Film theory and its emphasis on political and ideological readings of films dominated much of cinema studies in the '70s and '80s. Since then, in response to what some view as the shortcomings of theoretical approaches, a variety of other methods have emerged or reemerged. In many ways, as Nico Baumbach argues, "Anti-Grand Theory" has won the day but its victory is, in part, based on misreadings or simplifications of '70s film theory. In particular, Baumbach views contemporary critical approaches to (...) film as abandoning the crucial and productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. Baumbach does not advocate a return to the orthodoxies of the seventies but rather reads the work of Ranciere, Badiou, and Agamben as providing new ways of thinking about the history of film theory and how film creates its own way of thinking about politics. Moreover, at a time when digital technologies are asking us to think of film and the film image in new ways, the work of these thinkers once again asks, "What is Cinema?" but in a more expansive sense that can help us account for transformations in how moving images are produced, distributed, and exhibited in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

Drawing together eighteen contributions from leading international scholars, this book conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema's century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the senses made possible by the cinematic apparatus. This is the first anthology dedicated to thinking cinema's relationship to exploration from a global, decolonial, and ecological perspective. Featuring leading scholars working with pathbreaking interdisciplinary methodologies (drawing upon insights from science and technology (...) studies, postcolonial theory, indigenous ways of knowing, and film theory and history), it theorizes cinema's implication in imperial conquest but also its cutting edge role in empirical expansion and experiments in sensual and critical perception. The collected essays consider filmmaking in cross-cultural contexts, consider films made in or about peoples in South America, Asia, Africa, indigenous North America, as well as polar, outer space, and underwater exploration, with famous figures such as Jacques Yves Cousteau are considered alongside amateur and scientific filmmakers. The essays in this collection are ideal for a broad range of scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and cognate fields. (shrink)

This article examines the breathing and breathless body in Camille-Vidal Naquet’s Sauvage. Respiration has been characterised by Peter Sloterdijk, in the first volume of his Sphären trilogy, as the first extension of the womb. The air we breathe is a “nobject” that escapes the subject-object relation, like the placenta before it. Sauvage engages the respiratory, alongside the placental and the acoustic, as three pre-oral “nobjects” for exploring what Leo Bersani has termed the body’s “somatic receptivity”. Duration, framing, lighting, and camera (...) movements cultivate a spectator’s receptivity to these “nobjects” and participate in acts of sphere formation. This provides a framework for thinking about how cinema itself might function as a “nobject”: a connective medium or sphere that supports and augments a subject, providing a field of protection and attention. However, the film’s presentation of breathlessness also signals a blocked receptivity, an inability to take in, introducing friction and resistance to the discourse of immediacy and exchange that characterises philosophical reflections on breath. Breathlessness has implications for thinking about bodily autonomy and forms of freedom that speak to the queer politics of Sauvage, as well as questions about movement and stillness, animation and lifelessness, that reflect back on the medium of film itself. (shrink)

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avo...

Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It (...) argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human. (shrink)

Describing Cinema is part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy. It examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films, as probably the most common and the most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Practiced energetically and carefully, descriptions become exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and interpretation of films. My motto might be an inversion of one character's tongue-in-cheek remark in Jean-Luc Godard's (...) First Name, Carmen (played by Godard himself), "badly seen, badly said," rephrased for this project as "badly said, badly seen." Here, that phrase becomes an indication how acts of describing films or parts of films can measure and instantiate complex ways of seeing that are partly about accuracy but also about the mobility of understanding and interpretation. At its best, describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Here, especially, writing about film becomes thinking about film. Part I provides a theoretical basis for this argument. Part II features sixteen short essays from landmarks of post-war cinema that demonstrate the energy and movement of precise descriptions. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly. Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy and (...) contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives. (shrink)

Introduction: cinema, globalization and the posthuman object -- Consuming objects -- Exotic objects -- Part objects: war, disavowal, and the logic of substitution -- Objects of desire -- Posthuman objects.

Joshua Foa Dienstag engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing skeptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life.

