Film history, theory or criticism Books

Book SynopsisThis book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: ‘The sanguine, pulsating, enterprising modern life’: Cinema and Vitalism 1. Taking Life for a Spin 2. Turn-of-the-century Vitalism and Philosophy of Life 3. Early Film Theory 4. Cinematic Vitalism Chapter 1: Vitalism and Abstraction: Rhythm and Non-Organic Life from Hans Richter to Sergei Eisenstein 27 1. The Reinvention of Cinema in Abstract Film 2. A Universal Language 3. Bergson, Intuition, and Art 4. Setting Form into Motion: Scroll Paintings and Empathy 5. Transition to Film 6. Back into Matter: from Abstraction to Montage Chapter 2: New Worlds: Uexküll’s Umwelt Theory at the Movies 1. Forays 2. A Meditation on Mediated Dogs 3. The Agony of the Starfish: Uexküll’s Chronophotography 4. Of Ticks and Humans 5. Against Anthropocentrism: Umwelt and Cinema 6. A Necessary Field of Action: Benjamin, Umwelt, and Play 7. Painlevé’s Cinema of Bewilderment Chapter 3: The Interweaving of World and Self: Transformations of Stimmung in Expressionist and Kammerspiel Film 100 1. The Mediation of a Dog’s World 2. A Brief Aesthetic History of Stimmung 3. Turn-of-the-Century Vitalist Stimmung and the Cinema: Georg Simmel and Hugo von Hofmannsthal 4. Balázs, Kammerspielfilm, and Expressionism 5. The Kammerspiel Film: Naturalist Plots and Progressive Aesthetics Chapter 4: Open Bodies, Open Stories: Evolution, Narration and Spectatorship in Postwar Film Theory 1. The Axolotl and the Cinema: Bazin, Bergson, and Evolution 2. Cinema’s Milieu 3. Life and the Temporalities of Film and Painting 4. Post-Apocalyptic Life: Kracauer’s Theory of Film 5. Conclusion: Vital Cinema Bibliography

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Book SynopsisIn the 1950s, a group of critics writing for Cahiers du Cinéma launched one of the most successful and influential trends in the history of film criticism: auteur theory. Though these days it is frequently usually viewed as limited and a bit old-fashioned, a closer inspection of the hundreds of little-read articles by these critics reveals that the movement rested upon a much more layered and intriguing aesthetics of cinema. This book is a first step toward a serious reassessment of the mostly unspoken theoretical and aesthetic premises underlying auteur theory, built around a reconstruction of Eric Rohmer's early but decisive leadership of the group, whereby he laid down the foundations for the eventual emergence of their full-fledged auteurism.Trade Review"Marco Grosoli's Eric Rohmer's Film Theory (1948-1953) comes at a key point in Rohmer studies ... There has never been a better time to fully emerge oneself into the oeuvre (both his filmography and writings) of Eric Rohmer ... [This book] certainly fills a void in Rohmerian scholarship."- Zachary Ingle, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2020) "This is a much-needed contribution to the area of auteur theory, given the many questions raised by (and contradictions inherent in) even the most straightforward attempts to describe the stakes of what was eventually deemed the politique des auteurs."- Leah Vonderheide, H-France, Vol. 19 (2019) "It is the scope and depth of this new book that proves [Grosoli] to be one of the deepest thinkers of his generation of film scholars ... [AUP] has done something bold and commendable in giving us this sustained and serious study of film aesthetics."- Dudley Andrew, Critical Inquiry (2019)Table of Contents0. Introduction 1. A Novelistic Art of Space 1.1. Sartre's ontology 1.2. A novelistic ontology? 1.3. Cinema: novelistic consciousness qua actual nothingness 1.4. An art of space 1.5. An art of appearance for appearance's sake 1.6. Space vs. language 1.7. An art more novelistic than the novel itself 2. Alexandre Astruc: An Early but Decisive Influence 2.1. Kant's transcendental aesthetics - and Heidegger's reinterpretation 2.2. 