Description
Book SynopsisThe preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies
For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.
The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities.
Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.
Trade Review "A timely collection of critical essays that illuminates the aesthetic constitution and political deployment of depth in historical and contemporary media formations."—Critical Inquiry
Table of ContentsContents
Preface
Part I. Depths of the Moving Image: Perception, Spectatorship, and Film Theory
1. From the Flat Plane, an Architecture of Light: Filming Space in Interwar Animation
Katherine Rochester
2. Locomotive Views: Lateral Movement and the Flatness of the Moving Image
Jordan Schonig
3. Deep in the Cave
Jean Ma
4. On a Lonely Planet, Feeling-in-Depth: Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil
Jinhee Choi
Part II. Depth Hermeneutics and Surface Turns
5. Depth Effects: Citizen Kane, Citizenfour, and the Deep Time of Cinema
Jeff Scheible
6. Bankers Dream of Banking, or Against the Interpretation of Dreams
Jennifer Fay
7. Blackness at the Heart: Extruding Sovereignty in Nancy’s and Denis’s The Intruder
Alessandra Raengo and Laurel Ahnert
8. Inaudible Evidence: Counterforensic Listening in Contemporary Documentary Art
Pooja Rangan
9. To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary beyond Docufiction
Erika Balsom
Part III. Deep Space, Deep Time
10. Sinkholes, GIFs, and Cinematic Eco-catastrophe
Karl Schoonover
11. Underground Film: Thinking Vertically across the and of Cinema and Media Studies
Karen Redrobe
12. Transparency at Depth: Dark Mediation of the Deep Seabed
Lisa Han
13. Depth Mediators: Undersea Cables, Network Infrastructure, and the Deep Ocean
Nicole Starosielski
14. From Planetary Depth to Surface Measure, or How to Read the Future from an Image
Jussi Parikka
Part IV. Deep Networks
15. Depth in Deep Learning: Knowledgeable, Layered, Impenetrable
Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton
16. From Stereoscopic Depth to Deep Learning
Brooke Belisle
17. The Deep Realness of Deepfake Pornography: A Conversation
Shaka McGlotten, Susanna Paasonen, and John Paul Stadler
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
