Film history, theory or criticism Books
The University of Chicago Press The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
Book SynopsisWhat is cool and where did it come from? The first you just have to know when you see it; the second is the postwar years. Dinerstein explains, covering all the usual suspects.Trade Review"Dinerstein has written a thoughtful and entertaining account of cool--the most powerful image of how one should be since the English gentleman dominated the world. It's a history, a handbook, and a manual, filled with fascinating accounts of those stellar individuals whose aggressively haughty, patrician coldness was rooted in hip opposition and revolt."--John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth "Dinerstein takes seriously the roots of cool. Rather than some kind of irresponsible, juvenile put-on or species of ill-earned irony, cool is shown to be a game played for the highest of stakes--personal survival in the face of the era's unconcealed racism and barbarity that gave the lie to western civilization's moral self-congratulation."--Benjamin Cawthra, author of Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz "These divisions, between white and black, Europe and America, individual and society, run through the history of cool and explain the different forms it takes and how these have evolved. . . . The history of post-war cool is both a history of these strange convergence--between French intellectuals, African American musicians and white working-class Hollywood heroes--and of the continuing conflicts between and within them. The real subject of Dinerstein's book is the debt that American culture owes to black art and style, and the way white America has responded to that debt."--Benjamin Markovits"Times Literary Supplement" (07/18/2017) "In his entertaining book, . . . Dinerstein shows that cool isn't just a style, it's an 'embodied philosophy' that is anchored in a specific generational circumstance. Cool was first of all a form of resistance and rebellion, a rejection of the innocence, optimism and consumer cheeriness that marked the mainstream postwar experience."--David Brooks "New York Times " "The Origins of Cool vibrates with the energy of its very subject--as restrained, composed, and revitalized as the postwar rebel himself. From the cafes of the existentialists to the bars of film noir, from Lester Young's sax to Elvis's pout, Dinerstein offers a brilliant exegesis of the simmering mode of resistance we call cool. He penetrates the meanings of a misunderstood mode--a concept, a mood, a posture--while connecting the rich details of art and culture to the deepest transformations of the postwar world. The Origins of Cool takes the elusive and inchoate and renders them clear and nearly tangible, making the reader feel this mysterious current of postwar culture as if for the first time. This is a masterwork."--Jefferson Cowie, author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America will be the standard reference for those who wish to understand the deep historical roots for coolness as a cultural style and ethos--a 'public mode of covert resistance, ' an expression of faith in the integrity and agency of the individual in the face of depression, war, occupation, segregation, and the threat of nuclear annihilation--rather than as a trendy pose or an emblem of hip consumerism. Dinerstein has achieved something like a unified field theory of the postwar American arts combined with a history of ideas attached to the quest for ethical renewal and existential affirmation."--John Gennari, author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics
£21.00
The University of Chicago Press A Grammar of Murder Violent Scenes and Film Form
Book SynopsisThe dark shadows and offscreen space that force us to imagine violence we cannot see. The real slaughter of animals spliced with the fictional killing of men. The missing countershot from the murder victim's point of view. This book argues that such images, or absent images, distill how the murder scene challenges and changes film.Trade Review"Karla Oeler exhibits a lively, searching, and penetrating intelligence. In A Grammar of Murder she takes a fresh and illuminating look at various representations of violence - their form as well as their content - in films ranging from the Soviet montage school to Jean Renoir, from classical Hollywood to the work of such mavericks as Stanley Kubrick and Jim Jarmusch." - Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College"
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Coming Together The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay
Book Synopsis
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press Coming Together
Book SynopsisIn Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this earlier generation of movie-making--which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender--provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press The Philosophical Hitchcock Vertigo and the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Pippin has given us a rich and nuanced analysis of Hitchcock's sophisticated and subtle depiction of the struggle for mutual understanding and the perils of unknowingness in Vertigo. And it is no small achievement to say something fresh and compelling about a film as widely discussed and celebrated as this one." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "Pippin's reading of considerable finesse is in the tradition of moral philosophic writing... Pippin uses Vertigo particularly to explore the state of 'unknowingness' in romantic relationships One of the many compelling ideas he explores is that any romantic relationship between two people actually involves at least six 'people' in terms of how the two are perceived by themselves and their others--as they are, as they see themselves, as they see each other... Pippin's reading makes nearly every nuance of Hitchcock's richest work clear, thought-provoking and rewarding."--Nick James "Sight & Sound " "Robert Pippin has written a magnificent work on Hitchcock's Vertigo. The richness of insights and attention to detail is carefully balanced with an overall coherence of purpose and constant deepening of what Pippin calls the point of the film. The result is an impressive unity of interpretation: a sustained attention to an individual film that is wholly interpenetrated with reflection on the problem of mutual interpretability in the modern world." --Eli Friedlander, Tel Aviv University "No film has been more written about than Vertigo, and it so often brings out the best in the critics who enter Hitchcock's labyrinth. Robert Pippin's best is of an extremely high order, as his previous studies of the American western and film noir richly demonstrate. Pippin is fully conversant with the abundant commentary on the film, and adeptly incorporates it into his own scene-by-scene reading. But he also manages the large feat of making Vertigo feel new again within his persuasive context for what he terms the 'philosophical Hitchcock.' Building on Stanley Cavell's theme of the 'unknown woman' in melodrama, Pippin introduces the kindred concept of unknowingness as a disconcerting constant in human relationships. He convincingly argues that the anxieties swirling within our inescapable uncertainty about others is a preoccupation of Hitchcock that works its way into every segment of the Vertigo narrative."--George Toles, University of Manitoba "The illumination that Pippin's careful and systematic account casts on this complicated, convoluted movie will remind readers of the virtues of close reading. A seminal and unusual contribution to the literature on Vertigo specifically, on Hitchcock more broadly, and on film in general."--George Wilson, University of Southern California "[Pippin] proposes an interpretation that shows how the film can be said to bear on a philosophical problem. That problem, in Pippin's words, is concerned with 'commonsense views about what it is to understand another person or be understood by him or her, and about how we present ourselves to others in our public personae'. In service of this aim, he offers an impressively close scrutiny of the film, which also considers its formal and technical properties (a continuing weakness of some film scholarship is its refusal to see films as anything more than text), and demonstrates just how far he has engaged in the voluminous secondary literature surrounding both Hitchcock and Vertigo.... for those who are interested in the film it will offer much insight." --Times Higher Education "The Philosophical Hitchcock makes a wide range of philosophical thinking accessible to a wide audience. Readers of it can pick up a thing or two about Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre and Stanley Cavell, all without having to learn a whole new language or master a bunch of jargon in the process."--Riot Material "This is a text for experts in the philosophy of film with a subexpertise in Hitchcock and an interest in and willingness to go the distance on Vertigo in particular. It is an excellent book: thoughtful, finely observed, provocatively argued, and well written. But without a deep familiarity with Vertigo (i.e., recent, contemporaneous, and multiple viewings), much of what Pippin does in The Philosophical Hitchcock will be impossible to keep track of, much less evaluate. The "Prologue," "Introduction," and "Concluding Remarks" will interest anyone working in philosophy and film and more generally on philosophy and fiction (and some other areas of aesthetics); the 18 sharp (and brief) chapters on the film itself can serve as a model of how to think about and talk about what is going on philosophically in a movie. Pippin's account is suitably complex--avoiding the lure of narrative reductiveness--intertwining the visual, the unspoken, the use of camera angles, and many telescoped emotions with many philosophical themes. They may not all be on the surface, of course, but come on, this is Hitchcock!"--Choice
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press Filmed Thought Cinema as Reflective Form
Book Synopsis
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press Picturing Culture Explorations of Film and
Book SynopsisThis text explores the relationship between film and anthropology. It analyzes key filmmakers, the idea of research film, Eric Michaels and indigenous media, the ethics of representation, ethnography and anthropological knowledge.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Projecting the Shadow The Cyborg Hero in
Book SynopsisThe cyborg is the hero of an increasingly popular genre of American film. Drawing from representative films such as Jaws, The Deer Hunter and The Manchurian Candidate the authors track the narrative's thread from the hunter to his technological nemesis.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1: The Intellectual Landscape 2: The Transmodern Frontier 3: The Hunter Myth 4: Jaws: Faces of the Shadow 5: The Deer Hunter: The End of Innocence 6: The Manchurian Candidate: The Human as Weapon 7: Blade Runner: On the Edge 8: The Terminator: Future-Perfect Tense 9: Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Effacing the Shadow Conclusion Notes Index
£76.95
The University of Chicago Press Between Film Screen Modernisms Photo Synthesis
Book SynopsisDiscusses the photogram not only as the undertext of screen images but also in its unexpected links to the early modernist writings of James, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and others. It pursues the suppressed photogram as it ripples the narrative surface of several dozen films from Chaplin to Coppola.