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, (...) first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. (shrink)

Introduction. Flesh and its reversibility ; Defining the baroque ; 'Good looking' ; A cinema of baroque flesh -- 1. Flesh, cinema and the baroque : the aesthetics of reversibility. Baroque vision and painting the flesh ; Baroque flesh ; Analogous embodiments : the film's body ; Baroque vision and cinema ; Summation : face to face-feeling baroque deixis -- 2. Knots of sensation : co-extensive space and a cinema of the passions. Synaesthesia, phenomenology, and the senses ; Cinesthesia and (...) the Bel composto ; A passionate baroque : emotion, excess, and co-extensive space ; Assault and absorption : cruel baroque ; Summation : beside oneself -- 3. Baroque skin/semiotics. Chiasm : language and experience ; Baroque poetic language and the seventeenth-century infinite ; Baroque luxury ; Skin-deep : baroque texturology ; Tickles : baroque wit ; Summation : cine-mimesis -- 4. One hand films the other : baroque haptics. Touching-touched ; Haptic visuality and the baroque ; Baroque haptics and cinema ; Analogical assemblages : Baroque databases ; Summation: TEXXTURE -- Conclusion : or the baroque 'Beauty of the act'. (shrink)

This updated edition of Cinema in the Digital Age takes a fresh look at the state of digital cinema. It pays special attention to the ways in which nostalgia for the look and feel of analogue disrupts the aesthetics of the digital image and examines how recent films have disguised and erased their digital foundations.

In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface to the English edition \ Translators' Introduction \Preface to the French Edition \ 1. Theses on Movement: First Commentary onBergson \ 2. Frame and Short, Framing and Cutting \ 3. Montage \ 4. TheMovement-Image and its Three Varieties: Second Commentary on Bergson \ 5. ThePerception-Image \ 6. The Affection-Image Face and Close-Up \ 7. TheAffection-Image: Qualities, Powers, Any-Space-Whatevers \ 8. From Affect toAction: The Impulse Image \ 9. The Action-Image: The Large Form \ 10. (...) The Action-Image:The Small Form \ 11. Figures, or the Transformation of Forms \ 12. The Crisisof the Action-Image \ Glossary \ Notes \ Index. (shrink)

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the (...) first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Fernando Coni Campos é considerado um dos maiores roteiristas da nossa cinematografia, autor de filmes importantes como 'A Viagem Ao Fim do Mundo', 'Ladrões de Cinema' e 'O Mágico e o Delegado'. 'Cinema - Sonho e Lucidez' é uma reunião da reflexão sobre cinema do cineasta, morto em 1988, acrescida de alguns contos que mostram todo o seu domínio em contar histórias.

Victor Fan's dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu's work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold's 2018 existential thriller Transit, Cinema Illuminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

"In this edited collection, an international ensemble of scholars examine what contemporary cinema tells us about neoliberal capitalism and cinema, exploring whether filmmakers are able to imagine progressive alternatives under capitalist conditions. Individual contributions discuss filmmaking practices, film distribution, textual characteristics and the reception of films made in different parts of the world. They engage with topics such as class struggle, debt, multiculturalism and the effect of neoliberalism on love and sexual behaviour. Written in accessible, jargon-free language, Contemporary Cinema and (...) Neoliberal Ideology is an essential text for those interested in political filmmaking and the political meanings of films."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Introduction: Excess, the gaze, and cinema of confinement -- Excess in confinement in Room and Green room -- Big window, big other: enjoyment and spectatorship in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope -- Interior confinement: shattering and disintegration in Ingmar Bergman's The passion of Anna -- It "over-looks": movement and stillness in Stanley Kubrick's The shining -- "It's just a show?" Paranoia and provocation in Oliver Stone's Talk radio -- Voices, telephones, and confined spaces: Phone booth and Locke -- Captive, captor, and aliens: (...) 10 Cloverfield lane -- Conclusion: 127 hours, The wall, Panic room, and Cyberspace. (shrink)

