Film history, theory or criticism Books
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Vampires and Zombies Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations
Book SynopsisAs this volume demonstrates, distribution of vampires and zombies across time and space has revealed these undead figures to carry multiple meanings. This book - with scholars from different national and cultural backgrounds - explores the transformations that the vampire and zombie figures undergo when they travel globally and through various media and cultures.
£27.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Sterling Haydens Wars
Book SynopsisA master sailor when he was barely in his twenties, Sterling Hayden (1916-1986) became an overnight film star despite having no training in acting. This volume details the life and career of this important hollywood actor.
£26.06
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Films of Douglas Sirk Exquisite Ironies and
Book SynopsisDouglas Sirk (1897-1987) brought to all his work a distinctive style that led to his reputation as one of twentieth-century film's great directors. This book offers fresh insights into all of the director's films and situates them in the culture of their times. Tom Ryan also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources.
£77.35
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hat The Making of Roger Rabbit
Book SynopsisRoss Anderson interviewed over 140 artists to tell the story of how, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they created something truly magical. Anderson describes the ways in which the Roger Rabbit characters have been used in film shorts, commercials, and merchandising, and how they have remained a cultural touchstone today.
£77.35
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Lost World of DeMille
Book SynopsisAs only an accomplished author, consummate collector, and savvy insider can, John Kobal tells the story of the man who invented Hollywood, Cecil Blount DeMille. Kobal narrates the story of DeMille's life and follows the director's career from his first film in 1914 tp his last in 1956.
£30.36
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Charles Burnett Interviews
Book SynopsisCharles Burnett (b. 1944) is a groundbreaking African American filmmaker and one of America's finest directors, yet he remains largely unknown, and few filmgoers have seen his films or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the work of a rare film master.
£24.71
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy The
Book SynopsisExamines the phenomenon the ""fanboy auteur"". The volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon, and fangirls like J.K. Rowling and E.L. James, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is constructed and defended, and how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of geek culture.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Intergenerational Solidarity in Childrens Literature and Film
Book SynopsisContributions by Aneesh Barai, Clémentine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Björn Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need. Intergenerational Solidarity in Children''s Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional co
£78.20
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Lost in the Dark A World History of Horror Film
Book SynopsisStarting with silent-era horror films and ending with 2020's The Invisible Man, Lost in the Dark looks at decades of horror movies. Brad Weismann covers such topics as the roots of horror in literature and art, monster movies, B-movies, the destruction of the American censorship system, zombies, and critical reception of modern horror.
£19.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Lost in the Dark A World History of Horror Film
Book SynopsisStarting with silent-era horror films and ending with 2020's The Invisible Man, Lost in the Dark looks at decades of horror movies. Brad Weismann covers such topics as the roots of horror in literature and art, monster movies, B-movies, the destruction of the American censorship system, zombies, and critical reception of modern horror.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Savvy Sphinx How Garbo Conquered Hollywood
Book SynopsisIncluding over a hundred beautiful images, The Savvy Sphinx charts Greta Garbo’s rise and her long self-imposed exile as the queen who abdicated her Hollywood throne. Garbo was the paramount star produced by the Hollywood studio system, and by the time of her death her legendary status was assured.
£29.71
University Press of Mississippi The Films of Fred Schepisi
Book SynopsisFred Schepisi is one of the crucial names associated with the revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s. The Films of Fred Schepisi traces the lead-up to his critical successes in feature filmmaking, via his earlier award-winning success as a producer in advertising commercials in the 1960s and the setting up of his own company. Unlike some directors, he derived from this experience a sure sense of the commercial aspects of filmmaking, as well as its aesthetic considerations. The volume also considers stories of his early education in a Catholic seminary, which he drew on in his semiautobiographical film, The Devil''s Playground, the success of which launched him as an exciting new feature director. The volume expands on Schepisi''s success story to chart his development as a director in demand in other countries, notably in the US and the UK, as well as continuing to make major films in Australia. Brian McFarlane argues that Schepisi''s career is symptoma
£27.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Films of Fred Schepisi
Book SynopsisFred Schepisi is one of the crucial names associated with the revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s. The Films of Fred Schepisi traces the lead-up to his critical successes in feature filmmaking, via his earlier award-winning success as a producer in advertising commercials in the 1960s and the setting up of his own company.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Films of Delmer Daves Visions of Progress in
Book SynopsisArgues that the Delmer Daves’ work warrants sustained scholarly attention. Examining all of Daves’ films, his screenplays, scripts that were not filmed, and personal papers, Douglas Horlock argues that Daves was a serious and enlightened filmmaker whose work confronts the general conservatism of Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi After Midnight
Book SynopsisAlan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen fundamentally altered the perception of American comic books and remains one of the medium’s greatest hits. This volume looks specifically at the three adaptations of Moore’s and Gibbons’s Watchmen.
£26.06
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Barbara Stanwyck
Book SynopsisBarbara Stanwyck rose from the ranks of chorus girl to become one of Hollywood’s most talented leading women - and America’s highest-paid woman in the mid-1940s. This book positions Stanwyck where she belongs - at the very top of her profession - and offers a close, sympathetic reading of her performances in all their range and complexity.
£18.86
University Press of Mississippi Ray Milland
£79.20
Cornell University Press Not According to Plan
Book SynopsisIn Not According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya''s revisionist account of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors.Trade ReviewNot According to Plan offers a new take on the failures of the Soviet film industry during Stalin's reign. Highly recommended * Choice *Through a robust exploration of the institutions, production mechanisms and professional groups that comprised the film industry under Stalin, Belodubrovskaya offers a fresh perspective on censorship, the relationship between filmmakers and the party-state, and the failure to create a mass communist cinema in the USSR.... By patiently preparing the ground for four chapters before boldly reconceptualizing film censorship under Stalin, Belodubrovskaya succeeds in shifting the dominant paradigm of Soviet filmmaking history. Her counterintuitive insights make Not According to Plan both compelling and original. * Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema *Maria Belodubrovskaya's book is a significant contribution not only to film studies but also to social and political science.... The author disputes the conventional wisdom on Soviet film under Stalin, in particular the myth of Stalin as the 'chief censor' [showing] that a weak institutional policy and environment, not Stalin, were critical in shaping film policy and production in all of its dimensions. * Europe-Asia Studies *Maria Belodubrovskaya has written a thoroughly researched and analytically deep monograph that will impact film and Slavic studies for years to come. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsTerms and Abbreviations Note on Transliteration Introduction 1. Quantity vs. Quality 2. Templan 3. The Masters 4. Screenwriting 5. Censorship Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendixes Bibliography Index
£40.50
Cornell University Press Promiscuous Media
Book SynopsisIn Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as American film genres and techniques. Hori provides a range of examples that illustrate how maternal melodrama and animated features, akin to those popularized by Disney, were adopted wholesale by Japanese filmmakers.Emperor Hirohito''s image, Hori argues, was inseparable from the development of mass media; he was the first emperor whose public appearances were covered by media ranging from postcards to radio broadcasts. Worship of the emperor through viewing his image, Hori shows, taught the Japanese people how to look at images and primed their enjoyment of early animation and documentary films alike. Promiscuous Media lTrade ReviewA fresh perspective to understanding the popular culture of prewar Japan.... Hori's analyses and interpretations of the key visual/filmis texts are absolutely riveting and powerfully stimulating, compelling us to seek out the media works in question and reevaluate their meanings with our own eyes. * CROSS CURRENTS *Promiscuous Media... is a work of impressive breadth and erudition. * PACIFIC AFFAIRS *Table of ContentsLilst of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Photography's Aura 2. Contested Motherhood and Entertainment Film 3. The Politics of Japanese Documentary Film 4. The Dream of Japanese National Animation Epilogue Notes Bibliography
£45.90
Cornell University Press This Thing of Darkness