£38.00
John Wiley & Sons Northern Getaway
Book SynopsisNorthern Getaway investigates the connections between film and tourism of the 1890s through the 1950s. Using evidence from archival sources and current scholarship in film history and tourism studies, Dominique Brégent-Heald demonstrates that Canada was an innovator in employing film to project a recognizable destination brand.Trade Review“Northern Getaway makes an extremely compelling case that pre-1939 Canadian cinema was part of the vanguard that harnessed the potential of motion pictures in the service of tourism promotion, subtly weaving a new narrative of relations between Canadian and American interests during the era in question. The result is frankly quite a profound reframing of Canadian film history, rescuing it from its common perception as a stunted branch-plant industry merely serving American interests.” Peter Lester, Brock University
£98.60
McGill-Queen's University Press Northern Getaway Film Tourism and the Canadian
Book SynopsisNorthern Getaway investigates the connections between film and tourism of the 1890s through the 1950s. Using evidence from archival sources and current scholarship in film history and tourism studies, Dominique Brégent-Heald demonstrates that Canada was an innovator in employing film to project a recognizable destination brand.Trade Review“Northern Getaway makes an extremely compelling case that pre-1939 Canadian cinema was part of the vanguard that harnessed the potential of motion pictures in the service of tourism promotion, subtly weaving a new narrative of relations between Canadian and American interests during the era in question. The result is frankly quite a profound reframing of Canadian film history, rescuing it from its common perception as a stunted branch-plant industry merely serving American interests.” Peter Lester, Brock University
£27.90
McGill-Queen's University Press Midnight Cowboy
Book SynopsisMidnight Cowboy the story of a small-town stud's attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York is an indisputably iconic film. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of queer cinema.Jon Towlson reclaims Midnight Cowboy as a queer text by addressing John Schlesinger as a gay author and filmmaker and providing a fresh perspective on the film's relationship to the 1965 James Leo Herlihy novel from which it was adapted. Offering a nuanced and personal view of the film's relevance to queer experience and queer friendship, Towlson also considers Midnight Cowboy's production and reception and its place in Schlesinger's filmography. Depictions of sixties New York counterculture and 42nd Street hustlers offer an opportunity for reasseTrade Review“A persuasive rereading.” Total Film“[Towlson] highlights the profound influence that Midnight Cowboy exerted on subsequent moviemaking, suggesting that it was particularly important in creating the tradition of homoerotic buddy movies, as well as such films as Brokeback Mountain that came much later. As a step toward the depiction of openly gay people in film, Midnight Cowboy was an important milestone.” The Gay & Lesbian Review
£15.19
Columbia University Press Deviant Eyes Deviant Bodies
Book SynopsisStraayer looks at commercial film and video from a new angle, and compels readers to consider the wealth of films made by and for non-traditional viewers. She surveys Hollywood productions ranging from the 1935 Stella Dallas to 1994's Mrs. Doubtfire.Trade ReviewIn the course of this fascinating, polemical book... [Straayer] writes interestingly about such films as Some Like It Hot, Victor / Victoria, Adoption, and Orlando and about a number of experimental films... Informative, challenging, thought-provoking, and perhaps unsettling. Choice
£27.00
Columbia University Press Picturing Japaneseness
Book SynopsisProviding an historical and cultural exploration, this text demonstrates the role Japanese cinema played in the 1930s in the construction of a national identity, and in terms of the larger context of Japan's encounter with the West and with modernity.
£28.80
Columbia University Press The Sounds of Commerce
Book SynopsisA detailed historical analysis of popular music in American film, from the era of sheet music sales, to that of orchestrated pop records by Henry Mancini and Ennio Morricone in the 1960s, to the MTV-ready pop songs that occupy soundtrack CDs of today.Trade Review[A] fascinating exploration of Hollywood film music since the 1960s. -- R. D. Cohen, Indiana University Northwest ChoiceTable of ContentsDid They Mention the Music? Banking on Film Music Sharps, Flats, and Dollar Signs My Huckleberry Friend The Midas Touch Every Gun Makes its Own Tune The Sounds of Commerce Pretty Women and Dead Presidents
£27.00
Columbia University Press CounterArchive
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCounter-Archive is a groundbreaking, original and scholarly book, which is indispensable to a full understanding of the early and present history of the cinema and its relationship to the archive and the everyday. -- Barbara Creed H-France an ambitious and compelling book which elegantly ties meticulous archival detail to astute theoretical challenges, and its conceptual hook may well inspire further critical attention. -- Tara Blake Wilson New Formations A work of exceptional scholarly merit. -- Jan Baetens Biography ...rich and endearing study... -- Lisabeth During and Deborah Levitt Years Work in Critical and Cultural TheoryTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. World Souvenir: "Mr. K" and the Archives de la Planete 2. "Keep your eyes open": From Pre-documentary to Documentary Film in the Kahn Archive 3. The Counter-Archive of Cinematic Memory: Bergsonism, la duree, and the Everyday 4. "No more written archives, only films": Early Discourses and Practices of the Film Archive 5. The "anecdotal side of history": Temporality, Film, and Annales Historiography 6. Seeing "for the first time": The Rediscovery of the Everyday in Early French Film Theory 7. Illuminations from the Darkened "Sanctuary": Reception of the Kahn Films 8. The Aerial View: Human Geography, Cosmopolitanism, and Colonialism Conclusion: Toute la Memoire du monde: The Counter-Archive Beyond Kahn Appendix: Photographers and Cameramen of the Archives de la Planete Notes Bibliography Index
£999.99
Columbia University Press Hollywoods Censor
Book SynopsisFrom 1934 to 1954 Joseph I Breen, a media-savvy Victorian Irishman, reigned over the Production Code Administration, the Hollywood office tasked with censoring the American screen. This title tells the story of Breen's ascent to power and the widespread effects of his reign.Trade ReviewDoherty writes with such wit and verve, bringing the past to life... a very entertaining read. Publishers Weekly Compelling, colorful, insightful, and nearly encyclopedic in detail, this book seems destined to become the definitive scholarly biography of Breen. Highly recommended. Library Journal [An] entertaining and rigorous biography of Breen. -- Ada Calhoun New York Times Book Review A fascinating read for anyone interested in American film history. -- Carol O'Sullivan Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [An] authoritative, entertaining, unexpectedly unnerving biography. -- Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times [A] brilliant and absorbing new book. -- Gerald Peary The Phoenix Hollywood's Censor is a stinging portrait of a cultural strongman who made it his business to baby his fellow citizens. -- Dennis Drabelle Washington Post Written with controlled exuberance, and much wit. -- Scott Eyman Palm Beach Post A pleasure to read. -- Rob Hardy Commercial Dispatch An exemplary biography... Highly recommended. CHOICETable of ContentsOpening Credits Prologue: Hollywood, 1954 1. The Victorian Irishman 2. Bluenoses Against the Screen 3. Hollywood Shot to Pieces 4. The Breen Office 5. Decoding Classical Hollywood Cinema 6. Confessional 7. Intermission at RKO 8. At War with the Breen Office 9. In His Sacerdotalism 10. "Our Semitic Brethren" 11. Social Problems, Existential Dilemmas, and Outsized Anatomies 12. Invasion of the Art Films 13. Amending the Ten Commandments 14. Not the Breen Office 15. Final Cut: Joseph I. Breen and the Auteur Theory Appendix: The Production Code Notes Film Index Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press Creaturely Poetics
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAnimals and the Human Imagination soars. Intellectually exciting, smart, and accessible, this volume will intrigue and revolt, surprise and inspire. The opening overview by Gross is a tour de force and each essay fascinates. Collectively they offer an invitation to think in new ways about what we, perhaps wrongly, call our humanity. I can't imagine a better introduction to the essential new field of critical animal studies. -- Jonathan Safran Foer [A] lively, fascinating, moving book. -- Scott Cowdell Journal of Animal Ethics This is a beautiful, profound, and important book that works through and around long-held and cherished assumptions, both within and without animal studies. -- Lindgren Johnson Journal for Critical Animal StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Creaturely Bodies Part 1 The Inhumanity of Literature 1. Humanity Unraveled, Humanity Regained: The Holocaust and the Discourse of Species 2. Neanderthal Poetics in William Golding's The Inheritors 3. The Indignities of Species in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales Part 2 The Inhumanity of Film 4. Cine-Zoos 5. Scientific Surrealism in the Films of Georges Franju and Frederick Wiseman 6. Werner Herzog's Creaturely Poetics Conclusion: Animal Saintliness Notes Works Cited Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press The Rey Chow Reader
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsEditor's Introduction Acknowledgments Part 1. Modernity and Postcolonial Ethnicity 1. The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies 2. The Postcolonial Difference: Lessons in Cultural Legitimation 3. From Writing Diaspora: Introduction: Leading Questions 4. Brushes with the-Other-as-Face: Stereotyping and Cross-Ethnic Representation 5. The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, by Miscegenation 6. When Whiteness Feminizes ... : Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic Part 2. Filmic Visuality and Transcultural Politics 7. Film and Cultural Identity 8. Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship 9. The Dream of a Butterfly 10. Film as Ethnography; or, by Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World 11. A Filmic Staging of Postwar Geotemporal Politics: On Akira Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth, by Sixty 12. From Sentimental Fabulations, by Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility 13. The Political Economy of Vision in Happy Times and Not One Less; or, by a Different Type of Migration Notes Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press The Utopia of Film
Book SynopsisExploring the work of three visionary auteurs deeply invested in the political possibilities of film.Trade ReviewAn impressive book people will read for all kinds of reasons, academic and otherwise, not least of which is its bold proposal that the future is unthinkable without cinema. -- Richard Dienst, author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television ... Pavsek renews our faith in the utopian possibilities of truly political art. -- Patrick Reagan, Yale University Screening the PastTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Idea of Cinema1. What Has Come to Pass for Cinema: From Early to Late Godard2. Kidlat Tahimik's "Third World Projector"3. The Actuality of Cinema: Alexander KlugeEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex
£82.80
Columbia University Press Millennial Cinema
