, it reconstructs the complex genesis of cinema and television as historically relative – and thus finite – cultural forms, focussing on the dynamics and tension in the interaction between the apparatus and its uses. The book is also a plea for “staying power” in studies of cultural technology and technological culture of film.
Essayistic in style, it dispenses with complicated cross references and, instead, is structured around distinct historical phases. Montages of images and text provide supplemental information, contrast, and comment.
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Film Culture in Transition
ISBN: 9789053563137
360 pages
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Frances Guerin: A Culture of Light. Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, cinema, film, germany, history of cinema, silent cinema, technology
Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany’s advance to technological modernity, light – particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light – became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.
In Frances Guerin’s compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light – electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights – and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin’s interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern.
This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816642869, 9780816642861
Length 314 pages
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