Book SynopsisSergei Eisenstein''s unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film''s politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein''s expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein''s unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger''s riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein''s personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film.Neuberger''s bold argumenTrade ReviewA superbly informed, comprehensive reading of the films that may fairly be said to be the first fully to unpack and contextualize this still controversial masterpiece. * Cinéaste *Joan Neuberger has given us a wonderful book. Anyone interested in Eisenstein, in Soviet film, in the ways Soviet artists and the institutions around them interacted, or in what happened to Soviet art during World War II will want to read this lively, well-researched, thought-provoking monograph a couple of times over—and then will be sure to keep it somewhere readily at hand, for easy access while teaching classes on film or Eisenstein or Russian history. * Russian Review *This fine monograph under review is an excellent addition to both Eizenshtein studies and to studies of Stalin-era Soviet films. * Slavonic and East European Review *Impressive in its profound scholarship and brilliant insight into Eisenstein's filmic and historical achievement, Joan Neuberger's This Thing of Darkness provides the most wide-ranging account to date of Eisenstein's classic and controversial film.... This book provides a scintillating new perspective not only of this film and director, but more broadly of how art was produced within the political culture of Stalin's Soviet Union. * Citation from the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize Committee *"A beautifully written microhistory of Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished cinematic trilogy, Ivan the Terrible. By means of a wide variety of sources, from Eisenstein's diaries and notes to archival materials, Neuberger ties in international and national politics to her analysis of the characters, content, and production of the film. Her brilliant analysis admirably demonstrates what happens to aesthetic theory and practice in the hands of a genius at an existential political moment." * Citation from the American Historical Association's 2020 George L. Mosse Prize Committee *Joan Neuberger's beautifully written and meticulously researched book tells the story of this film with a focus both on Eisenstein's creative process and his quixotic attempt to reconcile the official historiography and the aesthetic of socialist realism with his aspiration to make a film that critiqued Stalinism using the cinematic language of modernism. * Journal of Modern History *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Transliteration, Translations, and Citations List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Potholed Path: Ivan in Production 2. Shifts in Time: Ivan as History 3. Power Personified: Ivan as Biography 4. Power Projected: Ivan as Fugue 5. How to Do It: Ivan as Polyphonic Montage 6. The Official Reception: Ivan as Triumph and Nightmare Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£88.33
Cornell University Press When the Movies Mattered
Book SynopsisIn When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s and David Thomson dubbed the era the decade when movies mattered. Thomson''s words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsiderTrade ReviewAnd that's what makes "Mattered" such a fascinating read. This set of random pieces actually reveal how — for one shining moment — the losers ran Hollywood. * The Houston Chronicle *Movie connoisseurs and film students, especially those who relish the pictures of the New Hollywood era, should add this admirable volume to their library * Midwest Book Review *A superb anthology, a volume whose nostalgia for the New Hollywood is refreshingly clear-eyed rather than rose-tinted, and no less infectious for it. * The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The New Hollywood Revisited Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis 1. The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman's Film: The Age of Ambivalence Revisited Molly Haskell 2. Antonioni's America: Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, and the Making of a New Hollywood Jon Lewis 3. "Jason's No Businessman... I Think He's an Artist": BBS and the New Hollywood Dream Jonathan Kirshner 4. Robert Altman: Documentaries, Dreamscapes, and Dialogic Cinema David Sterritt 5. City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and the New Hollywood Cinema Heather Hendershot 6. The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone? David Thomson 7. Cinematic Tone in Polanski's Chinatown: Can "Life" Itself Be "False"? Robert Pippin 8. "I Don't Know What to Do with My Hands": John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie George Kouvaros 9. The Spirit of '76: Travis, Rocky, and Jimmy Carter J. Hoberman Coda: What "Golden Age"? A Dissenting Opinion Phillip Lopate Appendix: Time Line—the New Hollywood Years Notes on Contributors Notes Index
£97.20
Cornell University Press Difference and Orientation
Book SynopsisAlexander Kluge is one of contemporary Germany''s leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, he has also cowritten three acclaimed volumes of critical theory, published countless essays and numerous works of fiction, and continues to make films even as he expands his video production to the internet. Despite Kluge''s five decades of work in philosophy, literature, television, and media politics, his reputation outside of the German-speaking world still largely rests on his films of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. With the aim of introducing Kluge''s heterogeneous mind to an Anglophone readership, Difference and Orientation assembles thirty of his essays, speeches, glossaries, and interviews, revolving around the capacity for differentiation and the need for orientation toward ways out of catastrophic modernity. This landmark volume brings together some of Kluge''s most fundamental statements on lTrade Review"Richard Langston has assembled a remarkable collection of essays and interviews by Alexander Kluge that introduces English-speaking readers to a different Kluge than they are familiar with. The excellent translations capture the incisiveness, range, and wit of one of the most intelligent, prolific, and creative minds in contemporary Europeean history." -- Christopher Pavsek, Simon Fraser University, author of The Utopia of Film"Alexander Kluge's colossal oeuvre sets out to shepherd both Theodor W. Adorno's and Walter Benjamin's Frankfurt School into the twenty-first century. Richard Langston's anthology provides English-language readers with an essential compendium containing five decades of Kluge's reflections on Critical Theory's poetical potential." -- Rainer Stollmann, University of Bremen"Interest in Alexander Kluge's astonishingly varied production has exploded in the English-Language world. This volume makes available for the first time a judicious selection of his most important essays and shows Kluge the essayist is no less remarkable than Kluge the filmmaker, Kluge the author of fictions, Kluge the theorist, or Kluge the media visionary." -- Michael Jennings, Princeton University, coauthor of Walter BenjaminTable of ContentsTranslator Information List of Illustrations Acknowledgment Part I: Introduction The Guardian of Difference: The Essayist Alexander Kluge by Richard Langston, by Richard Langston Part II: Literature 1. The Difference: Heinrich von Kleist (1985) 2. Storytelling Is the Representation of Differences (2001) 3. The Peacemaker (2003) 4. Companions in Now-Time (2007) 5. Storytelling Means Dissolving Relations (2008) 6. Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One (2013) 7. What Is a Metaphor? (2016) Part III: Film 8. Word and Film (1965) by Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke 9. Bits of Conversation (1966) 10. The Realistic Method and the "Filmic" (1975) 11. Film: A Utopia (1983) 12. A Plan with the Force of a Battleship (2008) 13. No Farewell to Yesterday: New German Cinema from 1962 to 1981 as Seen from 2011 (2012) Part IV: From Classical to New Media: Opera, Television, Internet 14. An Answer to Two Opera Quotations (1983/84) 15. On the Expressions "Media" and "New Media": A Selection of Keywords (1984) 16. Medialization: Musealization (1990) 17. The Opera Machine (2001) 18. Primitive Diversity (2002) 19. Planting Gardens in the Data Tsunami (2010) Part V: Theory 20. The Role of Fantasy (1974) 21. The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention (1989) 22. The Political without Its Despair: On the Concept of "Populism" (1992) 23. War (2001) 24. The Art of Drawing Distinctions (2003) 25. Critique, Up Close and Personal (2007) 26. The Actuality of Adorno (2009) 27. Inventory of a Century: On Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (2013) 28. An Instance of Internet Telephony over the Himalayas (2016) Index
£24.29
Cornell University Press Not According to Plan
Book SynopsisIn Not According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya''s revisionist account of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors.Trade ReviewNot According to Plan offers a new take on the failures of the Soviet film industry during Stalin's reign. Highly recommended * Choice *Through a robust exploration of the institutions, production mechanisms and professional groups that comprised the film industry under Stalin, Belodubrovskaya offers a fresh perspective on censorship, the relationship between filmmakers and the party-state, and the failure to create a mass communist cinema in the USSR.... By patiently preparing the ground for four chapters before boldly reconceptualizing film censorship under Stalin, Belodubrovskaya succeeds in shifting the dominant paradigm of Soviet filmmaking history. Her counterintuitive insights make Not According to Plan both compelling and original. * Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema *Maria Belodubrovskaya's book is a significant contribution not only to film studies but also to social and political science.... The author disputes the conventional wisdom on Soviet film under Stalin, in particular the myth of Stalin as the 'chief censor' [showing] that a weak institutional policy and environment, not Stalin, were critical in shaping film policy and production in all of its dimensions. * Europe-Asia Studies *Maria Belodubrovskaya has written a thoroughly researched and analytically deep monograph that will impact film and Slavic studies for years to come. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsTerms and Abbreviations Note on Transliteration Introduction 1. Quantity vs. Quality 2. Templan 3. The Masters 4. Screenwriting 5. Censorship Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendixes Bibliography Index
£20.89
Cornell University Press Cinema and the Cultural Cold War
Book SynopsisCinema and the Cultural Cold War explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. Sangjoon Lee adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region''s film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. By taking a closer look at the cultural realities of this tumultuous period, Lee comprehensively reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War.Lee elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast AsiaTrade ReviewCinema and the Cultural Cold War expertly utilizes rich archival material to tell a compelling story about cinema in Asia during the Cold War that describes the complexity of the film business and the myriad risks and failures. Read alongside other works such as Day and Liem (2010) and Shaw (2007), Lee's study is ground-breaking. It is a book for researchers and film historians, but also a highly readable story about the history of Cold War cinema. * South East Asia Research *Sang Joon Lee's study is in concordance with his other books and will be highly useful for academics and researchers in the field of Asian cultural politics. Readers will benefit from Lee's deep knowledge of cross-cultural interchange through the Asian cinema network. * Insight Turkey *Extensive archival research undergirds this first-rate analysis. The volume offers an excellent history of postwar Asian cinema in and of itself, but Lee's close analysis of the challenges of international coproduction and the development of a truly transnational Asian cinema in what he terms the First and Second Networks of Asian cinema elevates the volume and results in an original exploration of the relationship between cinematic production and the US's attempts to maintain dominance in the region. An important study. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Cultural Cold War and the Birth of the AsianCinema Network Part I: The First Network 1. The Asia Foundation's Motion Picture Project 2. The FPA, US Propaganda, and Postwar Japanese Cinema 3. It's Oscar Time in Asia! 4. Constructing the Anticommunist Producers' Alliance 5. Projecting Asian Cinema to the World Part II: The Second Network 6. The Rise and Demise of a Developmental State Studio 7. Hong Kong, Hollywood, and the End of the Network Epilogue: From Asia to Asia-Pacific
£97.20
Cornell University Press Nabokov Noir