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAn engaging and insightful look at the construction and purpose of memory and nostalgia in contemporary or 'millennial' film... Film Comment A most welcome collection that addresses the role of memory in some of the most thought-provoking films in cinema today. -- Peter C. Pugsley Media International AustraliaTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction. Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, by Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney Virtual and Prosthetic Memory 1. Time, Memory and Movement in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, by Paul Atkinson 2. Reconstructing Memory: Visual Virtuality in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Steven Rawle 3. Death Every Sunday Afternoon : The Virtual Memories of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Afterlife, by Alanna Thain 4. 'Prosthetic Memory' and Transnational Cinema: Globalised Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God, by Russell J. A. Kilbourn Traumatic and Allegorical Memory 5. Impossible Memory: Traumatic Narratives in Memento and Mulholland Drive, by Belinda Morrissey 6. Memories of a Catastrophe: Trauma and the Name in Mira Nair's The Namesake, by Amresh Sinha 7. The Future at Odds with the Past : Journey through the Ruins of Memory in Alkinos Tsilimodos's Tom White, by Warwick Mules 8. Filming the Past, Present and Future of an African Village: Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade, by David Murphy Historical and Cultural Memory 9. 'The Unquiet Dead': Memories of the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, by Jonathan Ellis and Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce 10. Rewind: The Will to Remember, the Will to Forget in Michael Haneke's Cache, by Jehanne-Marie Gavarini 11. Memory, Nostalgia and the Feminine: In the Mood for Love and Those Qipaos, by Lynda Chapple 12 Memory as Cultural Battleground in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, by Terence McSweeney Index
£64.00
Columbia University Press Storytelling in World Cinemas Forms
Book SynopsisStorytelling in World Cinemas, Vol. 1: Forms is an innovative collection of essays that discuss how different cinemas of the world tell stories. The book locates European, Asian, African, and Latin American films within their wider cultural and artistic frameworks, showing how storytelling forms in cinema are infused with influences from other artistic, literary, and oral traditions. This volume also reconsiders cinematic storytelling in general, highlighting the hybridity of 'national' forms of storytelling, calling for a rethinking of African cinematic storytelling that goes beyond oral traditions, and addressing films characterised by 'non-narration'. This study is the first in a two-volume project, with the second focusing on the contexts of cinematic storytelling.Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Introduction to Volume One, by Lina Khatib 'National' Forms of Storytelling Aristotle Did Not Make It to India: Narrative Modes in Hindi Cinema, by Claus Tieber Tootsie Meets Yesilcam: Narration in Popular Turkish Cinema, by Savas Arslan Jewish Humour and the Cabaret Tradition in Interwar Hungarian Entertainment Films, by Anna Manchin Storytelling and Literary and Oral Forms Third Person Interrupted: Form, Adaptation and Narration in Tony Takitani, by Chris Wood The Labyrinth of Halfaouine: Storytelling and the 1001 Nights, by Stefanie Van de Peer 'Leaping broken narration': Ballads, Oral Storytelling and the Cinema, by Adam Ganz Rethinking Storytelling Forms in African Cinemas Storytelling in Contemporary African Fiction Film and Video, by Lindiwe Dovey That's Entertainment? Art, Didacticism and the Popular in Francophone West African Cinema, by David Murphy Intriguing African Storytelling: On Aristotle's Plot by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, by Matthias De Groof Storytelling and Visual Forms Pirosmani's Passion: Narration and the Aesthetics of Pirosmanashvili's Paintings in Georgian Film, by Gesine Drews-Sylla When the Story Hides the Story: The Narrative Structure of Milcho Manchevski's Dust, by Erik Tangerstad Refusing to Conform: Forms of Non-narration Primitive Gazing: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Sensational Inaction Cinema, by Matthew P. Ferrari Ghosts in the National Machine: The Haunting (and Taunting) Films of Tracey Moffatt, by Jennifer L. Gauthier The Reluctance to Narrate: Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, by Linda Mokdad Index
£67.20
Columbia University Press Storytelling in World Cinemas
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewSuperb essays that should enlighten both the common reader and the film critic. The European LegacyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction to Volume Two, by Lina Khatib Storytelling and Cultural Politics Stories as Social Critique: The Vision of China in the Films of Jia Zhangke, by Konrad Ng Taonga (cultural treasures): Reflections on Maori Storytelling in the Cinema of Aotearoa/New Zealand, by Hester Joyce The Minjung Cultural Movement and Korean Cinema of the 1980s: The Influence of Minjung Theatre and Art in Lee Jang-ho's Films, by Nam Lee On How to Tell a Revolution: Alsino y el condor, by Robert Dash and Patricia Varas Storytelling and Postcolonialism Telling Stories About Unknown People in Faraway Countries: U.S. Travelogues About Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s, by Isabel Arredondo Memory and Tradition as a Postcolonial Response in the Films of Kyrgyzstan's Aktan Abdykalykov, by Willow Mullins 'Postcolonial Beaux' Stratagem: Singing and Dancing Back with Carmen in African Films, by Yifen T. Beus Telling Women's Stories Heard/Symbolic Voices: The Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua and Women's Film in the Maghreb, by Zahia Smail Salhi Women's Stories and Public Space in Iranian New Wave Film, by Anna Dempsey Cinematic Images of Women at a Time of National(ist) Crisis: The Case of Three Yugoslav Films, by Dijana Jelaca History as Science Fiction: Women of Action in Hong Kong Cinema, by Sasa Vojkovic Storytelling and Religio-Cultural Encounters Clouds of Unknowing: Buddhism and Bhutanese Cinema, by Shohini Chaudhuri and Sue Clayton Claiming Space, Time and History in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, by Darrell Varga Qissa and Popular Hindi Cinema, by Anjali Gera Roy Index
£67.20
Columbia University Press Lasting Impressions
Book SynopsisJesse Matz considers its two legacies—positive and negative—to explain impressionism’s true contemporary significance.Trade ReviewLasting Impressions shrewdly explores a fascinating, strikingly under-researched topic, namely that impressionism remains a powerful cultural presence in ways that have tended to elude definition. Examining a variety of areas such as advertising, painting, music, and postcolonial and contemporary fiction, Jesse Matz argues that impressionism's seminal configuration of the project of modern representation has continued to shape cultural discourses and practices long after modernism. An extremely interesting and important work. -- Max Saunders, King's College London Lasting Impressions revitalizes our understanding of impressionism by showing just how strong its legacies are. Ranging widely across painting, music, narrative, and film, Matz argues in eloquent readings that in opening a gap between the authority of our perceptions and the stories we construct from them, impressionism leads to the most vibrant and intractable aesthetic problems we inherit today. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the unstable divide between art and its co-optation, high culture and kitsch, real experience and artistic fraud. -- Tamar Katz, author of Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England Brilliant and original in its arguments, impressive in its range and command of reference, and written in an invigorating style, Lasting Impressions will be essential reading for anyone interested in impressionism, the modernist movement in the arts, and the wider question of how modern culture has imagined and reimagined the status of art and the aesthetic. Every chapter is full of rewarding insights and provocative, challenging ideas. -- Adam Parkes, University of Georgia Written with the same elegance that characterizes its enduring subject, Lasting Impressions moves nimbly across time to uncover the indomitable energy with which impressionism informs new critical and transmedial configurations. By revealing how the perceptual problem of the impression continues to inspire charismatic narratives of cultural and aesthetic emergence, Jesse Matz deftly shows that impressionism remains a living mode of reflection on the very possibilities of contemporary art and literature. -- David James, Queen Mary, University of London and author of Modernist Futures Lasting Impressions poses two elemental questions: what makes art relevant, and how do we know things? Matz answers these questions in this landmark study, which traces the cultural contradictions surrounding impressionism from its origins in the nineteenth century to its manifestations in the twenty-first century. Matz's capacious aesthetic history, his second study of impressionism, will be essential for scholars seeking to understand modernism's multiple legacies. -- Urmila Seshagiri, author of Race and the Modernist ImaginationTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. First and Lasting: Histories for the Tache 2. The Impressionist Advertisement 3. Photogenie from Renoir to Gance to Renoir 4. The "Image of Africa" from Conrad to Achebe to Adichie 5. Impressionist Fraud: Klein, Saito, Frey 6. Contemporary Impressions and Kitsch Aesthetics: Kinkade/Doig 7. The Pseudo-Impressionist Novel: Sebald, Toibin, Cunningham 8. Thinking Medium: The Rhetoric of Popular Cognition Conclusion Notes Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press Finding Ourselves at the Movies
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA brilliant venture in the lost art of bringing theoretical insight to bear on popular culture. Finding Ourselves at the Movies defends another relationship between the thinker and the public, enacting what it theorizes in illuminating commentaries on films. Kahn makes us reconsider movies as reflections of our collective imagination and public commitments. -- Samuel Moyn, Columbia University This is a terrific book, bursting with ideas, and seamlessly blending discussions of love, war, freedom, faith-in short, of the human condition-with talk about movies. Drawing on everything from war movies to romantic comedies, from horror films to family dramas, Kahn shows us how the movies mirror the ways we communally invest our lives and our world with meaning. His readings of popular films and the shared world these films reflect are at once astute and provocative. -- Susan Wolf, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill What an astonishing book, a marriage between film and philosophy written without pretension or technical language. Fifty years ago, Pauline Kael famously 'lost it at the movies'; now Paul Kahn has found it. Film, Kahn explains, is not just about losing your innocence, it is about finding your 'self'-and that is and always has been the project of philosophy. You may not agree with Kahn's interpretation of particular films, but you will always be enlightened. -- Alan A. Stone, Harvard University Writing with wisdom and philosophical insight, Kahn seeks to reclaim for philosophy the task of helping us discover who we are. Drawing on the narratives compellingly depicted in movies, he helps us reclaim our ability to act as intelligent agents. The humanity that pervades this book makes what Kahn has done significant for anyone who continues to hope that what we are and do matters. -- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School Informed, thought-provoking,, and insightful. Midwest Book Review Crisply document[s] and provide[s] a provocative theoretical account of an important feature of America's distinctiveness. -- Mark S. Weiner Telos [Finding Ourselves at the Movies] is rich, thought provoking, and will inspire much further discussion. [Kahn] has written a book that is both sophisticated in its philosophical argument and accessible to an intelligent, non-specialist readership. Notre Dame Philosophical Review Kahn's work is rich, thought provoking, and will inspire much further discussion... Finding Ourselves at the Movies will be of keen interest to scholars working in the field of film and philosophy, and constitutes a valuable addition to this area of scholarship. -- Sarah Cooper Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews With ease and clarity, Kahn effectively calls nonprofessional audiences' attention to the role of philosophy in examining our struggle with identity and its engagement with the lived experiences. -- Mi Young Park Journal of Popular Culture A thoughtful and often thought-provoking book. -- Tony McKibbin Senses of Cinema A valuable read. -- Nicole Talmacs Media International AustraliaTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Part I: From Philosophy to Film 1. Philosophy, Democracy, and the Turn to Film 2. Freedom and Persuasion 3. On Interpretation Part II: Film and the Social Imaginary 4. Violence and the State 5. Love, Romance, and Pornography Conclusion: Film, Faith, and Love Notes Bibliography: Essays on Sources Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press Finding Ourselves at the Movies