'Dialectique et cinema' 2.3. With and beyond Sartre's Heideggerian perspective 2.4. The 'Caméra-Stylo' 3. Under and On the Volcano: Rohmer's Conversion 3.1. The Other 3.2. The triumph of exteriority over interiority 3.3. Pulling phenomenology back to its Kantian roots 3.4. Ethics 3.5. God? 3.6. Echoes of the conversion 4. The Art of Nature 4.1. To show and not to tell 4.2. Natural beauty 4.3. Immediate mediation 4.4. Movement and narrative 4.5. Mechanism as the background for freedom 5. Ethics at the Heart of Aesthetics 5.1. On abjection: The Wages of Fear 5.2. Films with a soul 5.3. Tragedy 5.4. Solitude morale 5.5. The vertiginous moment: the reversal between inside and outside 6. After Modernity: Rohmer's Classicism and Universalism 6.1. Beyond modern art 6.2. Classic = Modern 6.3. An anti-evolutionist approach 6.4. Universalism 6.5. Authorship and mise en scene 7. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisSpaces of Communication offers a concise introduction to semiopragmatics and condenses the intellectual trajectory of one of the foundational figures of film studies into a relatively short and accessible volume. It testifies to the author’s deep and rich intellectual engagement with a vast array of objects ranging from the classics of the cinephile canon to television news programs, home movies and mobile phone films.Trade Review"It is hard to believe that it has taken almost forty years for Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach to finally become accessible in a book for the English-speaking world. Long before the post-cinema debate, Roger Odin started to theorize the many facets of film beyond the theatrical motion picture. Immensely productive particularly with a view to the current transformations of film, Odin’s film theory continues to question and subvert established distinctions: between disciplines and theoretical schools, but also between legitimate and illegitimate objects." – Alexandra Schneider, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz "With scientific rigor and academic generosity, Roger Odin discloses the analytical machine that underpins his semio-pragmatic approach. Readers not only enjoy a wide breadth of examples, but also witness the trial-and-error approach that ensured the success of semio-pragmatics. At once a methodological synthesis and a balance of intellectual achievement, this book promotes an integral method for analyzing film as a communicative apparatus." – Francesco Casetti, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsA Democracy of Readings and Objects: Roger Odin’s Contribution to the Theory of Film (Vinzenz Hediger) What We Make of Images and Sounds: Semio-Pragmatics as Approach and Method Establishing a Discipline, Cultivating a Field: Roger Odin and Film Studies in France Moving Semiotics Forward: Semio-Pragmatics and Film Theory since the 1960s Beware of the Crypt: Semio-Pragmatics and the Question of Communication After the Elegy of Cinema: Semio-Pragmatics and the State of Film Studies Spaces of Communication: Elements of Semio-Pragmatics (Roger Odin) Foreword and Acknowledgements Introduction: The Semio-Pragmatic Model On the Difficulty of Getting Away from Immanence On the Difficulty of Staying Within Immanence Vacillation For an Articulation between the Two Paradigms: Semio-Pragmatics The Semio-Pragmatic Model 1. Context, Constraints and the Space of Communication Universally Shared Constraints Natural Constraints The Narrative Constraint The Case of Languages Language and Perception The Influence of a Language on How We Read Images “Non-Natural” Constraints and the Notion of the “Space of Communication” 2. The Discursive Space : Communicative Competence and Modes of Production of Meaning Fictionalizing Mode (First Approach) Spectacularizing and Energetic Modes Documentarizing Mode, Moralizing Mode Fictionalizing Mode (Second Approach); Fabulating Mode 3. Aesthetic Mode, Artistic Mode: Relationship between Modes and Spaces From the Aesthetic Mode to Aesthetic Spaces From the Artistic Mode (in Reduced Form) to Inscription in the Space of Art From the Artistic Mode (Full-Fledged Form) to the Spaces of Art Relationship among Modes and among Spaces 4. Contextual Analysis and the Space of Communication: The Space of Communication of Family Memory The Space of Communication for