Book SynopsisNabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov''s early literary careerfrom the 1920s to the 1940sin the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov''s engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy.Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov''s Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature''s relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov''s involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worTrade ReviewLuke Parker's book is a rich offering that adds a great deal of texture to what we thought we knew about Nabokov's activities in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is part biography and part cultural history, looking closely at the world of Russian émigré life, mainly in Berlin during the decades in question. * The Russian Review *Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. * Modern Language Review *Nabokov Noir provides an engaging and stimulating look at one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Parker (Russian, visiting faculty, Amherst College) argues that Vladimir Nabokov's connections to US and European film industries illuminates his experience in exile. * Choice *Luke Parker presents a ground-breaking analysis of Nabokov's engagement with cinema culture in interwar Europe. * SEER *Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. Nabokov Noir is a significant contribution to the fields of Nabokov studies and émigré culture. * Modern Language Review *
£37.80
Stanford University Press Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End
Book SynopsisIn December of 1997, the International Monetary Fund announced the largest bailout package in its history, aimed at stabilizing the South Korean economy in response to a credit and currency crisis of the same year. Vicious Circuits examines what it terms "Korea's IMF Cinema," the decade of cinema following that crisis, in order to think through the transformations of global political economy at the end of the American century. It argues that one of the most dominant traits of the cinema that emerged after the worst economic crisis in the history of South Korea was its preoccupation with economic phenomena. As the quintessentially corporate art form—made as much in the boardroom as in the studio—film in this context became an ideal site for thinking through the global political economy in the transitional moment of American decline and Chinese ascension. With an explicit focus of state economic policy, IMF cinema did not just depict the economy; it also was this economy's material embodiment. That is, it both represented economic developments and was itself an important sector in which the same pressures and changes affecting the economy at large were at work. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's window on Korea provides a peripheral but crucial perspective on the operations of late US hegemony and the contradictions that ultimately corrode it.Trade Review"A bravura display of associative invention, developing new knowledge in a gymnastic and improvisational recombination of films and ideas whose secret relation was previously invisible. Like a movie, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon brings things to light in a series of brilliant images and insights." -- Joshua Clover * University of California, Davis *"Vicious Circuits is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between aesthetics and economics. Contemporary films of all kinds become denser with meaning and filled with surfaces that reflect back to the viewer the rapidly transforming financial world in which we find ourselves." -- Min Hyoung Song * Boston College *"Vicious Circuits is not just a book about contemporary Korean cinema. It's a fine execution of cultural studies in general that I'd want to assign to my students. Each chapter showcases Jeon's eye for detail, witty phrasing, and lucid synthesis of cutting edge scholarship in a variety of fields, from film theory to critical finance and transnational American studies." -- Colleen Lye, University of California * Berkeley *"Compellingly argued, especially through close readings of individual films...the volume asserts convincingly that IMF cinema reflects and demonstrates the underlying themes of the transition from a world economy centered in the US to one centered in Asia...Recommended."––K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICE"[S]eamless transitions between personal and imperial, material and ideological, are what makes Jeon's critique truly dazzling; he has mastered the art of scalar leaps and dives....Vicious Circuitssucceeds in disclosing why a transnational perspective—not just regarding the selection of the films, but also with regard to the book's post-imperial optic—proves indispensable for film studies and cultural studies." -- Chang-Min You * Los Angeles Review of Books *"As the US continues to face the unravelling of its neoliberal-imperialist agendas, the global film industry will, too, continue to reflect and instantiate the mutation of its hegemonic strategies. Vicious Circuits offers a crucial vantage on those mutations, neither privileging their appearance nor subordinating it to the aesthetic materials with which contemporary cinema conveys an unprecedentedly volatile moment of global integration." -- Maria Bose * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Concrete Memories: Historiography, Nostalgia, and Archive in Memories of Murder chapter abstractThis chapter examines Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder and its forceful articulation of post-IMF historical anxiety in Korea. In fictionalizing the infamously unsolved Hwaseong serial murders in the Korean countryside that occurred between 1986 and 1991, Memories of Murder employs and then jettisons detective genre conventions as a way of testing and then dismissing hermeneutic methods for making sense of the newly disorienting present. The film's interest is thus methodological, using the failure of investigation as a way drawing attention away from hermeneutic dead ends in favor of a materialist orientation in which film apparatus is understood to be the concrete product of a political economy that invariably indexes the conditions that determine it. Its historiographic method moves us then from serial to system, away from recursive killings that no one can explain toward an understanding that makes sense of larger schema. 2Company Men: Salarymen and Corporate Gangsters in Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life chapter abstractThis chapter considers the abrupt social reorganization prompted by the IMF Crisis, focusing on the figure of the salaryman in Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy—particularly in Oldboy (2003)—and its extension in post-IMF gangster films, what I term kkangp'ae films. One of the most visible figures in the aftermath of the crisis, the despondent salaryman, having lost his job, becomes in these films a launch point for a critical effort to think abstractly about exploitation in the credit relationship in a period when national debt gave rise to consumer debt. The salaryman in these films, however, is also a reification that disavows systemic understandings of debt in favor of individual understandings that are consistently rendered intelligible as personal rather than structural pathologies. So although these films intuit the transformative changes accelerated by the IMF Crisis, they remain constrained by the reification that both accesses and limits their view. 3Segyehwa Punk: Subsistence Faming and Human Capital in Looking for Bruce Lee chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the phenomenon of Korean punk rock as represented in Lone Kang's independent film Looking for Bruce Lee. Less a misanthropic youth and more a new kind of worker, the segyehwa punk becomes an ideal figure for a new labor logic in a globalized Korean marketplace that privileges human capital over the forms of security implicit in the false promises of lifetime employment that were once proffered by Korea's chaebŏl. Although these figures understand their relationship to the world already in globalized terms, they also disavow its material realities. The fantasy of human capital, however, can only partially elide the reality of a collapsing youth job market. Under the rubric of what I call subsistence faming, this fantasy, despite itself, reveals itself to be a survival strategy amid bleak alternatives. 4The Surface of Finance: Digital Touching in Take Care of My Cat chapter abstractThis chapter centers the depiction of gendered labor in Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat (2001), in which the film's five protagonists, all young women seeking to enter the workforce, seem to actively participate in the logics that make their own labor obsolete. The chapter focuses specifically on the representation of technological remediation that abounds in the film and is epitomized by a trope in which text messages among the young women appear on various diegetic surfaces, like windows and buildings. Such intermedial representations become a way of thinking about the problem of integrating the young women into a changing economy. The disparity between the growing technology and infrastructure in the film, on the one hand, and the limited prospects of the women, on the other, suggests that despite their fantasies of remediation, a more likely fate is obsolescence. 5Math Monsters: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in The Host, HERs, and D-War chapter abstractMoving from a focus on films that foreground post-IMF social reorganization to those that seem to engage directly the systemic mechanisms of late US hegemony, the underlying material infrastructures, and protocols that facilitate and govern the new economic order in the Republic of Korea, this chapter traces the overlapping recursive logics of CGI (computer-generated imagery) cinema, US military technology, and contemporary finance, as presented explicitly in the blockbuster monster films The Host (2006) and D-War (2007), and obliquely in the independent diasporic film, HERs (2007). All of these films self-reflexively index the algorithmic and mathematical procedures that link contemporary filmmaking to military and financial technologies. As a result, the surprising interplay of what might initially seem like three discrete realms of production reveals a deeper systemic logic that has driven the attempt to reproduce US power past its expiration date. 6Wire Aesthetics: Tube Entertainment's Flops and Hegemonic Protocols chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the wire shot, the increasingly clichéd first-person point-of-view shot of imagined wire traversal in contemporary action cinema. These reifications index while disavowing the material history of the massive physical network of subterranean and undersea cables, first built by the US military, that might serve as a figure for a desire in late US hegemony to reproduce itself at the moment of decline, in a manner similar to the British All Red Line system of telegraph cables in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a trio of films by the Korean production company Tube Entertainment, all of which flopped at the box office, this chapter examines the way in which post-IMF Korean culture encodes the protocols of US financialization as the culmination of a long history of imbrication between transportation infrastructure, communications networks, and capital circulation. Coda: Hegemonic Pork chapter abstractThe coda briefly explores the afterlife and relevance of Korea's IMF Cinema in contemporary Korean cinema, looking specifically at Bong Joon-ho's second foray into Hollywood coproduction in his 2017 film Okja in relation to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) that same year. Made in conjunction with Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and released simultaneously in theaters and on the U.S.-based streaming service Netflix, Okja is a transnational production explicitly about global commodity distribution that reflects on its own status in the global marketplace at the moment it seems about to close. Its choice of topic (global pork distribution) points to the conspicuous absence in the film, that is, China, which makes up one-half of the global pork market. Okja is thus a post-TPP film that thinks about what a world system would look like without US hegemony to center it.