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA brilliant venture in the lost art of bringing theoretical insight to bear on popular culture. Finding Ourselves at the Movies defends another relationship between the thinker and the public, enacting what it theorizes in illuminating commentaries on films. Kahn makes us reconsider movies as reflections of our collective imagination and public commitments. -- Samuel Moyn, Columbia University This is a terrific book, bursting with ideas, and seamlessly blending discussions of love, war, freedom, faith-in short, of the human condition-with talk about movies. Drawing on everything from war movies to romantic comedies, from horror films to family dramas, Kahn shows us how the movies mirror the ways we communally invest our lives and our world with meaning. His readings of popular films and the shared world these films reflect are at once astute and provocative. -- Susan Wolf, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill What an astonishing book, a marriage between film and philosophy written without pretension or technical language. Fifty years ago, Pauline Kael famously 'lost it at the movies'; now Paul Kahn has found it. Film, Kahn explains, is not just about losing your innocence, it is about finding your 'self'-and that is and always has been the project of philosophy. You may not agree with Kahn's interpretation of particular films, but you will always be enlightened. -- Alan A. Stone, Harvard University Writing with wisdom and philosophical insight, Kahn seeks to reclaim for philosophy the task of helping us discover who we are. Drawing on the narratives compellingly depicted in movies, he helps us reclaim our ability to act as intelligent agents. The humanity that pervades this book makes what Kahn has done significant for anyone who continues to hope that what we are and do matters. -- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School Informed, thought-provoking,, and insightful. Midwest Book Review Crisply document[s] and provide[s] a provocative theoretical account of an important feature of America's distinctiveness. -- Mark S. Weiner Telos [Finding Ourselves at the Movies] is rich, thought provoking, and will inspire much further discussion. [Kahn] has written a book that is both sophisticated in its philosophical argument and accessible to an intelligent, non-specialist readership. Notre Dame Philosophical Review Kahn's work is rich, thought provoking, and will inspire much further discussion... Finding Ourselves at the Movies will be of keen interest to scholars working in the field of film and philosophy, and constitutes a valuable addition to this area of scholarship. -- Sarah Cooper Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews With ease and clarity, Kahn effectively calls nonprofessional audiences' attention to the role of philosophy in examining our struggle with identity and its engagement with the lived experiences. -- Mi Young Park Journal of Popular Culture A thoughtful and often thought-provoking book. -- Tony McKibbin Senses of Cinema A valuable read. -- Nicole Talmacs Media International AustraliaTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Part I: From Philosophy to Film 1. Philosophy, Democracy, and the Turn to Film 2. Freedom and Persuasion 3. On Interpretation Part II: Film and the Social Imaginary 4. Violence and the State 5. Love, Romance, and Pornography Conclusion: Film, Faith, and Love Notes Bibliography: Essays on Sources Index
£20.90
Columbia University Press Lady in the Dark
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewSitton's book is chock full of fascinating detail and tells a compelling story about an unusual character, a woman who built institutions and contributed to a way of thinking about film that we take for granted today. The result is a much larger and untold history about art, film, and culture. -- Haidee Wasson, author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema Museum of Modern Art film legend Iris Barry mattered to cinema history, and this book makes her life matter as well. Sitton's sharp biography spans Barry's life from her fascinating times among the literati of post-Victorian Britain to her famed career in the United States, which entailed her virtually founding the influential MoMA Film Library. This is a rich and captivating story. -- Dana Polan, author of Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film, 1915-1935 Iris Barry was film's first great archivist and a crucial figure in turning a curious novelty into the most significant new art form of its century. She has long deserved a biography as graceful and expert as the one Robert Sitton has delivered so handsomely. It offers a lively portrait of modernist New York when it was fresh and new and is the better for the richness of its quotations from Barry's stirring writings. It cannot be praised too highly. -- Richard Schickel I confess that I thought of Iris Barry as an English snob who had rejected many exceptional silents as products of the much-despised Hollywood, but she is so much more interesting-and maddening-than I ever suspected. Her autobiographical fragments are superb, remarkable descriptions of history as it happened-a Zeppelin raid on London in World War 1, the Depression in America making the rich richer. As she describes them, these incidents are as evocative as any film, and the book is beautifully illustrated with excellent-quality portraits. Somebody should film it. -- Kevin Brownlow, author of The Parade's Gone By... Robert Sitton's remarkably well researched and evocatively written biography of Iris Barry's hitherto largely unknown position at the forefront of film appreciation is long overdue and most welcome. She led a fascinating private and public life and had an extremely complicated female odyssey in the world of her times, which she profoundly influenced through her writings and cultural actions. That influence still reverberates today. -- Peter Bogdanovich Sitton exhaustively traces Barry's career from aspiring poet to playwright, biographer and film critic... Film students will enjoy this book. Kirkus Reviews The most fascinating characters tend to be the unsung heroes of their field, and there may be no greater example of this than Iris Barry... This remarkable story is richly detailed... and is required reading for anyone interested in film, art, or museums. Library Journal (starred review) Meticulously researched, lovingly written... Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film is a must-read biography. PopMatters An excellent on Iris Barry's important work at [Museum of Modern Art.] Lillian Gish's Happy Life A very welcome and long overdue tribute to a fascinating figure. -- Henry K. Miller Sight & Sound Robert Sitton's biography makes for lively reading. -- Philip Kemp Times Higher Education [A] compelling biography... gracefully written, always interesting, and well researched... Anyone interested in film history, particularly in the history of film history and film preservation, will want to read this book. Iris Barry is a key figure, and she led a fascinating life. Louise Brooks Society Blog A terrific new biography... Sitton brings to light an extraordinary story-or, rather, an extraordinary person, who has been languishing unjustly in the shadows. -- Richard Brody The New Yorker Sitton's elegant, accomplished book is the first to elucidate Barry's important work... This is an indispensable account of a woman who was not only a singular pioneering personality but also a diligent, cunning creator of institutions and ways of seeing that are now taken for granted. CHOICE A full-fledged biography of the woman who changed the course of American film culture. -- Leonard Maltin Indiewire [A] fascinating biography of the founder of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library and the individual who helped institutionalize film studies. -- Thomas Gladysz The Huffington Post Sitton, a film historian, has done justice to a fascinating and important subject. Following extensive archival research, he's told a dramatic story and ended with an incisive summary of Barry's character and achievements. -- Jeffrey Meyers The New CriterionTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Foreword by Alistair Cooke Credits Previews 1. Early Years 2. "We Enjoyed the War" 3. "Dear Miss Barry" 4. The Other Bloomsbury 5. Life with Lewis 6. Children 7. Alan Porter 8. The Spectator 9. Splashing Into Film Society 10. Cinema Paragons, Hollywood, and Lady Mary 11. Let's Go to the Pictures 12. Victory and Defeat 13. America 14. The Askew Salon 15. Museum Men 16. Remarriage 17. Settling In 18. Cracking Hollywood 19. Art High and Low 20. On to Europe 21. Going Public 22. The Slow Martyrdom of Alfred Barr 23. Meanwhile, Back at the Library 24. New Work, Old Acquaintances 25. "The Master" and His Minions 26. Temora Farm 27. The Museum Enlists 28. Mr. Rockefeller's Office 29. L'Affair Bunuel 30. The Other Library 31. Divorce 32. Postwar Blues 33. Abbott's Fall 34. Hospital 35. Departure 36. La Bonne Font 37. Things Past 38. The Austin House 39. Readjustments 40. New York and London 41. Final Breaks 42. The End Sequel Notes Sources Index
£28.63
Columbia University Press Foucault at the Movies
Book SynopsisFoucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work. It offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.Trade ReviewFoucault at the Movies is an effectively translated and admirably assembled work of film scholarship and philosophical history . . . Foucault’s thoughts on film are fascinating yet also offer a more genial look at the famed philosopher. -- Mike McClelland * Spectrum Culture *To accept this volume's invitation 'to go to the movies with Foucault' is to find oneself ushered to a seat from which the screen ahead looks dazzlingly different. * Times Literary Supplement *Here is a collection to excite the archaeological imagination. -- Thomas Beard * Film Comment *This volume will prove useful not only to anyone who teaches or studies Foucault, but also to those interested in Continental philosophy and film studies. * Choice *Foucault at the Movies is a challenging yet satisfying read that bridges a considerable gap in film and philosophy. Well-researched, its overarching strength is the location of film within Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical project. This book will prove to be pivotal reading for anyone interested in the intersections of film-philosophy and film history and will doubtlessly titillate Foucault scholars interested in a synthesis of these lesser-known writings. -- Kyler Chittick * Foucault Studies *Like all of his great interviews, Foucault at the Movies presents Foucault speaking in his own voice. We find Foucault saying that “the art of living” means that psychology must be killed; that the body must be dismantled; that memory must function without remembering; and that passion is more interesting than love. Foucault at the Movies is an invaluable addition to our understanding of Foucault’s thought. -- Leonard Lawlor, Penn State UniversityMichel Foucault’s writings have led many of us to think differently. Do his observations on film introduce us to fresh ways of seeing? If philosophers have primarily studied discourses of truth, perhaps they need to give equal consideration to the overpowering fabrication of regimes of fiction, especially those of our cinematic culture. Is Fascism comprehensible apart from the images of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will? Foucault at the Movies is a stimulating engagement with a frequently overlooked contribution from the French thinker. -- James Bernauer, Boston CollegeTable of ContentsTranslator’s Preface, by Clare O’FarrellIntroduction: Michel Foucault’s Cut, by Patrice Maniglier and Dork ZabunyanPart 1. Foucault and Film: A Historical and Philosophical Encounter1. What Film Is Able to Do: Foucault and Cinematic Knowledge, by Dork Zabunyan2. Versions of the Present: Foucault’s Metaphysics of the Event Illuminated by Cinema, by Patrice ManiglierPart 2. Michel Foucault on Film3. Film, History, and Popular Memory4. Marguerite Duras: Memory Without Remembering5. Paul’s Story: The Story of Jonah6. The Nondisciplinary Camera Versus Sade7. The Asylum and the Carnival8. Crime and Discourse9. The Return of Pierre Rivière10. The Dull Regime of Tolerance11. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse12. Werner Schroeter and Michel Foucault in ConversationAppendix: Foucault at the Movies—a Program of FilmsNotesBibliographyIndex