Cinema and the automatic sweetheart. The work of art as an automatic sweetheart. Automatic sweethearts without names: the place of films in the world of art -- Cinema and new realism. Realism and trasparency in film. What is new in realism? Cinema, philosophy and the rediscovery of reality -- Cinema and documediality. The movie theatre of Babel. Toward a new ontology of film. The digital secret of the moving image -- Cinema and the ontology of the cell phone. Double signature. (...) An ontology for mobile movies. Film me, stupid. On Eco on mobile phones and stupidity -- Cinema and animality. Humans, animals, machines. Anthropocentrism and science fiction cinema. (shrink)

Shard cinema tells an expansive story of how moving images have changed in the last three decades, and how they have changed us along with them, rewiring the ways we watch, fight, and navigate an unsteady world. In a set of interrelated essays that range from the writings of early factory workers to the distributed sight of contemporary surveillance, Williams argues for deep links between the images we see and the hidden labors frozen into them, exploring how even the apparently (...) trivial or spectacular carries unique opportunities to detect and process the social frictions of their making. Spanning film, video games, radical history, architecture, visual effects, and war, the book crosses the twentieth century into our present to confront a new order of seeing and making that slowly took shape: the composite image, where no clean distinction can be made between production and post-production, filmed and animated, material and digital. Giving equal ground to costly blockbusters, shaky riot footage, disaster photography, and early cinema, Williams leads us from computer-generated 'shards' of particles and debris to the broken phone screens on which we watch these digital storms, looking for the unexpected histories lived in the interval between"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, (...) Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. (shrink)

The range of topics in this volume covers a multitude of historical periods and topics, which in turn figure in the new media environments of contemporary life. These include discussions of the Aristotelian and classical models of a "good life" that inform animated fairy tales today, 1930s French and Hollywood films which respond to the dire need for productive human relationships in a turbulent decade, the polemical positions of black film criticism through the lens of James Baldwin's work, a discussion (...) of contemporary filmic quests for happiness, the challenges for women filmmakers today in mapping the values of their own world, landscapes of austerity and poverty in the cinematic homelands today, the scientific, psychological, and philosophical base for human value, and the shifting media frames of modern society and selves. (shrink)

Resumo Na entrevista ficcional que se segue, as ideias de Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos sobre as artes de representação serão aplicadas a aspectos relevantes do cinema. Du Bos argumenta que, normalmente, as obras de ficção cinematográfica são projectadas para dar origem a “paixões artificiais”, que têm a função de fornecer alívio ao tédio, sem as consequências negativas que muitas actividades alternativas têm. Também será considerada a questão, se os filmes têm um significado filosófico. O resultado é uma perspectiva desconhecida, do (...) princípio do século XVIII, em algumas temáticas contemporâneas. Palavras-chave : catarse, cinema apocalíptico, Du Bos, emoção, paixões artificiais, paradoxo do afecto negativoIn the following fictional interview, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ ideas about the representational arts are applied to relevant aspects of the cinema. Du Bos argues that normally works of cinematic fiction are designed to give rise to ‘artificial passions’ that have the function of providing relief from boredom without the negative consequences that many alternative pursuits would have. Du Bos’ solution to the paradox of negative affect and his position on Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis are also set forth in the interview. The question of whether films have philosophical significance is also taken up. The upshot is a somewhat unfamiliar early 18th-century perspective on some contemporary issues. Keywords: apocalyptic cinema, artificial passions, catharsis, Du Bos, emotion, paradox of negative affect. (shrink)