£100.00
Stanford University Press Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End
Book SynopsisIn December of 1997, the International Monetary Fund announced the largest bailout package in its history, aimed at stabilizing the South Korean economy in response to a credit and currency crisis of the same year. Vicious Circuits examines what it terms "Korea's IMF Cinema," the decade of cinema following that crisis, in order to think through the transformations of global political economy at the end of the American century. It argues that one of the most dominant traits of the cinema that emerged after the worst economic crisis in the history of South Korea was its preoccupation with economic phenomena. As the quintessentially corporate art form—made as much in the boardroom as in the studio—film in this context became an ideal site for thinking through the global political economy in the transitional moment of American decline and Chinese ascension. With an explicit focus of state economic policy, IMF cinema did not just depict the economy; it also was this economy's material embodiment. That is, it both represented economic developments and was itself an important sector in which the same pressures and changes affecting the economy at large were at work. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's window on Korea provides a peripheral but crucial perspective on the operations of late US hegemony and the contradictions that ultimately corrode it.Trade Review"A bravura display of associative invention, developing new knowledge in a gymnastic and improvisational recombination of films and ideas whose secret relation was previously invisible. Like a movie, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon brings things to light in a series of brilliant images and insights." -- Joshua Clover * University of California, Davis *"Vicious Circuits is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between aesthetics and economics. Contemporary films of all kinds become denser with meaning and filled with surfaces that reflect back to the viewer the rapidly transforming financial world in which we find ourselves." -- Min Hyoung Song * Boston College *"Vicious Circuits is not just a book about contemporary Korean cinema. It's a fine execution of cultural studies in general that I'd want to assign to my students. Each chapter showcases Jeon's eye for detail, witty phrasing, and lucid synthesis of cutting edge scholarship in a variety of fields, from film theory to critical finance and transnational American studies." -- Colleen Lye, University of California * Berkeley *"Compellingly argued, especially through close readings of individual films...the volume asserts convincingly that IMF cinema reflects and demonstrates the underlying themes of the transition from a world economy centered in the US to one centered in Asia...Recommended."––K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICE"[S]eamless transitions between personal and imperial, material and ideological, are what makes Jeon's critique truly dazzling; he has mastered the art of scalar leaps and dives....Vicious Circuitssucceeds in disclosing why a transnational perspective—not just regarding the selection of the films, but also with regard to the book's post-imperial optic—proves indispensable for film studies and cultural studies." -- Chang-Min You * Los Angeles Review of Books *"As the US continues to face the unravelling of its neoliberal-imperialist agendas, the global film industry will, too, continue to reflect and instantiate the mutation of its hegemonic strategies. Vicious Circuits offers a crucial vantage on those mutations, neither privileging their appearance nor subordinating it to the aesthetic materials with which contemporary cinema conveys an unprecedentedly volatile moment of global integration." -- Maria Bose * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Concrete Memories: Historiography, Nostalgia, and Archive in Memories of Murder chapter abstractThis chapter examines Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder and its forceful articulation of post-IMF historical anxiety in Korea. In fictionalizing the infamously unsolved Hwaseong serial murders in the Korean countryside that occurred between 1986 and 1991, Memories of Murder employs and then jettisons detective genre conventions as a way of testing and then dismissing hermeneutic methods for making sense of the newly disorienting present. The film's interest is thus methodological, using the failure of investigation as a way drawing attention away from hermeneutic dead ends in favor of a materialist orientation in which film apparatus is understood to be the concrete product of a political economy that invariably indexes the conditions that determine it. Its historiographic method moves us then from serial to system, away from recursive killings that no one can explain toward an understanding that makes sense of larger schema. 2Company Men: Salarymen and Corporate Gangsters in Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life chapter abstractThis chapter considers the abrupt social reorganization prompted by the IMF Crisis, focusing on the figure of the salaryman in Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy—particularly in Oldboy (2003)—and its extension in post-IMF gangster films, what I term kkangp'ae films. One of the most visible figures in the aftermath of the crisis, the despondent salaryman, having lost his job, becomes in these films a launch point for a critical effort to think abstractly about exploitation in the credit relationship in a period when national debt gave rise to consumer debt. The salaryman in these films, however, is also a reification that disavows systemic understandings of debt in favor of individual understandings that are consistently rendered intelligible as personal rather than structural pathologies. So although these films intuit the transformative changes accelerated by the IMF Crisis, they remain constrained by the reification that both accesses and limits their view. 3Segyehwa Punk: Subsistence Faming and Human Capital in Looking for Bruce Lee chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the phenomenon of Korean punk rock as represented in Lone Kang's independent film Looking for Bruce Lee. Less a misanthropic youth and more a new kind of worker, the segyehwa punk becomes an ideal figure for a new labor logic in a globalized Korean marketplace that privileges human capital over the forms of security implicit in the false promises of lifetime employment that were once proffered by Korea's chaebŏl. Although these figures understand their relationship to the world already in globalized terms, they also disavow its material realities. The fantasy of human capital, however, can only partially elide the reality of a collapsing youth job market. Under the rubric of what I call subsistence faming, this fantasy, despite itself, reveals itself to be a survival strategy amid bleak alternatives. 4The Surface of Finance: Digital Touching in Take Care of My Cat chapter abstractThis chapter centers the depiction of gendered labor in Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat (2001), in which the film's five protagonists, all young women seeking to enter the workforce, seem to actively participate in the logics that make their own labor obsolete. The chapter focuses specifically on the representation of technological remediation that abounds in the film and is epitomized by a trope in which text messages among the young women appear on various diegetic surfaces, like windows and buildings. Such intermedial representations become a way of thinking about the problem of integrating the young women into a changing economy. The disparity between the growing technology and infrastructure in the film, on the one hand, and the limited prospects of the women, on the other, suggests that despite their fantasies of remediation, a more likely fate is obsolescence. 5Math Monsters: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in The Host, HERs, and D-War chapter abstractMoving from a focus on films that foreground post-IMF social reorganization to those that seem to engage directly the systemic mechanisms of late US hegemony, the underlying material infrastructures, and protocols that facilitate and govern the new economic order in the Republic of Korea, this chapter traces the overlapping recursive logics of CGI (computer-generated imagery) cinema, US military technology, and contemporary finance, as presented explicitly in the blockbuster monster films The Host (2006) and D-War (2007), and obliquely in the independent diasporic film, HERs (2007). All of these films self-reflexively index the algorithmic and mathematical procedures that link contemporary filmmaking to military and financial technologies. As a result, the surprising interplay of what might initially seem like three discrete realms of production reveals a deeper systemic logic that has driven the attempt to reproduce US power past its expiration date. 6Wire Aesthetics: Tube Entertainment's Flops and Hegemonic Protocols chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the wire shot, the increasingly clichéd first-person point-of-view shot of imagined wire traversal in contemporary action cinema. These reifications index while disavowing the material history of the massive physical network of subterranean and undersea cables, first built by the US military, that might serve as a figure for a desire in late US hegemony to reproduce itself at the moment of decline, in a manner similar to the British All Red Line system of telegraph cables in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a trio of films by the Korean production company Tube Entertainment, all of which flopped at the box office, this chapter examines the way in which post-IMF Korean culture encodes the protocols of US financialization as the culmination of a long history of imbrication between transportation infrastructure, communications networks, and capital circulation. Coda: Hegemonic Pork chapter abstractThe coda briefly explores the afterlife and relevance of Korea's IMF Cinema in contemporary Korean cinema, looking specifically at Bong Joon-ho's second foray into Hollywood coproduction in his 2017 film Okja in relation to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) that same year. Made in conjunction with Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and released simultaneously in theaters and on the U.S.-based streaming service Netflix, Okja is a transnational production explicitly about global commodity distribution that reflects on its own status in the global marketplace at the moment it seems about to close. Its choice of topic (global pork distribution) points to the conspicuous absence in the film, that is, China, which makes up one-half of the global pork market. Okja is thus a post-TPP film that thinks about what a world system would look like without US hegemony to center it.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it Real in