£70.00
Columbia University Press Foucault at the Movies
Book SynopsisFoucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work. It offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.Trade ReviewFoucault at the Movies is an effectively translated and admirably assembled work of film scholarship and philosophical history . . . Foucault’s thoughts on film are fascinating yet also offer a more genial look at the famed philosopher. -- Mike McClelland * Spectrum Culture *To accept this volume's invitation 'to go to the movies with Foucault' is to find oneself ushered to a seat from which the screen ahead looks dazzlingly different. * Times Literary Supplement *Here is a collection to excite the archaeological imagination. -- Thomas Beard * Film Comment *This volume will prove useful not only to anyone who teaches or studies Foucault, but also to those interested in Continental philosophy and film studies. * Choice *Foucault at the Movies is a challenging yet satisfying read that bridges a considerable gap in film and philosophy. Well-researched, its overarching strength is the location of film within Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical project. This book will prove to be pivotal reading for anyone interested in the intersections of film-philosophy and film history and will doubtlessly titillate Foucault scholars interested in a synthesis of these lesser-known writings. -- Kyler Chittick * Foucault Studies *Like all of his great interviews, Foucault at the Movies presents Foucault speaking in his own voice. We find Foucault saying that “the art of living” means that psychology must be killed; that the body must be dismantled; that memory must function without remembering; and that passion is more interesting than love. Foucault at the Movies is an invaluable addition to our understanding of Foucault’s thought. -- Leonard Lawlor, Penn State UniversityMichel Foucault’s writings have led many of us to think differently. Do his observations on film introduce us to fresh ways of seeing? If philosophers have primarily studied discourses of truth, perhaps they need to give equal consideration to the overpowering fabrication of regimes of fiction, especially those of our cinematic culture. Is Fascism comprehensible apart from the images of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will? Foucault at the Movies is a stimulating engagement with a frequently overlooked contribution from the French thinker. -- James Bernauer, Boston CollegeTable of ContentsTranslator’s Preface, by Clare O’FarrellIntroduction: Michel Foucault’s Cut, by Patrice Maniglier and Dork ZabunyanPart 1. Foucault and Film: A Historical and Philosophical Encounter1. What Film Is Able to Do: Foucault and Cinematic Knowledge, by Dork Zabunyan2. Versions of the Present: Foucault’s Metaphysics of the Event Illuminated by Cinema, by Patrice ManiglierPart 2. Michel Foucault on Film3. Film, History, and Popular Memory4. Marguerite Duras: Memory Without Remembering5. Paul’s Story: The Story of Jonah6. The Nondisciplinary Camera Versus Sade7. The Asylum and the Carnival8. Crime and Discourse9. The Return of Pierre Rivière10. The Dull Regime of Tolerance11. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse12. Werner Schroeter and Michel Foucault in ConversationAppendix: Foucault at the Movies—a Program of FilmsNotesBibliographyIndex
£20.90
Columbia University Press The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism
Book SynopsisCasts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.Trade ReviewA major work of critical writing on film, and one that moves the intellectual discourse about film, politics, and the aesthetic movements and projects of the twentieth century forward by several steps. -- Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (2010) and The Hollywood Historical Film (2008). Kappelhoff distinguishes himself as an astute analytical thinker and as a film theorist who plies the history of the medium and its shifting interpretations for the underlying implications about the 'big' questions that animate the humanities. -- Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan Since the 1920s, the cinema has been closely associated with the development of aesthetic utopias. Drawing on the writings of Ranciere, Brecht and Kracauer, Hermann Kappelhoff traces the legacy of these utopias in the films of the late Visconti, the early Fassbinder, the New Hollywood of A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, and the flamboyant oeuvre of Pedro Almodovar. What emerges is a fascinating study of cinema as a cultural institution that unlike any other helps us experience the complexities of social reality and envision a new symbiosis between poetics and politics. -- Gerd Gemunden, author of Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951 Kappelhoff, one of Germany's most accomplished film scholars, endowed with a uniquely philosophical grasp of history in the tradition of Kracauer, offers in The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism a precise reassessment of realism across a historical spectrum, while also enlisting Fassbinder and Almodovar as realists of the body and of communities to come. -- Thomas Elsaesser, Columbia University Kappelhoff offers an engaging and thoughtful account of cinematic experience framed by deeply original readings of Richard Rorty's pragmatist account of solidarity and community, Jacques Ranciere's writings on politics and aesthetic experience, and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of film. Here Kappelhoff rethinks the concept of realism as a lived practice within which life and art, politics and poetics, indeed reality and image, are experienced as inseparable activities that dynamically shape our sense of the worlds and the communities we live in. In so doing, he also produces new and convincing accounts of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, and others. -- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago, author of Philosophy's Artful ConversationTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. Poetics and Politics 2. Before the War: The Avant-garde, Film, and the Utopia of Art 3. After the War: Cinema as the Site of Historical Consciousness 4. After '68: The Politics of Form 5. Beyond Classical Hollywood Cinema 6. A New Sensitivity Notes Bibliography Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism
Book SynopsisCasts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.Trade ReviewA major work of critical writing on film, and one that moves the intellectual discourse about film, politics, and the aesthetic movements and projects of the twentieth century forward by several steps. -- Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (2010) and The Hollywood Historical Film (2008). Kappelhoff distinguishes himself as an astute analytical thinker and as a film theorist who plies the history of the medium and its shifting interpretations for the underlying implications about the 'big' questions that animate the humanities. -- Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan Since the 1920s, the cinema has been closely associated with the development of aesthetic utopias. Drawing on the writings of Ranciere, Brecht and Kracauer, Hermann Kappelhoff traces the legacy of these utopias in the films of the late Visconti, the early Fassbinder, the New Hollywood of A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, and the flamboyant oeuvre of Pedro Almodovar. What emerges is a fascinating study of cinema as a cultural institution that unlike any other helps us experience the complexities of social reality and envision a new symbiosis between poetics and politics. -- Gerd Gemunden, author of Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951 Kappelhoff, one of Germany's most accomplished film scholars, endowed with a uniquely philosophical grasp of history in the tradition of Kracauer, offers in The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism a precise reassessment of realism across a historical spectrum, while also enlisting Fassbinder and Almodovar as realists of the body and of communities to come. -- Thomas Elsaesser, Columbia University Kappelhoff offers an engaging and thoughtful account of cinematic experience framed by deeply original readings of Richard Rorty's pragmatist account of solidarity and community, Jacques Ranciere's writings on politics and aesthetic experience, and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of film. Here Kappelhoff rethinks the concept of realism as a lived practice within which life and art, politics and poetics, indeed reality and image, are experienced as inseparable activities that dynamically shape our sense of the worlds and the communities we live in. In so doing, he also produces new and convincing accounts of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, and others. -- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago, author of Philosophy's Artful ConversationTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. Poetics and Politics 2. Before the War: The Avant-garde, Film, and the Utopia of Art 3. After the War: Cinema as the Site of Historical Consciousness 4. After '68: The Politics of Form 5. Beyond Classical Hollywood Cinema 6. A New Sensitivity Notes Bibliography Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Essays on the Essay Film Film and Culture Series
Book SynopsisThis anthology of fundamental statements on the essay film offers a range of crucial historical and philosophical perspectives. It provides early critical articulations of the essay film as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, key contemporary scholarly essays, and a selection of writings by essay filmmakers.Trade ReviewCreatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn. -- Dana Polan, New York University Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order. -- Eric Rentschler, Harvard University Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms. -- Michael Witt, University of RoehamptonTable of ContentsIntroduction, by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan Part I. Foundations 1. "On the Nature and Form of the Essay," by Georg Lukacs 2. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil 3. "On the Essay and Its Prose," by Max Bense 4. "The Essay as Form," by Theodor W. Adorno 5. "Preface to The Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley," by Aldous Huxley Part II. The Essay Film Through History 6. "The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film," by Hans Richter 7. "The Future of Cinema," by Alexandre Astruc 8. "Bazin on Marker," by Andre Bazin Part III. Contemporary Positions 9. "In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film," by Phillip Lopate 10. "The Political Im/Perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War," by Nora M. Alter 11. "Essay Questions," by Paul Arthur 12. "The Electronic Essay," by Michael Renov 13. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments," by Laura Rascaroli 14. "Of the History of the Essay Film: Vertov, to Varda," by Timothy Corrigan 15. "The Cinema and the Essay as a Way of Thinking," by Raymond Bellour 16. "The Essay Film: From Film Festival Favorite to Flexible Commodity Form?," by Thomas Elsaesser Part IV. Filmmakers on the Essayistic 17. "Performing Borders: Transnational Video," by Ursula Biemann 18. "Proposal for a Tussle," by Jean-Pierre Gorin 19. "The Essay as Conformism? Some Notes on Global Image Economies," by Hito Steyerl 20. "On Writing the Film Essay," by Lynne Sachs 21. "Tramp Steamer," by Ross McElwee 22. "The ABCs of the Film Essay," by Harun Farocki and Christa Blumlinger 23. "Riddles as Essay Film," by Laura Mulvey 24. "Certain Obliquenesses," by Renee Green 25. "Essay Documentary: The disembodied narrator and an unclaimed image that floats through space and time," by Rea Tajiri 26. "From Ten Thousand Waves to Lina Bo Bardi, via Kapital," by Isaac Julien Bibliography Contributors Permissions Index
