Description
Book SynopsisWhen a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of arteither by reference to itself or to other workswe have become accustomed to calling this move meta. While scholars and critics have, for decades, acknowledged reflexivity in films, it is only in Metacinema, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists join to enthusiastically debate the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In new essays on generative films, including Rear Window, 8 1/2, Holy Motors, Funny Games, Fight Club, and Clouds of Sils Maria, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What results is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise-en-abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual and intermedial traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study found in Metacinema.
Trade ReviewTheoretically sophisticated and deeply invested in close textual analysis, this book will appeal most to those with an interest in philosophical approaches to cinema. * D Herbert, CHOICE *
We all know meta when we see it, but up until now few have attempted to define it. This terrific book, comprising essays from both established and emerging scholars, is a welcome corrective to that oversight, and a vital addition to contemporary film and media theory. * Catherine Wheatley, Reader in Film and Visual Culture, King's College London *
Table of ContentsList of Contributors Foreword The Cinematic Question: "What Do You Want From Me?" Robert B. Pippin Introduction An Invitation to the Varieties and Virtues of "Meta-ness" in the Art and Culture of Film David LaRocca Part I. Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation to Metacinema 1. Cinematic Self-Consciousness in Hitchcock's Rear Window Robert B. Pippin 2. Adaptations, Refractions, and Obstructions: The Prophecies of André Bazin Timothy Corrigan 3. A Metacinematic Spectrum: Technique Through Text to Context Garrett Stewart 4. Recursive Reflections: Types, Modes, and Forms of Cinematic Reflexivity Daniel Yacavone 5. Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese: Authorship, Historiography, and Videographic Styles Eleni Palis Part II. Illumination from the Duplications and Repetitions of Reflexive Cinema 6. 8 ½: Self-Reflexive Fiction and Mental Training Joshua Landy 7. Clouds of Sils Maria: True Characters and Fictional Selves in the Construction of Filmic Identities Laura T. Di Summa 8. Holy Motors: Metameditation on Digital Cinema's Present and Future Ohad Landesman Part III. Affectivity and Embodiment in Metanarratives 9. Fight Club: Enlivenment, Love, and the Aesthetics of Violence in the Age of Trump J. M. Bernstein 10. Funny Games: Film, Imagination, and Moral Complicity Paul Schofield 11. Shoah: Art as Visualizing What Cannot Be Grasped Shoshana Felman Part IV. Metadocumentary, Experimental Film, and Animation 12. The Act of Killing: Empathy, Morality, and Reenactment Thomas E. Wartenberg 13. Waltz with Bashir's Animated Traces: Troubled Indexicality in Contemporary Documentary Rhetorics Yotam Shibolet 14. Alone., Again: On Martin Arnold's Metaformal Invention by Intervention David LaRocca Acknowledgments Index