Book SynopsisIn recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous. In The Authenticity Industries, journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters.Trade Review"This book offers a compelling, important inside view of how professional image-makers perceive and attempt to manufacture authenticity. An ambitious survey of the rising currency of 'authenticity' in contemporary life."—Laurie Ouellette, author of Lifestyle TV"This book is crisp and often playful, yet theoretically and historically robust. The interviews with the people who work to produce authenticity make this a truly unique and compelling book—a must-read for those in the media and cultural industries."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, coauthor of Believability"An incredibly engaging, deeply researched book that details just how our taken-for-granted mediated realities are strategized, constructed, and managed—and provides necessary solid ground for understanding how perceptions of authenticity shape 21st-century American life."—Emily Hund, author of The Influencer Industry"Serazio adds a crucial industrial perspective to the growing literature on authenticity in contemporary culture. He pulls back the curtain on fascinating, tension-filled considerations that drive industry practitioners to craft and parade various versions of authenticity in the media."—Joseph Turow, author of The Voice Catchers"Written with Serazio's trademark eloquence and drawing on insights from politics to pop music, and from industrialists to influencers, this timely and incisive book reveals why the ideal of authenticity animates so many spheres of social and civic life."—Brooke Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love"A fascinating, commended academic exploration of the ways in which products and experiences are marketed to consumers."—Library Journal"The internet now feels like a place whose sole purpose is selling you something. And it's not going to change—in fact, it's going to get much, much worse... [Serazio] explores the commodification of identity, why 'selling out' has no meaning anymore, and why amateurs—that is to say, regular people on social media—make the most effective salespeople."—Rebecca Jennings, VoxTable of ContentsIntroduction: Our Enduring Quest for Authenticity 1. Casting Reality Television: Stages of Self-Disclosure 2. Social Media Designs: The Amateur Ideal 3. Pop Music's Sponsorship Play: The Art of Selling Out 4. The Commercial Brand Sell: Humanizing the Corporate 5. The Rise of Influencers: Corporatizing the Human 6. Performative Politics: Unscripting the Identity Show 7. Populist Politics: Technologies of Informality Conclusion: The Business of Keeping it 'Real'
£23.39
Stanford University Press Performing Chinatown
Book SynopsisIn 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM''s The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At
£77.35
University of Minnesota Press Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s
Book SynopsisCinema without Reflection traces an implicit film theory in Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, especially in his frequent invocation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Derrida’s reflections on the economies of image and sound that reverberate in this story, along with the spectral dialectics of love, mirrors, and poiesis, serve as the basis for a theory of cinema that Derrida perhaps secretly imagined. Following Derrida’s interventions on Echo and Narcissus across his thought on the visual arts, Akira Mizuta Lippit seeks to return to a theory of cinema adrift in Derrida’s philosophy. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.Trade Review"As media historians seek to understand familiar notions of realism and spectatorship in terms of ethics, participatory relations, and other such criteria, this excavation of Derrida's thinking on and through cinema by Lippit makes a timely and excellent contribution."—Film Quarterly
£9.00
University of Minnesota Press Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary
Book SynopsisThe turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries.De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected sex work and sex workers. Throughout, Sexography analyzes the films of a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and their documentary historiography.De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and consuming films about sex work.Trade Review"Nicholas de Villiers’s deeply felt and sharply focused transcultural purview of documentary representations of sex work is all the more urgent at a historical moment that threatens to close down not only desire and difference but also documentary’s historical aspirations toward democracy and social justice. The critical questions he raises extend far beyond the narrow bounds of the selected films as he behooves us to join him in trying to answer them."—Thomas Waugh, Concordia University"Unlike former work focusing on prostitutes as characters in film, Nicholas de Villiers launches an entirely new discourse around the motivations, inventions, and methods of sex worker cinema in this groundbreaking book. His integration of perspectives of both non-sex-worker filmmakers and films made by sex workers is absolutely crucial. In a book that's been a long time coming, de Villiers embraces the 'whore’s eye view' of experiential makers and presents an inquiry that is central to investigations of politics, political art, and empowerment."—Carol Leigh, producer of Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes"de Villiers has sought to be, as he says, “a queer ally” to sex workers — meaning that he seeks to assist in the process of destigmatization and to problematize the discourse of sex worker as victim. In a world that is dominated by anti-sex work bias, such an analysis is sorely needed."—Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsContentsPreface. Venus: Paris Is BurningIntroduction: How Much Does It Cost for Cinema to Tell the Truth of Sex?1. Street Talk and Love: Pasolini’s Cinéma Vérité in Comizi d’amore2. Confession Porn: Wiktor Grodecki’s Body without Soul and Not Angels but Angels3. Save Us from Saviors: Reflexive Feminist Documentary and Shohini Ghosh’s Tales of the Night Fairies4. Gray Mornings of Tolerance: Cui Zi’en’s Night Scene and Queer China, “Comrade” China5. Truth under the Uniform: Youth and Sexuality in Hideaki Anno’s Love & PopConclusion. Plot Twists: Live Nude Girls, Unite!AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£23.39
University of Minnesota Press Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early
Book SynopsisA daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive. Katherine Groo daringly takes readers to the margins of the film record, addressing the undertheorization of film history and offering a rigorous corrective. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful. Rather than filling holes, Groo endeavors to understand the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Bad Film Histories draws on numerous works of ethnographic cinema, from Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, to a Citroën-sponsored “croisière” across Africa, to the extensive archives of the Maison Lumière and the Musée Albert-Kahn, to dozens of expedition films from the 1910s and 1920s. The project is deeply grounded in poststructural approaches to history, and throughout Groo draws on these frameworks to offer innovative and accessible readings that explain ethnographic cinema’s destabilizing energies.As Groo describes, ethnographic works are mostly untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and largely unrestored even in their digital afterlives. Her examination of ethnographic cinema provides necessary new thought for both film scholars and those who are thrilled by cinema’s boundless possibilities. In so doing, she boldly reexamines what early ethnographic cinema is and how these films produce meaning, challenging the foundations of film history and prevailing approaches to the archive.Trade Review"Stimulating and necessary . . . Bad Film Histories makes an important theoretical intervention into early cinema history. Katherine Groo prompts us to question our assumptions—to throw away the film-historical map—and to keep moving along multiple trajectories."—Alice Maurice, author of The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema"With this book, Katherine Groo establishes the necessary and productive incoherence of film historical inquiry by insisting on certain structuring non-relations between artifact and historical knowledge, between ethnographic subject and scientific investigator, between film and its content, and between the world and its index. Bad Film Histories devastatingly reveals how our current film historical knowledge is entirely without basis, leaving us to wonder what today might constitute an adequate account of the cinema; the solution—as Groo brilliantly argues—is that this is precisely the wrong question to ask."—Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s AmericaTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Untimely Historiographies, Ethnographic Particularities1. Of Other Archives: The Excursive Minors of La Maison Lumière and Les Archives de la Planète 2. Historical Figures: Dance and the Unlettered Line3. Following Derrida: Ethnocinematic Animals, Death Effects, and the Supplement of Expedition Cinema 4. Language Games, or the World Intertitled5. Ethnography Won’t Wait: New Media and Material HistoriesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£80.00
University of Minnesota Press Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early
Book SynopsisA daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive. Katherine Groo daringly takes readers to the margins of the film record, addressing the undertheorization of film history and offering a rigorous corrective. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful. Rather than filling holes, Groo endeavors to understand the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Bad Film Histories draws on numerous works of ethnographic cinema, from Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, to a Citroën-sponsored “croisière” across Africa, to the extensive archives of the Maison Lumière and the Musée Albert-Kahn, to dozens of expedition films from the 1910s and 1920s. The project is deeply grounded in poststructural approaches to history, and throughout Groo draws on these frameworks to offer innovative and accessible readings that explain ethnographic cinema’s destabilizing energies.As Groo describes, ethnographic works are mostly untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and largely unrestored even in their digital afterlives. Her examination of ethnographic cinema provides necessary new thought for both film scholars and those who are thrilled by cinema’s boundless possibilities. In so doing, she boldly reexamines what early ethnographic cinema is and how these films produce meaning, challenging the foundations of film history and prevailing approaches to the archive.Trade Review"Stimulating and necessary . . . Bad Film Histories makes an important theoretical intervention into early cinema history. Katherine Groo prompts us to question our assumptions—to throw away the film-historical map—and to keep moving along multiple trajectories."—Alice Maurice, author of The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema"With this book, Katherine Groo establishes the necessary and productive incoherence of film historical inquiry by insisting on certain structuring non-relations between artifact and historical knowledge, between ethnographic subject and scientific investigator, between film and its content, and between the world and its index. Bad Film Histories devastatingly reveals how our current film historical knowledge is entirely without basis, leaving us to wonder what today might constitute an adequate account of the cinema; the solution—as Groo brilliantly argues—is that this is precisely the wrong question to ask."—Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s AmericaTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Untimely Historiographies, Ethnographic Particularities1. Of Other Archives: The Excursive Minors of La Maison Lumière and Les Archives de la Planète 2. Historical Figures: Dance and the Unlettered Line3. Following Derrida: Ethnocinematic Animals, Death Effects, and the Supplement of Expedition Cinema 4. Language Games, or the World Intertitled5. Ethnography Won’t Wait: New Media and Material HistoriesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and