£95.00
Columbia University Press Holocaust Cinema in the TwentyFirst Century
Book SynopsisAnalyses of twenty-first-century Holocaust films that venture across national and linguistic boundaries and make visible various formal and intertextual relationships within the substantial body of Holocaust cinema.Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Introduction: The Next Chapter in the History of Holocaust Cinema, by Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer Part One: The Past and Its Presence 1. Transformations of Holocaust Memory: Frames of Transmission and Mediation, by Aleida Assmann 2. Supplementing Shoah: Claude Lanzmann's The Karski Report and The Last of the Unjust, by Sue Vice 3. The Act of Digging: Archaeology, Photography and Forensics in Birthplace and Holocaust by Bullets, by Brad Prager 4. The Willing Amnesia: The Holocaust in Post-Soviet Cinema, by Olga Gershenson 5. Wilhelm Brasse's Photographs from Auschwitz: Testimony and Photography in Irek Dobrowolski's The Portraitist, by Tomasz Lysak Part Two: The Ethics of Memory 6. The Singular Jew: Representing National Socialism's Jewish Victims in Recent Historical Cinema, by Jennifer M. Kapczynski 7. Locked Doors and Hidden Graves: Searching the Past in Poklosie, Sarah's Key and Ida, by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann 8. The Ethics of Perspective and the Holocaust Archive: Spielberg's List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Fateless, by Martin Modlinger Part Three: The Legacy of Evil 9. 'The Doctor is Different': Ambivalent Ethics, Cinematic Heroics and the Figure of the Jewish Doctor in Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone, by Erin McGlothlin 10. On the Cinematic Nazi, by Aaron Kerner 11. The Holocaust as Case Study: Universalist Rhetoric and National Memory in Stefan Ruzowitzky's Radical Evil, by Oleksandr Kobrynskyy 12. TV as a Historical Archive? How Epic Family Series Memorialise the Holocaust, by Marcus Stiglegger Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Words on Screen
Book SynopsisA poetic investigation into the many ways that the written word is used in cinemaTrade ReviewWords On Screen offers a radically new understanding of cinema. By concentrating on the written word in a very wide variety of films, Chion turns what in the past has always been no more than a passing concern into a full-fledged reading strategy, applicable to films of all periods and types. I never could have imagined that Chion would once again create an entirely new approach to cinema. -- Rick Altman, author of A Theory of Narrative We tend to take the appearance of written words in movies for granted. In this book, the great film critic Michel Chion compiles an inventory of textual effects, and shows us just how strange, powerful, and surprising words on screen can be. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University We too often think of the film as a purely visual medium and the text as a purely verbal one. In his highly original and incisive study, Michel Chion illuminates the overt yet overlooked presence of the fusion of visual and verbal that is writing on the screen. The results are revelatory. Chion tracks the whole panoply of inscriptions in film and makes clear how our understanding of film depends on the force of these inscriptions. You will never again look at or read the titles, intertitles, subtitles, signage, or hand-written letters on screen in quite the same way. -- Ian Balfour, York UniversityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Introduction Part I: An Infinite Inventory 1. The Name on Screen 2. Nondiegetic Writing 3. Diegetic Writing as Athorybos Part II: Writing, Reading 4. Fingers, Tablets, and Machines Writing 5. From Books Undone, Films 6. Half-Reading 7. Hearing One Language and Reading Another Part III: Writing in Film Space 8. Writing in the Land of Three Dimensions 9. Anagrams and Clinamen 10. Excription Glossary Notes Bibliography Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Transgression in AngloAmerican Cinema
Book SynopsisThis collection explores the gendered dynamics of sex and the body, particularly embodied deviations from normative cultural scripts.Trade ReviewInteresting and reliable. -- Florian G. Mildenberger * Sexuality and Culture *Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Introduction. Queering Heterosexuality in New Transgressive Cinema, by Joel Gwynne Part I: Extreme Bodies, Extreme Desire 1. The New Anglo-American Cinema of Sexual Addiction, by Alistair Fox 2. Carnotopia: The Culture of Sadism in Nymphomaniac, Shame, and Thanatomorphose, by Mark Featherstone 3. Feed: A Representation of Feederism or Fatsploitation?, by Niall Richardson 4. Proving their 'Virility'? Steve McQueen's Hunger and Transgressive Masculinity, by Alison Garden 5. Male-Nutrition: Extreme Weight Loss, Socio-Cultural Transgression and the Male Body in Recent American Cinema, by Tom Steward 6. Surgery, Blood, and Patriarchal Sex: Excision and American Mary, by Alice Haylett Bryan Part II: Adolescence, Ageing and Queer Agency 7. A Child is Being Raped! Homosexual Panic in Mystic River, by Vulcan Volkan Demirkan-Martin 8. Crash-and-Burn Girls and Culpable Parenthood: Negotiating Sexualisation Discourses in Independent Cinema, by Joel Gwynne 9. 'Please be a good boy': Challenging Perceptions of Paedophilia in Contemporary US Cinema, by Amy C. Chambers 10. Nowhere Teens: Following Gregg Araki's Queer Adolescents through the End of a Century, by Arnau Roig-Mora 11. Unsettling Heteronormativity: Abject Age and Transgressive Desire in Notes on a Scandal, by Eva Krainitzki Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press The Cinema of Hal Hartley
Book SynopsisFeaturing new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley’s work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.Trade ReviewHal Hartley has been at work for a quarter of a century and his films still seem like fresh discoveries. Independent, individualistic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable, he defies all known pigeonholes, and this balanced, wide-ranging collection marks a welcome new stage in the exploration of his work. -- David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America This first collection to showcase the curiously under-celebrated independent filmmaker reminds us why Hartley and his films matter. Rich in original insights about conditions of authorship into the crowdfunding era, textuality and intertextuality, film style, critical reception, the local in location production, indie genericity, performance, and more across the past 25 years, this book brings Hartley's vibrant work back to the fore of film studies. -- Mark Gallagher, University of NottinghamTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Hal Hartley: A Quality of Attention, by Steven Rybin 1. Up Close and Impersonal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition, by David Bordwell 2. 'Young. Middle-Class. College-Educated. Unskilled.': Hal Hartley in 1991, by Mark L. Berrettini 3. 'Some Things Shouldn't Be Fixed': Frameworks of Critical Reception and the Early Career of Hal Hartley, by Jason Davids Scott 4. The Locality of Hal Hartley: The Aesthetics and Business of Smallness, by Steven Rawle 5. Hal Hartley's Romantic Comedy, by Sebastian Manley 6. A New Man: The Logic of the Break in Hal Hartley's Amateur, by Daniel Varndell 7. Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film, by Steven Rybin 8. Poiesis and Media in The Book of Life and No Such Thing, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 9. Bodies, Space and Theatre in The Unbelievable Truth (and its American Precursors), by Zachary Tavlin 10. Parker Posey as Hal Hartley's 'Captive Actress', by Jennifer O'Meara 11. The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy, by Steven Rybin Filmography Bibliography Index
£56.00
Columbia University Press The Cinema of Hal Hartley
Book SynopsisFeaturing new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley’s work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.Trade ReviewHal Hartley has been at work for a quarter of a century and his films still seem like fresh discoveries. Independent, individualistic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable, he defies all known pigeonholes, and this balanced, wide-ranging collection marks a welcome new stage in the exploration of his work. -- David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America This first collection to showcase the curiously under-celebrated independent filmmaker reminds us why Hartley and his films matter. Rich in original insights about conditions of authorship into the crowdfunding era, textuality and intertextuality, film style, critical reception, the local in location production, indie genericity, performance, and more across the past 25 years, this book brings Hartley's vibrant work back to the fore of film studies. -- Mark Gallagher, University of NottinghamTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Hal Hartley: A Quality of Attention, by Steven Rybin 1. Up Close and Impersonal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition, by David Bordwell 2. 'Young. Middle-Class. College-Educated. Unskilled.': Hal Hartley in 1991, by Mark L. Berrettini 3. 'Some Things Shouldn't Be Fixed': Frameworks of Critical Reception and the Early Career of Hal Hartley, by Jason Davids Scott 4. The Locality of Hal Hartley: The Aesthetics and Business of Smallness, by Steven Rawle 5. Hal Hartley's Romantic Comedy, by Sebastian Manley 6. A New Man: The Logic of the Break in Hal Hartley's Amateur, by Daniel Varndell 7. Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film, by Steven Rybin 8. Poiesis and Media in The Book of Life and No Such Thing, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 9. Bodies, Space and Theatre in The Unbelievable Truth (and its American Precursors), by Zachary Tavlin 10. Parker Posey as Hal Hartley's 'Captive Actress', by Jennifer O'Meara 11. The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy, by Steven Rybin Filmography Bibliography Index
£19.80
Columbia University Press Mediamorphosis
Book SynopsisMediamorphosis compiles articles by some of today’s leading forces in the scholarship of Kafka as well as film studies to provide a thorough investigation of the reciprocal relations between Kafka’s work and the cinematic medium.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction, by Ido Lewit and Shai Biderman Part I. The Cinematic Kafka Kafka, Rumour, Early Cinema: Archaic Moving Pictures, by Paul North Sebald Goes to the Movies: Reading Kafka as Cinematography, by Nimrod Matan The Ghost Is Clear: The POV of the Daydreamer, by Laurence A. Rickels Moving Pictures-Visual Pleasures: Kafka's Cinematic Writing, by Peter Beicken To Move as the Image Moves: The Rule of Rhythmic Presence and Absence in Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared, by Tobias Kuehne Noises Off: Cinematic Sound in Kafka's 'The Burrow', by Kata Gellen Gesture, Wardrobe, Backdrop and Prop in Franz Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared and Peter Weir's The Truman Show, by Idit Alphandary The Possibility of the Cinematic in 'The Metamorphosis' and 'The Burrow', by Kevin W. Sweeney Part II. The Kafkaesque Cinema 'The Essential Is Sufficient': The Kafka Adaptations of Orson Welles, Straub-Huillet and Michael Haneke, by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes K., the Tramp, and the Cinematic Vision: The Kafkaesque Chaplin, by Shai Biderman 'The Medium Is the Message': Cronenberg 'Outkafkas' Kafka, by Iris Bruce The Absurdity of Human Existence: 'The Metamorphosis' and The Fly, by William J. Devlin and Angel M. Cooper 'This Is Not Nothing': Viewing the Coen Brothers Through the Lens of Kafka, by Ido Lewit The Face: K. and Keaton, by Omri Ben-Yehuda Translating Kafka into Italian: Kafkaesque Themes in Eilo Petri's Films, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Leonardo Acosta Lando Epilogue: A Personal Quest Into the Cinematic Kafkaesque Magic, Mystery and Miracle: Re-spiralling Marker and Kafka, by Dan Geva Transcribing Kafka Into Film: A Tortuous Love-Story, by Henry Sussman Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Ingmar Bergmans Face to Face