Memory in the “Traditional” Family The Constraints and the Construction of the Actants Which Mode(s) to Construct? Private Mode, Intimate Mode Communication Operators The Space of Communication for Memory in the New Family Structure “Freed-Up” Communication Testimony Mode: Another Mode of Production of Meaning Other Memory Operators 5. The Space of Communication and Migration: The Example of the Home Movie The Home Movie: From Archives to Loci of Memory The Home Movie on Television From Home Movie to Micro-Histories The Home Movie in the Space of Art The Home Movie in the Medical Context 6. Textual Analysis and Semio-Pragmatics A Stage of the Tour de France on Television Interpreting the Reproduction of a Painting Collective Academic Research The Space of Description and the Construction of the Object of Analysis From the Space of Textual Analysis to the Space of Interpretation The Space of Ideological Analysis The Space of Epistemological Reflection The Place of Cinema in the Academic Institutional Space Conclusion List of Tools The Different Stages of Construction of the Semio-Pragmatic Model Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe impact of French film critic André Bazin (1918-1958) on the development of film studies, though generally acknowledged, remains contested. A passionate initiator of film culture during his lifetime, his ideas have been challenged, defended and revived throughout his afterlife. Studying Film with André Bazin offers an entirely original interpretation of major concepts from Bazin’s legacy, such as auteur theory, realism, film language and the influence of film on other arts (poetry and painting in particular). By examining mostly unknown and uncollected texts, Blandine Joret explains Bazin’s methodology and adopts it in a contemporary reading, linking his ideas to major philosophical and scientific frameworks as well as more recent media practices such as advertising, CGI, 3D cinema and Virtual Reality. In tune with 21st-century concerns in media culture and film studies, this book addresses a wide readership of film scholars, students and cinephiles.Table of ContentsPREFACE CHAPTER I -- STUDYING FILM 1.1 YOUNG ART, OLD CRITICS 1.1.1 MYTH VERSUS HISTORY 1.1.2 CASE STUDY: CHAPLIN AND THE TALKIES 1.2 IN SEARCH OF A METHOD 1.2.1 THE ASEPTIC STUDY OF FILMOLOGY 1.2.2 A SOCIAL STUDY OF FILM 1.3 BAZIN'S MAYONNAISE THEORY CHAPTER II - THE ART OF REALITY 2.1 PARADOX: THE EXISTENCE OF FILM 2.1.1 EDITING PROHIBITED? CGI AND THE DUMMY OF DANGER 2.1.2 AUTHENTICITY: BAZIN'S SHARK AND SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT 2.1.3 THIS IS CINEMA! 2.2 INTEGRAL REALISM: REALITY AND CINEMA 'ULTIMATELY EQUAL' 2.2.1 NO MOMENT SUPRÁME: BAZIN OPPOSES ELLIPSIS (AND PHOTOGÉNIE) 2.2.2 BAZIN ON UMBERTO D: REFORMULATING THE PREGNANT INSTANT 2.2.3 THE ASYMPTOTE OF REALITY: REALITY ? CINEMA 2.3 BAZIN'S WAGER 2.3.1 CALCULATED RISK 2.3.2 LES JEUX SONT FAITS: RIEN NE VA PLUS? CHAPTER III - FILM AND THE OTHER ARTS 3.1 DEBATES ON CONTEMPORARY ART: BAZIN, MARCEL AND PORTMANN 3.1.1 THE INVENTION OF CINEMA IS A MYTH 3.1.2 BRUEGEL CINEMATOGRAPHER 3.1.3 'HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY': ICARUS AS ANTI-WAR STATEMENT 3.2 CINEMA AND PAINTING 3.2.1 TWO REVOLUTIONS ON FILM: GEOGRAPHIC TEMPORALITY 3.3 CASE STUDY: VAN GOGH'S EAR 3.3.1 MYTHIC REALITY BECOMES FLESH 3.3.2 SELF-PORTRAITS WITH BANDAGED EAR: MIRROR AND MASK 3.4 RECREATION: THE LANGUAGE OF FILM CHAPTER IV - A MATTER OF FORM 4.1 FORM + CONTENT 4.1.1 FROM ADVERTISING TO POETRY IN BAZIN 4.1.2 DEPTH, WATER AND THE EVOLUTION OF FORMS 4.1.3 ON FLOATING BODIES: SERGE DANEY AND THE CASE OF LE GRAND BLEU 4.2 PERSPECTIVES ON 3-D 4.2.1 FROM A REALIST PERSPECTIVE: 'THE IMAGINARY IMAGE' 4.2.2 'WILL THIS BE THE TRIUMPH OF THE FAT?' 4.3 BAZIN PUT TO THE TEST: GODARD AND WENDERS 4.3.1 GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 4.3.2 3D AS REALIST GRAMMAR 4.4 VR: COMPLETE FILM, OR TOTAL CINEMA? EPILOGUE: UNKNOWN ARTS, NEW MEDIA ICARUS IS THE INVENTOR OF FILM BAZIN'S HYPOTHESIS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

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