Book SynopsisTelevision has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. Utopian Television examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of its existing practices.Utopian Television illustrates how each director imagined television’s improved or “utopian” version by drawing on elements that had come to characterize it by the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the public service model of Western European broadcasting, each used television to realize works that would never have been viable in the commercial cinema. All three directors likewise seized on television’s supposed affinity for information and its status as a “useful” medium, but attempted to join this utility with aesthetic experimentation, suggesting new ways to conceive of the relationship between aesthetics and information.As beautifully written as it is theoretically rigorous, Utopian Television turns to the writing of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch in treating the three directors’ television experiments as enactments of “utopia as method.” In doing so it reveals the extent to which the medium inspired and shaped hopes not only of a better future but of better moving image art as well.Trade Review"Both theoretical treatise and intellectual history, Michael Cramer’s intervention matches the utopian vision of its subject as he efficiently and astutely navigates us through the thorny politics of art cinema."—Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick"Michael Cramer's fine book explores those paths not taken that define a genre, that interplay between film and TV pioneered by Rossellini in service of a now utopian social pedagogy. Peter Watkins' understudied work, along with Rossellini's experiments—unfamiliar to those who only know him through the early masterpieces—throw a wholly new light on Godard himself, and Cramer's luminous readings of the works are as stimulating as his overall theorization of this new, or perhaps missed, form."—Fredric Jameson, Duke University"Rich and theoretically rigorous text."—CHOICE"Cramer has done an invaluable service to those of us who esteem these works, contextualising them through contemporary writing and interviews by the filmmaker."—Sight and Sound"Michael Cramer’s new book, Utopian Television, is an impressively constructed work of scholarship that does more than display certain utopian trends in its three subjects; it traces a discursive movement of utopian thinking through technologies. The book is a dynamic and engaging work that will be of interest to more than television scholars, dealing with movements between cinema and television, concepts of the image, and in-depth discussions of auteurs."—Senses of CinemaTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction. The Land beyond Cinema: Television and Utopian Method1. The Promise of Television: Making Utopia Possible2. Television as Enlightenment: Roberto Rossellini’s History Lessons3. Inform, Educate, and Aestheticize: Peter Watkins at the BBC4. Radical Communications: Jean-Luc Godard on and around Television5. Utopia after Television: Media Mutations and TransplantationsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£23.39
University of Minnesota Press Film as Philosophy
Book SynopsisFilm and philosophy have much in common, and books have been written on film and philosophy. But can films be, or do, philosophy? Can they “think”? Film as Philosophy is the first book to explore this fascinating question historically, thematically, and methodically.Bringing together leading scholars from universities across the globe, Film as Philosophy presents major new research that leads film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue. It provides a uniquely sweeping, historical overview of the confluence of film and philosophy for more than a century, considering films from Jean Renoir, Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, and others; the written works of filmmakers who also theorized on the medium, including Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein; and others who have written on cinema, including Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and many more. Representing a major step toward establishing a media philosophy that puts the status, role, and function of film into a new perspective, Film as Philosophy removes representational techniques from the center of inquiry, replacing these with the medium’s ability to “think.” Hence it accords film with “agency,” and the dialogue between it and philosophy (and even neuroscience) is negotiated anew.Contributors: Nicole Brenez, U of Paris 3–Sorbonne; Elisabeth Bronfen, U of Zurich; Noël Carroll, CUNY; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology; Gregory Flaxman, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Alex Ling, Western Sydney U; Adrian Martin, Monash U; John Ó Maoilearca, Kingston U, London; Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie U, Sydney; Murray Smith, U of Kent, Canterbury; Julia Vassilieva, Monash U, Melbourne; Christophe Wall-Romana, U of Minnesota; and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College.Trade Review"The essays in this superb collection show how contradictory and even imaginary the field is. Highly recommended."—CHOICE"Film As Philosophy offers the reader a productive set of ideas for navigating today’s post-everything landscape."—Leonardo "This is a dense but very instructive volume for both novice and knowledgeable readers interested in the relation of film and philosophy. These essays offer a comprehensive range of theoretical accounts and genealogies that explore the film-philosophy encounter as one that elicits fruitful and open possibilities of thought." —European Journal of American Studies"The essays in this superb collection show how contradictory and even imaginary the field is. Highly recommended."—CHOICE"Film as Philosophy offers the reader a productive set of ideas for navigating today’s post-everything landscape."—Leonardo"Film as Philosophy is a big book, in more ways than one, and a strong contribution to the debate about whether film can actually do the work of philosophy."—Film International"This is a dense but very instructive volume for both novice and knowledgeable readers interested in the relation of film and philosophy. These essays offer a comprehensive range of theoretical accounts and genealogies that explore the film-philosophy encounter as one that elicits fruitful and open possibilities of thought."—European Journal of American Studies"Film as Philosophy represents a remarkable achievement, providing a unique overview of its subject that at once serves as an illuminating introduction for those unfamiliar with the field, and advances our understanding of film as a cognitive rather than a purely representational phenomenon–of film as philosophy."—Film-Philosophy Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction. Film and/as Philosophy: An Elective Affinity? Bernd Herzogenrath 1. Striking Poses: Gesture, Image, and Remake in the Cinematic Bergson John Ó Maoilearca 2. Hugo Münsterberg, Film, and Philosophy Robert Sinnerbrink 3. Different, Even Wholly Irrational Arguments: The Film-Philosophy of Béla Balázs Adrian Martin 4. This is Your Brain on Cinema: Antonin Artaud Gregory Flaxman 5. From Lyrosophy to “Anti-Philosophy”: The Thought of Cinema in Jean Epstein Christophe Wall-Romana 6. Montage Eisenstein: Mind the Gap Julia Vassilieva 7. André Bazin’s Film Theory and the History of Ideas Angela Dalle Vacche 8. Strange Topologics: Deleuze Takes a Ride Down David Lynch’s Lost Highway Bernd Herzogenrath 9. Hurray for Hollywood: Philosophy and Cinema According to Stanley Cavell Elisabeth Bronfen 10. Thinking Cinema with Alain Badiou Alex Ling 11. Thinking as Feast: Raymonde Carasco Nicole Brenez 12. Rancière’s Film Theory as Deviation Tom Conley 13. Movie-Made Philosophy Noël Carroll 14. “Not Time’s Fool”: Marriage as an Ethical Relationship in Michael Haneke’s AmourThomas E. Wartenberg 15. Experience and Explanation in the Cinema Murray Smith Acknowledgments Contributors Index
£23.39
University of Minnesota Press Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the
Book SynopsisA cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists.Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers—Will Burtin, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, among others—at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century’s exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age.Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle—and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.Trade Review"Happiness by Design is a fascinating contribution to the fate of modernisms at midcentury. Justus Nieland unpacks the cheery products of Eames-era modern design as they manifest in material objects, in experimental films and multi-screen media, and in new forms of knowledge-making at conferences and lectures. He weaves all of this together in a rich and often surprising intellectual history of the midcentury ‘good life’ that questions how designers’ attempts to fashion human happiness quickly devolved into sad stories and risky futures."—Lynn Spigel, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television"Happiness by Design is an astonishingly rich and inventive book. It immerses us in a world of midcentury modernism that feels connected to our present but is shaped by ideas and hopes we have perhaps forgotten. Justus Nieland has written a fantastic cultural history of the artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals who not only created some of the most iconic works of the period, but also whole environments filled with media and technologies actually designed to make life better."—Mark Goble, author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life"Who doesn’t want to be happy? Justus Nieland’s brilliant book exposes the political and aesthetic stakes of this seemingly innocent desire voiced by so many of us in the present. Breaking new ground in film studies, Happiness by Design builds an account of how happiness became a technology, medium, and measure of human well-being and security. Happiness, in this book, is not just an emotion—it is a technique that has become central to how we imagine not only who we are but how we will survive in a rapidly changing world."—Orit Halpern, author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 "The book’s design reinforces its subjects’ focus on knowledge organization and delivery."—ARLIS/NA Reviews"A dazzling array of theorizing on the plight of the world and the roles of designers and theoreticians in it."—CHOICE"Happiness by Design is an astonishingly rich portrait of an era whose reinvention of happiness out of global disaster might help chart out our own life among the ruins."—American Literary History"Lusciously illustrated . . . this book invites historians of design to consider the interdisciplinary practices and media techniques that shaped twentieth-century modernist design in the US and offers an invaluable resource for media scholars interested in the ways that design culture shaped period media practices. A wonderful read."—Design and Culture "Adventurous readers as well as film enthusiasts wishing to understand the medium in a much-wider context will find a veritable treasure trove of information."—Film International "Extensively researched and richly illustrated, Happiness by Design is a fascinating and inventive approach to the transformations of modernism at midcentury."—Synoptique"Throughout this probe into designers’ media experiments and their involvement in the organization of culture, Nieland employs his own organizational techniques, engaging midcentury discourses and reckonings with technology and information."—CAA Reviews"A dazzling intellectual history of a period marked by creative ferment and interdisciplinary collaboration... the result should change the way we think about our own disciplinary history."—Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
£30.60
University of Minnesota Press Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of
Book SynopsisAn archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean PainlevéBefore Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects. Zoological Surrealism draws from Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints. From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.Trade Review"Reading Jean Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The ‘cinematic nature’ of Painlevé’s world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether."—Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene "A remarkable study of Jean Painlevé’s cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill’s study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought."—Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems of Modernity: Dr. Normet’s Serum: Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog and The Vampire5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins and The Blood of the BeastsConclusion: Unfinished Revolutions, Untimely NatureAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies
Book SynopsisAn important new approach to the study of laboratories, presenting a practical method for understanding labs in all walks of life From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.Organized by interpretive categories such as space, infrastructure, and imaginaries, The Lab Book uses both historical and contemporary examples to show how laboratories have become fundamentally connected to changes in the contemporary university. Its wide reach includes institutions like the MIT Media Lab, the Tuskegee Institute’s Jesup Wagon, ACTLab, and the Media Archaeological Fundus. The authors cover topics such as the evolution and delineation of lab-based communities, how labs’ tools and technologies contribute to defining their space, and a glossary of key hybrid lab techniques.Providing rich historical breadth and depth, The Lab Book brings into focus a critical, but often misunderstood, aspect of the contemporary arts and humanities. Trade Review"Lively, timely, and filled with vivid examples, The Lab Book is a highly readable and critically sophisticated account of current lab culture. Written by three distinguished practitioners, it examines the rhetoric that links real and imaginary ideas of experimentality with systems of power and authority across a surprising range of disciplines. A fun, smart, useful guide to ongoing work in media studies."—Johanna Drucker, author of Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to DisplayTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Everything Is a LabCase Study: The French Language Lab (Middlebury College, U.S.)1. Lab SpaceCase Study: Menlo Park Laboratory (Menlo Park, U.S.)Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 1 (MIT, U.S.)Case Study: Media Archaeological Fundus (Humboldt University, Germany)2. Lab ApparatusCase Study: The Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University, Germany)Case Study: The Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.)3. Lab InfrastructureCase Study: Home Economics Labs and Extension on the Canadian Prairies (Manitoba, Canada)Case Study: Black Laboratories and Agricultural Extension4. Lab PeopleCase Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 2 (MIT, U.S.)Case Study: ActLab (University of Texas Austin, U.S.)5. Lab ImaginariesCase Study: Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and ParapsychologyCase Study: Bell Labs, A Factory for Ideas6. Lab TechniquesConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex
£86.40
University of Minnesota Press Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left
Book SynopsisAn integrated look at the political films of the 1960s and ’70s and how the New Left transformed cinema A timely reassessment of political film culture in the 1960s and ’70s, Enduring Images examines international cinematic movements of the New Left in light of sweeping cultural and economic changes of that era. Looking at new forms of cinematic resistance—including detailed readings of particular films, collectives, and movements—Morgan Adamson makes a case for cinema’s centrality to the global New Left. Enduring Images details how student, labor, anti-imperialist, Black Power, and second-wave feminist movements broke with auteur cinema and sought to forge local and international solidarities by producing political essay films, generating new ways of being and thinking in common. Adamson produces a comparative and theoretical account of New Left cinema that engages with discussions of work, debt, information, and resistance. Enduring Images argues that the cinemas of the New Left are sites to examine, through the lens of struggle, the reshaping of global capitalism during the pivotal moment in which they were made, while at the same time exploring how these movements endure in contemporary culture and politics. Including in-depth discussions of Third Cinema in Argentina, feminist cinema in Italy, Newsreel movements in the United States, and cybernetics in early video, Enduring Images is an essential examination of the political films of the 1960s and ’70s.Trade Review"Enduring Images is a powerful and nuanced re-reading of the New Left, viewed through the triptych of critical theory, radical politics, and documentary film."—Jonathan Kahana, author of Intelligence Work and editor of The Documentary Film Reader"Morgan Adamson’s elegant and fascinating study shows how the cinematic image was an important weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite the effects of the counter-revolution that followed, the legacy of those cinematic experiments is still alive today, a resource for generating new ways of knowing the world and, perhaps, transforming it."—Michael Hardt, Duke University"Adamson's book is the best overall history to date of this important subject."—CHOICE"The interventions of Enduring Images, taken together, “seek resistance to the present,” as Deleuze would have it, and in so doing remain, productively, fascinatingly, unfinished."—Film Quarterly"Adamson conveys a hope that cinema, especially at the fringes, will continue to play an important role in radicalizing its viewers."—HyperallergicTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The New Left’s Essay Film: From Subjective Expression to Collective Insurgency2. Toward a New Mode of Study: The Student New Left and the Occupation of Cinema3. Finally Got the News at the End of the Short American Century4. Italian Feminist Collectives and the “Unexpected Subject”5. Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare: Early Video and the Ambivalence of Information6. Inflation of the Image; or, The Image of Revolution in the 1970sEpilogue: A Future History?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left
Book SynopsisAn integrated look at the political films of the 1960s and ’70s and how the New Left transformed cinema A timely reassessment of political film culture in the 1960s and ’70s, Enduring Images examines international cinematic movements of the New Left in light of sweeping cultural and economic changes of that era. Looking at new forms of cinematic resistance—including detailed readings of particular films, collectives, and movements—Morgan Adamson makes a case for cinema’s centrality to the global New Left. Enduring Images details how student, labor, anti-imperialist, Black Power, and second-wave feminist movements broke with auteur cinema and sought to forge local and international solidarities by producing political essay films, generating new ways of being and thinking in common. Adamson produces a comparative and theoretical account of New Left cinema that engages with discussions of work, debt, information, and resistance. Enduring Images argues that the cinemas of the New Left are sites to examine, through the lens of struggle, the reshaping of global capitalism during the pivotal moment in which they were made, while at the same time exploring how these movements endure in contemporary culture and politics. Including in-depth discussions of Third Cinema in Argentina, feminist cinema in Italy, Newsreel movements in the United States, and cybernetics in early video, Enduring Images is an essential examination of the political films of the 1960s and ’70s.Trade Review"Enduring Images is a powerful and nuanced re-reading of the New Left, viewed through the triptych of critical theory, radical politics, and documentary film."—Jonathan Kahana, author of Intelligence Work and editor of The Documentary Film Reader"Morgan Adamson’s elegant and fascinating study shows how the cinematic image was an important weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite the effects of the counter-revolution that followed, the legacy of those cinematic experiments is still alive today, a resource for generating new ways of knowing the world and, perhaps, transforming it."—Michael Hardt, Duke University"Adamson's book is the best overall history to date of this important subject."—CHOICE"The interventions of Enduring Images, taken together, “seek resistance to the present,” as Deleuze would have it, and in so doing remain, productively, fascinatingly, unfinished."—Film Quarterly"Adamson conveys a hope that cinema, especially at the fringes, will continue to play an important role in radicalizing its viewers."—HyperallergicTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The New Left’s Essay Film: From Subjective Expression to Collective Insurgency2. Toward a New Mode of Study: The Student New Left and the Occupation of Cinema3. Finally Got the News at the End of the Short American Century4. Italian Feminist Collectives and the “Unexpected Subject”5. Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare: Early Video and the Ambivalence of Information6. Inflation of the Image; or, The Image of Revolution in the 1970sEpilogue: A Future History?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World
Book SynopsisA fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.Trade Review"Sophisticated and accessible, with a depth and range that lends an impressive resonance, News Parade quickly convinced me that the study of the newsreel is a vital topic in the analysis of American culture. In Joseph Clark's hands, the emergence of spectatorship as a formative dimension of collective identity in the modern world is made clear and articulated in a wide variety of specific historical and social contexts."—Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition"With historians returning at last to the neglected institution of the newsreel, Joseph Clark’s News Parade becomes the key study of this significant element of cinema experience, journalism, and media industries. Lucidly written, it deftly conveys the enormity of six decades of newsfilm production and thousands of hours of surviving footage. This book is the most significant history of American newsreels published in the last fifty years."—Dan Streible, New York University "News Parade should be commended for raising important questions about the future directions that media studies might take... News Parade will certainly be a key reference for the important but underappreciated newsreel medium for the foreseeable future."—Journal of Cinema and Media Studies"A welcome contribution to a scandalously unplowed field in the realm of film studies."—Cineaste MagazineTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction. “History of the Most Graphic and Thrilling Sort”: The History of the Newsreel, The Newsreel as History 1. News Parade: The Logic of the Newsreel System2. Newsreel Realism: Redefining the Real in Motion Picture News3. “Heroes of the Lens”: Newsreel Cameramen, the Sino-Japanese War, and Looking as Action4. “Come Along. We’re Going to the Trans-Lux to Hiss Roosevelt”: Modernity, Virtual Travel and the Newsreel Cinema as Public Forum5. Double Vision: World War Two, Racial Uplift, and Politics of Visibility in the All-American NewsreelConclusion: News Parade’s Gone By?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World
Book SynopsisA fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.Trade Review"Sophisticated and accessible, with a depth and range that lends an impressive resonance, News Parade quickly convinced me that the study of the newsreel is a vital topic in the analysis of American culture. In Joseph Clark's hands, the emergence of spectatorship as a formative dimension of collective identity in the modern world is made clear and articulated in a wide variety of specific historical and social contexts."—Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition"With historians returning at last to the neglected institution of the newsreel, Joseph Clark’s News Parade becomes the key study of this significant element of cinema experience, journalism, and media industries. Lucidly written, it deftly conveys the enormity of six decades of newsfilm production and thousands of hours of surviving footage. This book is the most significant history of American newsreels published in the last fifty years."—Dan Streible, New York University "News Parade should be commended for raising important questions about the future directions that media studies might take... News Parade will certainly be a key reference for the important but underappreciated newsreel medium for the foreseeable future."—Journal of Cinema and Media Studies"A welcome contribution to a scandalously unplowed field in the realm of film studies."—Cineaste MagazineTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction. “History of the Most Graphic and Thrilling Sort”: The History of the Newsreel, The Newsreel as History 1. News Parade: The Logic of the Newsreel System2. Newsreel Realism: Redefining the Real in Motion Picture News3. “Heroes of the Lens”: Newsreel Cameramen, the Sino-Japanese War, and Looking as Action4. “Come Along. We’re Going to the Trans-Lux to Hiss Roosevelt”: Modernity, Virtual Travel and the Newsreel Cinema as Public Forum5. Double Vision: World War Two, Racial Uplift, and Politics of Visibility in the All-American NewsreelConclusion: News Parade’s Gone By?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£999.99