Book SynopsisThe 1976 premiere of Face to Face came at the height of director-screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's career, yet today Face to Face is a largely overlooked and dismissed work. This book tells the story of its rise and fall and presents a new portrait of Bergman as a political artist exploring a new medium with huge public impact: television.Trade ReviewIngmar Bergman's Face to Face seems to be one of those films that dwell in the shadows, as if patiently waiting to be found by a discerning eye. Enter Swedish critic and scholar Michael Tapper, who in throwing his sharp torchlight virtually revives this film, which for so long has remained a blind spot neglected by critics and scholarship alike. Most of all Tapper succeeds in delineating how Face to Face lends itself to a rich contextualization of the sort not generally found in mainstream Bergman studies, be it the sexual revolution of the 1970s, second-wave feminism, the growing importance of television as producer of feature film, or the (in)famous 'primal scream' therapy promoted by Henry Janov. Face to Face superbly mirrors the times in which it was made, yet is saturated with issues that remain relevant today. An added feature of this book is that it includes never before published material, for instance the director's diaries in the Ingmar Bergman Foundation Archive, which would otherwise not have seen the light of day. -- Maaret Koskinen, Stockholm UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Prelude: The 1960sUnder FireCrisisPart II. Bergman Goes TVOut of the Ivory TowerMass-Market BergmanThe TV Medium and Bergman’s StylePart III. Bergman’s ModernismAttack of Second-Wave FeminismThe Strindberg-Ibsen-Bergman ConnectionPersona: War on IdealismThe Making of Ingmar BergmanOne Man, Four WomenPart IV. The Djursholm Trilogy Plus OneThe Lie: A Tragi-Comedy of BanalityScenes from a MarriageLife in the Beige LaneCries and Whispers: Into the Belly of the Idealism BeastPart V. Face to FaceTo the Orgasm and Beyond: Ingmar Bergman and the Sexual RevolutionArthur Janov Conquers Sweden – and BergmanWorkbook No. 29, Part I: Everything is a DreamTraum and TraumaWorkbook No. 29, Part II: Jenny the PsychiatristWorkbook No. 29, Part III: The Primal ScreamThe ScreenplayThe ProductionThe TV SeriesThe FilmOverture to the ReleaseReceptionA Success and a FailureCoda: The End of Art?ReferencesIndex
£70.40
Columbia University Press When Movies Were Theater Architecture Exhibition
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewJust as the very concept of 'going to the movies' in a theatrical space seems under threat and antiquated, William Paul's informed and rigorous look back at what going to the moves once meant-culturally, aesthetically, and architecturally-seems particularly urgent and apt. When Movies Were Theater offers digital -age moviegoers-screen watchers?-a fascinating and provocative study of the spaces in which we see movies. -- Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 When Movies Were Theater is a brilliantly argued, superbly researched study of the spaces and physical contexts that determine our experience of movies. Paul shows that the history of stage and screen has involved many architectural changes, and that the framing environment-whether indoors or out, whether at home or in a multiplex-decisively affects both the form of films and our understanding of them. His book is of groundbreaking importance and should be read by everyone with a serious interest in the ever-evolving medium of moving images. -- James Naremore, author of An Invention Without a Future: Essays on Cinema When Movies Were Theater is an impressive achievement. William Paul demonstrates that the history of film should not - and cannot - be separated from the history of theatre, including the history of theatre buildings. A major accomplishment in research and analysis, Paul's book offers essential scholarship for both film scholars and theatre historians. -- Thomas Postlewait, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography In this fascinating study, Paul investigates the complex and ever-changing theatrical space of motion picture exhibition. He also offers his insights into the unexpected ways that these spaces influenced film production-and vice versa. -- Charles Musser, author The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 If you are interested in how the architecture within American movie houses shaped the cinema and vice-versa, William Paul's often brilliant tome is an instant classic. -- Gerald Peary The Arts Fuse This is a book that will change our thinking of cinema... It is a broadening of our views on the history of cinema as a cultural practice at the crossroads of many different fields: theater, architecture, technology, economy, and art... [When Movies Were Theater] deserves a place on the very top of all compulsory reading on the history of cinema. -- Jan Baetens Leonardo ReviewsTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: An Art of the Theater 1. Making Movies Fit 2. Store Theaters: A Radical Break 3. Palatial Architecture, Democratized Audience 4. Elite Taste in a Mass Medium 5. Uncanny Theater 6. The Architectural Screen Conclusion: Ontological Fade-Out Appendix 1: Stage Shows and Double Features in Select Markets Outside New York City Appendix 2: Feature Films Based on Theatrical Sources Appenidx 3: Filmography Appendix 4: List of Theaters Abbreviations Used for Citations in Notes Notes Selected Bibliography Index
£101.70
Columbia University Press When Movies Were Theater
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewJust as the very concept of 'going to the movies' in a theatrical space seems under threat and antiquated, William Paul's informed and rigorous look back at what going to the moves once meant-culturally, aesthetically, and architecturally-seems particularly urgent and apt. When Movies Were Theater offers digital -age moviegoers-screen watchers?-a fascinating and provocative study of the spaces in which we see movies. -- Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 When Movies Were Theater is a brilliantly argued, superbly researched study of the spaces and physical contexts that determine our experience of movies. Paul shows that the history of stage and screen has involved many architectural changes, and that the framing environment-whether indoors or out, whether at home or in a multiplex-decisively affects both the form of films and our understanding of them. His book is of groundbreaking importance and should be read by everyone with a serious interest in the ever-evolving medium of moving images. -- James Naremore, author of An Invention Without a Future: Essays on Cinema When Movies Were Theater is an impressive achievement. William Paul demonstrates that the history of film should not - and cannot - be separated from the history of theatre, including the history of theatre buildings. A major accomplishment in research and analysis, Paul's book offers essential scholarship for both film scholars and theatre historians. -- Thomas Postlewait, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography In this fascinating study, Paul investigates the complex and ever-changing theatrical space of motion picture exhibition. He also offers his insights into the unexpected ways that these spaces influenced film production-and vice versa. -- Charles Musser, author The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 If you are interested in how the architecture within American movie houses shaped the cinema and vice-versa, William Paul's often brilliant tome is an instant classic. -- Gerald Peary The Arts Fuse This is a book that will change our thinking of cinema... It is a broadening of our views on the history of cinema as a cultural practice at the crossroads of many different fields: theater, architecture, technology, economy, and art... [When Movies Were Theater] deserves a place on the very top of all compulsory reading on the history of cinema. -- Jan Baetens Leonardo ReviewsTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: An Art of the Theater 1. Making Movies Fit 2. Store Theaters: A Radical Break 3. Palatial Architecture, Democratized Audience 4. Elite Taste in a Mass Medium 5. Uncanny Theater 6. The Architectural Screen Conclusion: Ontological Fade-Out Appendix 1: Stage Shows and Double Features in Select Markets Outside New York City Appendix 2: Feature Films Based on Theatrical Sources Appenidx 3: Filmography Appendix 4: List of Theaters Abbreviations Used for Citations in Notes Notes Selected Bibliography Index
£29.75
Columbia University Press Global Cinematic Cities New Landscapes of Film
Book SynopsisEngaging with a rapidly transforming urban world, the contributions to this collection rethink the cinematic city at a global scale. By presenting a global constellation of screen cities, the book encourages juxtapositions and comparisons across the North and South to capture the global city and its dynamics of exchange, hybridity, and circulation.Trade ReviewOffering an extremely thoughtful mix of established and new voices, this is an intellectually exciting contribution to film scholarship. It adds significant new knowledge and understanding of the links and dissonances between the urban, the local, and the global to shed new light on existing and emerging cinematic cities throughout the world. -- Jane Mills, University of New South WalesThis collection of essay provides a set of innovative, international perspectives on the relationships between cities and screen media in their contemporary, globally networked configurations. It is important reading for anybody with an interest in the dynamics and the tensions of urban culture today. -- Andrew J. Webber, Cambridge UniversityOperating at the intersection of film studies, globalization studies, and urban studies to deliver a powerful, interdisciplinary re-assessment of the role of media and screens in shaping contemporary urban life, this volume addresses issues such as transnational mobility, digital technology, and social inequality…it makes important new connections between the ongoing transformation of cities worldwide and emerging trends in film, television, and new media. -- Christoph Lindner, University of OregonThe editors and contributors of this volume are to be congratulated on producing such thought-provoking work on a complex contemporary topic. * Film International *Encourages us to take a multi-faceted view of the global media landscape illuminating a diversification of screen practices and reflections of contemporary cultural life. * Frames Cinema Journal *Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Introduction: Decentring the Cinematic City-Film and Media in the Digital Age Part 1: Transnational Screen Cities 1. In the City but Not Bounded by It: Cinema in the Global, the Generic and the Cluster City, by Thomas Elsaesser 2. Traversing the Oresund: the Transnational Urban Region in Bron/Broen, by Pei-Sze Chow 3. Neoliberalism, Nollywood, and Lagos, by Jonathan Haynes Part 2: Global City Imaginaries 4. New Urban and Media Ecologies in Contemporary Buenos Aires, by Joanna Page 5. When Harry Met Siri: Digital Romcom and the Global City in Spike Jonze's Her, by Lawrence Webb 6. Cinephilia and the City: the Politics of Place in Contemporary Bengali Cinema, by Malini Guha Part 3: Public Screens and New Media Landscapes 7. Screen Cultures and the 'Generic City': Public Screens in Cairo and Shanghai, by Chris Berry 8. The City as Found Footage: the Reassemblage of Chinese Urban Space, by Yomi Braester 9. Remediating the 'Other Half': Planet Slum as Transmedia Project, by Igor Krstic Part 4: New Narrative Topographies 10. Interstitial Cityspace and the Immigrant Experience in Contemporary French Cinema, by William Higbee 11. Seoul, Busan and Somewhere Near: Korean Gangster Noir and Social Immobility, by Jinhee Choi 12. Chase Sequences and Transport Infrastructure in Global Hollywood Spy Films, by Christian B. Long Index