Cinema no abrigo: encontros, gestos e acontecimento Resumo: Este texto é fruto de reflexões sobre nossa vivência com o Projeto de Extensão “Educação, Cinema, Outros Territórios” no Lar de Idosos ‘Abrigo Tiradentes’, em Minas Gerais. Um objetivo específico do Projeto é realizar sessões de cinema junto aos idosos em diferentes territórios. A metodologia e a avaliação das ações são compreendidas como um gesto de acompanhamento do Programa de Extensão, amparado na investigação cartográfica, prática metodológica pertinente para o acompanhamento de processos (...) em curso e a produção de subjetividades. As questões que nos colocamos para esta reflexão são: o que pode o cinema num Abrigo de Idosos? Quais conexões poderíamos arquitetar entre cinema, linguagem e acontecimento? O que essas pessoas experimentam com os filmes? O que poderíamos exercitar, a partir do conceito de acontecimento, no pensamento? Buscamos, por meio deste ensaio, um exercício de pensar “acontecimentos” no nosso encontro com os moradores e com os filmes durante as sessões de cinema no Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palavras-chave: Acontecimento; Cinema; Idoso. Cinema in the shelter: meetings, gestures and events Abstract: This text is the result of reflections on our experience with the “Education, Cinema, Other Territories” Extension Project at the Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, in Minas Gerais. A specific objective of the Project is to hold cinema sessions with the elderly in different territories. The methodology and the evaluation of the actions are understood as a gesture of monitoring the Extension Program, supported by cartographic research, methodological practice relevant to the monitoring of ongoing processes and the production of subjectivities. The questions we ask ourselves for this reflection are: what can cinema do in a Shelter for the Elderly? What connections could we make between cinema, language and event? What do these people experience with films? What could we exercise, based on the concept of event, in thought? Through this essay, we seek an exercise in thinking about “events” in our meeting with the residents and with the films during the cinema sessions at Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Key-words: Event; Cinema; Elderly. Cine en el retiro: encuentros, gestos y acontecimientos Resumen: Este texto es el resultado de reflexiones sobre nuestra experiencia con el Proyecto de Extensión “Educación, Cine, Otros Territorios” en el Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, en Minas Gerais. Un objetivo específico del Proyecto es realizar sesiones de cine con personas mayores en diferentes territorios. La metodología y la evaluación de las acciones se entienden como un gesto de seguimiento del Programa de Extensión, con el apoyo de la investigación cartográfica, la práctica metodológica relevante para el seguimiento de los procesos en curso y la producción de subjetividades. Las preguntas que nos hacemos para esta reflexión son: ¿qué puede hacer el cine en un refugio para ancianos? ¿Qué conexiones podríamos hacer entre cine, idioma y evento? ¿Qué experimentan estas personas con las películas? ¿Qué podríamos ejercer, basado en el concepto de evento, en el pensamiento? A través de este ensayo, buscamos un ejercicio para pensar acerca de los "eventos" en nuestra reunión con los residentes y con las películas durante las sesiones de cine en Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palabras-claves: Acontecimentos; Cine; Ancianos. Data de registro: 19/03/2020 Data de aceite: 28/08/2020. (shrink)

In this article I propose the concept of ‘non-cinema’. The term points to that which is excluded from cinema, and accordingly I seek to explore the various reasons for these exclusions, in particular the political/ideological ones, together with how these exclusions are manifested on an aesthetic level. Instead of André Bazin's founding question regarding what is cinema, therefore, this essay asks what cinema is not – and why. This question is of redoubled importance in an age of technological change: not (...) only are nearly all films now not made using the traditional equipment of filmmaking (analogue cameras, linear editing systems, polyester film stock), but nor do they get exhibited in traditional theatrical venues (instead circulating on DVD and related formats, and online). On a related note, increasing numbers of filmmakers actively are moving away from feature filmmaking, e.g. into television. The essay focuses in particular on ‘non-cinematic’ works by Philippine director Khavn de la Cruz and American director Giuseppe Andrews. Formally, I argue that their films deliberately embrace that which is perceived as non-cinematic in order to put forward what Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel might define as a ‘barbarian’ film-philosophical vision of the world, which is reminiscent of Antonio Negri's concept of multitude, and which also has an ethical dimension in that it proposes the inclusion of the overlooked and the dispossessed, and of the darkness that necessarily accompanies the light. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here read the Iranian film Hit the Road through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. In doing so, I hope to illuminate the triadic link between cinema, philosophy and paideia (ethical-political education). To explore, I adopt a philosophical methodology with the double ambition to reveal the latent pedagogies of the film and to acquire insights on the distinctiveness of a Badiouan conception of cinema. My questions are to what degree and in what ways cinematic experience can (...) be said to promote ethical-political formation. I start by portraying Badiou’s cinematic philosophy. Next, I expose how Hit the Road confronts us with a hidden real. Third, I close the paper by considering Badiou’s idea of cinema as an influential form of ethical-political education. (shrink)