University of Minnesota Press The Horror of Police
Book SynopsisUnmasks the horrors of a social order reproduced and maintained by the violence of police Year after year the crisis churns: graft and corruption, violence and murder, riot cops and armored vehicles claim city streets. Despite promises of reform, police operate with impunity, unaccountable to law. In The Horror of Police, Travis Linnemann asks why, with this open record of violence and corruption, policing remains for so many the best, perhaps only means of security in an insecure world. Drawing on the language and texts of horror fiction, Linnemann recasts the police not only as self-proclaimed “monster fighters” but as monsters themselves, a terrifying force set loose in the world. Purposefully misreading a collection of everyday police stories (TV cop dramas, detective fiction, news media accounts, the direct words of police) not as morality tales of innocence avenged and order restored but as horror, Linnemann reveals the monstrous violence at the heart of liberal social order. The Horror of Police shows that police violence is not a deviation but rather a deliberate and permanent fixture of U.S. “law and order.” Only when viewed through the refracted motif of horror stories, Linnemann argues, can we begin to reckon the limits of police and imagine a world without them. Trade Review"We know this more clearly today than ever before: policing is monstrous, unleashing terror while cannibalistically devouring resources otherwise destined for more human things. Travis Linnemann turns our reality upside-down as he turns the horror genre inside-out, insisting that only by confronting the dreadful monsters in our midst can we build a truly different world."—Geo Maher, author of A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete"Police stories are among the most popular in American culture. In this book—equally steeped in pop culture, the latest critical theory, and the history and contemporary reality of policing—Travis Linnemann reads those stories against the grain to argue that the police represent the monstrous core of our society and to challenge us to imagine a world without them."—Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital"In this highly original take, Travis Linnemann looks beyond the flashy headlines of the grossest excesses of police violence to the monstrosity that lies beneath it: police power itself. Using the tropes and conventions of the horror literary genre, Linnemann parses not just the fear that the police inspire amongst ‘us’ but also what haunts the police: mutuality, collectivity, and solidarity."—Emma Russell, author of Queer Histories and the Politics of PolicingTable of ContentsIntroduction: Police Story, Horror Story1. Bad Cops and True Detectives2. The Police at the End of the World, or The Political Theology of the Thin Blue Line3. RoboCop, or Modern Prometheus4. Monsters Are Real5. The Unthinkable WorldAcknowledgmentsNotesIndexNotesIndex
£72.00
University of Minnesota Press Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of
Book SynopsisA study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media.Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience.Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.Trade Review"Roger F. Cook’s groundbreaking book, Postcinematic Vision, is an original and intriguing contribution to the analysis of the emergence of cinematic technologies on the spectator. The analysis of changes in our perception in concert with changes in the history of film and post-filmic development is exigent for our time. Postcinematic Vision traces out a dialectical relationship between technologies and formal developments in film and changes in our experience of the body and its perceptual capacities, helping us take stock of where we stand today and what we stand against."—Todd McGowan, author of Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution"Interrogating the cinema’s historical intermediality with rare clarity, Roger F. Cook claims that film’s historical transformations of perception and sensation in the early twentieth century still fundamentally shape the phenomenology of digital media—not to mention the sensoria of its users. Along the way, he engages with key critics from Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to Anne Friedberg, Lev Manovich, and David Rodowick, challenging and revising their findings via compelling film readings and astute deployment of discourses as diverse as cybernetics and post-Romantic theories of writing. Postcinematic Vision is a compelling and singular work on living with twenty-first century media."—Paul Young, Dartmouth CollegeTable of ContentsContentsIntroductionMoving-Image Media and Embodied SpectatorshipMedia Convergence and Remediation1. Film and the Embodied MindTechnogenesis: The Coevolution of the Biological and TechnologicalThe Phatic Image of Cinema—Reassessed“Consciousness Is an Epiphenomenon”Dual Temporalities of Media and the MindPostcinematic Reflections on Spectatorship2. 1900: Film Transforms the Media LandscapeFilm as Prosthetic Visual ConsciousnessMechanized Culture and the Moving ImageFilm and the Tyranny of Writing: Franz Kafka3. 2000: Cinema and the Digital ImageIntermedial Constructions of Cinema’s Virtual RealityDigital Mediations of Movement, Space, and TimeCinema and Singular ConsciousnessConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of
Book SynopsisA study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media.Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience.Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.Trade Review"Roger F. Cook’s groundbreaking book, Postcinematic Vision, is an original and intriguing contribution to the analysis of the emergence of cinematic technologies on the spectator. The analysis of changes in our perception in concert with changes in the history of film and post-filmic development is exigent for our time. Postcinematic Vision traces out a dialectical relationship between technologies and formal developments in film and changes in our experience of the body and its perceptual capacities, helping us take stock of where we stand today and what we stand against."—Todd McGowan, author of Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution"Interrogating the cinema’s historical intermediality with rare clarity, Roger F. Cook claims that film’s historical transformations of perception and sensation in the early twentieth century still fundamentally shape the phenomenology of digital media—not to mention the sensoria of its users. Along the way, he engages with key critics from Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to Anne Friedberg, Lev Manovich, and David Rodowick, challenging and revising their findings via compelling film readings and astute deployment of discourses as diverse as cybernetics and post-Romantic theories of writing. Postcinematic Vision is a compelling and singular work on living with twenty-first century media."—Paul Young, Dartmouth CollegeTable of ContentsContentsIntroductionMoving-Image Media and Embodied SpectatorshipMedia Convergence and Remediation1. Film and the Embodied MindTechnogenesis: The Coevolution of the Biological and TechnologicalThe Phatic Image of Cinema—Reassessed“Consciousness Is an Epiphenomenon”Dual Temporalities of Media and the MindPostcinematic Reflections on Spectatorship2. 1900: Film Transforms the Media LandscapeFilm as Prosthetic Visual ConsciousnessMechanized Culture and the Moving ImageFilm and the Tyranny of Writing: Franz Kafka3. 2000: Cinema and the Digital ImageIntermedial Constructions of Cinema’s Virtual RealityDigital Mediations of Movement, Space, and TimeCinema and Singular ConsciousnessConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press Spoiler Alert: A Critical Guide
Book SynopsisAll of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of itConcurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
£9.00
University of Minnesota Press Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s
Book SynopsisAn original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.Trade Review "In this wonderfully inventive and beautifully written book, Karen Pinkus adopts a cinematic lens to capture the dynamism of cultural production and social life in early 1960s Italy. But the questions she investigates—about the transformations of work by technology, the relations between humans and machines, and the powers of cinema for social analysis—are just as urgent for understanding today’s social world."—Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly "Clocking Out is a fascinating analysis of Italy’s rapid transition to a modern industrial economy. Using cinema as a way to explore workplaces, machines, and automation in the 1960s, Karen Pinkus provides brilliant insights into human relations and patterns of leisure, gender, and consumption. Well-known for her striking treatments of mediatized realities in such acclaimed books including Bodily Regimes and The Montesi Scandal, in this volume Pinkus forges illuminating connections between 1960s debates and more recent discussions of the digital and the post-human. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in Italian cinema, modernization, and social change."—Stephen Gundle, University of Warwick "Karen Pinkus has written a captivating and challenging account on the time element in workers’ lives, seen through the lens of mainly Italian filmmakers."—Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Opening Credits1. The Clock in the Factory2. Clocking Out3. Milan, circa 19624. “É sempre fattorino”5. Push-Button Jukebox6. Hand on Calculator7. Marriage on the Installment Plan8. Dance Hall and Movie Theater9. Night School10. Milan Beach11. ShiftsNotesFilmographyBibliography
£65.60
University of Minnesota Press Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s
Book SynopsisAn original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.Trade Review "In this wonderfully inventive and beautifully written book, Karen Pinkus adopts a cinematic lens to capture the dynamism of cultural production and social life in early 1960s Italy. But the questions she investigates—about the transformations of work by technology, the relations between humans and machines, and the powers of cinema for social analysis—are just as urgent for understanding today’s social world."—Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly "Clocking Out is a fascinating analysis of Italy’s rapid transition to a modern industrial economy. Using cinema as a way to explore workplaces, machines, and automation in the 1960s, Karen Pinkus provides brilliant insights into human relations and patterns of leisure, gender, and consumption. Well-known for her striking treatments of mediatized realities in such acclaimed books including Bodily Regimes and The Montesi Scandal, in this volume Pinkus forges illuminating connections between 1960s debates and more recent discussions of the digital and the post-human. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in Italian cinema, modernization, and social change."—Stephen Gundle, University of Warwick "Karen Pinkus has written a captivating and challenging account on the time element in workers’ lives, seen through the lens of mainly Italian filmmakers."—Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Opening Credits1. The Clock in the Factory2. Clocking Out3. Milan, circa 19624. “É sempre fattorino”5. Push-Button Jukebox6. Hand on Calculator7. Marriage on the Installment Plan8. Dance Hall and Movie Theater9. Night School10. Milan Beach11. ShiftsNotesFilmographyBibliography
£17.99