£999.99
Columbia University Press Cultures of Representation
Book SynopsisCultures of Representation is the first book to explore the cinematic portrayal of disability in films from across the globe.Trade Review"Outstanding essays... Highly recommended. CHOICETable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Disability Studies, World Cinema and the Cognitive Code of Reality, by Benjamin Fraser Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema: Targeting Ephemeral Domains of Belief and Cultivating Aficionados of the Body, by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder 'Beyond Forgiveness'? Lee Chang-dong's Oasis (2002) and the Mobilisation of Disability Discourses in the Korean New Wave, by Paul Petrovic Refusing Chromosomal Pairing: Inclusion, Disabled Masculinity, Sexuality and Intimacy in Yo mama, tambien (2009), by Michael Gill Dunce! Duffer! Dimwit!: Dyslexia in Bollywood's Taare Zameen Par (2007), by Sanjukta Ghosh Landscapes of Children: Picturing Disability in Bunuel's Los olvidados (1950), by Susan Antebi Fearful Reflections: Representations of Disability in Postwar Dutch Cinema (1973-2011), by Mitzi Waltz 'People Endure': The Function of Autism in Anton's Right Here (2012), by Jose Alaniz Displaying Autism: The Thinking and Images of Temple Grandin (2010), by Katherine Lashley More than the 'Other'? On Four Tendencies Regarding the Representation of Disability in Contemporary German Film (2005-2010), by Petra Anders The Other Body: Psychiatric Disability and Pedro Almodovar (1988-2011), by Candace Skibba On the Road to Normalcy: European Road Movies and Disability (2002-2011), by Anna Grebe Re-envisioning Italy's 'New Man' in Bella non piangere! (1955), by Jennifer Griffiths 'Get Your Legs Back': Avatar (2009) and the Re-booting of American Individualism, by Susan Flynn Through the Disability Lens: Revisiting Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1975) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988), by Ken Junior Lipenga Homes Wretched and Wrecked: Disability as Social Dis-ease in Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den (1970), by James A. Wren Leprosy and the Dialectical Body in Forugh Farrokhzad's The House is Black (1964), by Rosa Holman Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Unspeakable Histories
Book SynopsisWilliam Guynn reads seven films depicting atrocities, exploring the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic events and the dimensions of experience that historiography leaves untouched. Unspeakable Histories argues that the film medium triggers moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered.Trade ReviewGuynn's interpretive readings are insightful and downright brilliant. He is just the scholar to write this book, arguing for a kind of history that is an art rather than a social science, providing us with examples of moments in films during which the spectator can actually be made to confront the emotional impact of the past. -- Robert A. Rosenstone, author of History on Film/Film on History Unspeakable Histories decisively advances the state of the discipline in historical film studies. Film is shown to be a particularly subtle and challenging medium for articulating the historical traumas of the twentieth century. The writing is nuanced, vivid, and at times, passionate. -- Robert Burgoyne, author of The Hollywood Historical Film Through a close analysis of movies dealing with catastrophes, this book proposes a new theoretical approach: to study how film, under certain conditions at some moments (through intense flashes), can lead us to experience the past as a direct phenomenological perception and how it can change our understanding of history. Provocative, but also clear and didactical. A significant contribution to the relations between film and history. -- Roger Odin, Professor of Sciences of Information and Communication, University of Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. An eloquent meditation on cinema's capacity to put us in touch, in every sense of the word, with the presence of the past. Guynn's study makes a sustained argument for the place of affect, sensation, experience, and myth in our historical imagination. -- Debarati Sanyal, author of Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance In this thought-provoking book, Guynn argues for the power of historical films about catastrophic events of the twentieth century to suspend, albeit fleetingly, the distance between present and past, enabling viewers to grasp a fragment of that past. At once attuned to the affective dimension of spectatorship and the medium's power to reanimate traces of the historical past, this book argues for the crucial role of film in understanding historical disasters. -- Alison Landsberg, author of Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture Guynn does a superb job of examining these often-harrowing works. CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Making Experience Speak 1. Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished 2. Andrzej Wajda's Katyn 3. Andrei Konchalovsky's Siberiade 4. Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent 5. Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light 6. Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine 7. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Unspeakable Histories
Book SynopsisWilliam Guynn reads seven films depicting atrocities, exploring the emotional resonance that still adheres to traumatic events and the dimensions of experience that historiography leaves untouched. Unspeakable Histories argues that the film medium triggers moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered.Trade ReviewGuynn's interpretive readings are insightful and downright brilliant. He is just the scholar to write this book, arguing for a kind of history that is an art rather than a social science, providing us with examples of moments in films during which the spectator can actually be made to confront the emotional impact of the past. -- Robert A. Rosenstone, author of History on Film/Film on History Unspeakable Histories decisively advances the state of the discipline in historical film studies. Film is shown to be a particularly subtle and challenging medium for articulating the historical traumas of the twentieth century. The writing is nuanced, vivid, and at times, passionate. -- Robert Burgoyne, author of The Hollywood Historical Film Through a close analysis of movies dealing with catastrophes, this book proposes a new theoretical approach: to study how film, under certain conditions at some moments (through intense flashes), can lead us to experience the past as a direct phenomenological perception and how it can change our understanding of history. Provocative, but also clear and didactical. A significant contribution to the relations between film and history. -- Roger Odin, Professor of Sciences of Information and Communication, University of Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. An eloquent meditation on cinema's capacity to put us in touch, in every sense of the word, with the presence of the past. Guynn's study makes a sustained argument for the place of affect, sensation, experience, and myth in our historical imagination. -- Debarati Sanyal, author of Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance In this thought-provoking book, Guynn argues for the power of historical films about catastrophic events of the twentieth century to suspend, albeit fleetingly, the distance between present and past, enabling viewers to grasp a fragment of that past. At once attuned to the affective dimension of spectatorship and the medium's power to reanimate traces of the historical past, this book argues for the crucial role of film in understanding historical disasters. -- Alison Landsberg, author of Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture Guynn does a superb job of examining these often-harrowing works. CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Making Experience Speak 1. Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished 2. Andrzej Wajda's Katyn 3. Andrei Konchalovsky's Siberiade 4. Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent 5. Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light 6. Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine 7. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Hunting Girls
Book SynopsisKelly Oliver examines popular culture's fixation on representing young women as predators and prey and the implication that violence—especially sexual violence—is an inevitable part of a woman's maturity. She discusses campus rape, the valorization of woman's lack of consent, and the new urgency to implement affirmative consent policies.Trade ReviewKelly Oliver's brilliant analysis of how young girls' path to womanhood is filled with beating, battery, abuse, and sexual assault is shocking and timely. Oliver's meticulously researched volume moves back and forth between myths and fairy tales linked to rape, contemporary films, television shows and ads featuring violence to girls, along with studying rape culture, and ambiguities of 'consent,' on college campuses. It is essential reading, showing that women may not have liberated themselves after all. -- E. Ann Kaplan, author of Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction Corpse chic, mounted trophy, dead girl, tough girl-Kelly Oliver explores media representations of a new, empowered heroine in her compelling exploration of the dark side of the modern fairytale and its fascination with violence and rape. Oliver asks the reader to think seriously about the forces that drive rape culture and the eroticization of violence. A challenging, disturbing, and enlightening book. -- Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis In her detailed attention to contemporary films and social media, and in linking up today's violence against women with a long line of treasured fables and cultural archetypes, Kelly Oliver makes an important contribution to a discussion of great urgency. With eloquence and perspective, she not only exposes patterns of aggression against women but also shows the sometimes problematic ways in which women try to restore the balance. -- Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies Named a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title: "A must read for scholars and students." ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Girls as Trophies 1. A Princess Is Being Beaten and Raped 2. Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment 3. Girls as Predators and Prey Conclusion: The New Artemis, Title IX, and Taking Responsibility for Sexual Assault Notes Works Cited Index
£18.04
Columbia University Press Sweet and Lowdown Woody Allens Cinema of Regret
Book SynopsisTracing the recurrent theme of regret from his stand-up comedy through classics like Annie Hall as well as less esteemed accomplishments, this volume argues that it is ultimately the shallowness of his protagonists' regretâtheir lack of deeply felt, sustained remorseâthat defines Woody Allenâs view of human experience.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface 1. Regret and the Problem of Shallowness 2. Apprentice Works 3. The Relationship Films 4. The Murder Quartet 5. The Reflexive Films 6. Nostalgia 7. To Remedy Regret Postscript: Speculations Bibliography Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Mediating Mobility
Book SynopsisConsiders the images that circulate with reference to migrants or draw attention to those that accompany, show, or conceal them.Trade ReviewThis study provides an outstanding contribution to our knowledge regarding the visual representation and analysis of the migrant experience in the contemporary, globalized world. Challenging established discourses of visual representation of migration, and situating his argument within recent advances in the anthropology of contemporary art, phenomenology, and the ethics of representation, the author develops a new anthropology of the moving image. Highly recommended. -- Arnd Schneider, University of OsloTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Anthropology, Migration and the Moving Image 1. Migrant In/visibility 2. Migrant Experience 3. Migratory Spaces 4. Migratory Times Conclusion: Possibilities Notes Filmography Bibliography Index
£70.40