This essay examines Gaspar Noë's film, Enter the Void, in light of the work of both Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Arguing that the film shows to viewers the 'void' that separates subjects from objects, the essay also considers Noë's film in the light of drug literature and the altered states induced by cinema and describe by Anna Powell. Finally, the essay proposes that Enter the Void is a work of 'unbecoming' cinema, which in turn points to expansion of cinematic (...) form through the use of digital technologies. (shrink)

For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiouʹs account of cinema. He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of (...) thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people -- a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo, tentar-se-á reconstruir e defender a noção de “especificidade média” que se refere ao cinema. Começar-se-á por discutir a ontologia de um certo tipo de exibição visual, geralmente encontrada em conexão com uma vasta gama de obras cinematográficas. Argumentar-se-á que estas exibições têm uma natureza essencial ou real. Obras construídas em torno de tais exibições estão aptas a manifestar certas qualidades e poderes peculiares. Assim, o “meio de cinema” consiste em parte, num tipo particular de meio veicular e, (...) de várias propriedades nem sempre manifestas distintas dele. Ao discutir-se o conceito de “meio”, considera-se também um sentido em que esta noção é negligenciada, a saber, que as competências e habilidades pessoais operam uma mediação entre a concepção de uma exibição e a sua produção. Prosseguir-se-á, argumentando, que apesar dos defeitos da “especificidade média”, proveniente de uma versão da teoria clássica do cinema, o cinema como uma forma de arte ou corpo de obras de arte, é ou tem um “meio especial” dotado de distintas propriedades artísticas. Palavras-chave : essencialismo, medium specificity, medium, obra, ontologia do cinema, valor artísticoIn this paper, I try to reconstruct and defend the notion of medium specificity as it relates to cinema. I begin by discussing the ontology of a certain kind of visual display commonly found in connection with a vast range of candidate cinematic works. These displays, I argue, have an essential or real nature. Works constructed around such displays are apt to manifest certain qualities and powers peculiar to displays of that kind. Thus cinema’s medium consists in part of a particular type of vehicular medium and various not always manifested properties distinctive to it. In discussing the concept of medium, I also consider a neglected sense of this term, namely, personal abilities and skills that mediate between one’s designing a certain display and one’s producing a matching object or result. I go on to argue that, despite the defects of classic film theory’s version of medium specificity, it is true that cinema, as artform or body of artworks, is or has a special medium endowed with distinctive artistic properties. Keywords : artistic value, essentialism, medium specificity, medium, ontology of cinema, work. (shrink)

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark strain of optimism emerges, releasing each from its terrible and (...) inescapable guilt. It is this contingent and unlikely possibility that we find in Haneke's cinema: a utopian Europe. This collection celebrates, explicates, and sometimes challenges the worldview of Haneke's films. It examines the director's central themes and preoccupations--bourgeois alienation, modes and critiques of spectatorship, the role of the media--and analyzes otherwise marginalized aspects of his work, such as the function of performance and stardom, early Austrian television productions, the romanticism of The Piano Teacher (2001), and the 2007 shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games. (shrink)

Global airspace, global cinemaspace -- Aerial perceptions: the visuality of the airplane -- Airborne cinema: the emergence of inflight entertainment -- Executive flight: attention, gender and the seatback screen -- Networked transport: neoliberalism and digital entertainments -- Disastrous speed: thrill rides, screens and fear of flying -- Live in air: aerial circuits of television -- Conclusion: cinema as infrastructure.

Com o Sensualismo criam-se condições para uma nova estética, sensível e sensacionalista, que vai transformar as diversas artes (Literatura, Pintura, Escultura) e trazer consigo novas formas de espectáculo: o panorama, a fantasmagoria e o diorama (este, já no início do século XIX). O Eidophusikon, dispositivo de criação e ampliação (sensurround) de novas imagens – um híbrido de teatro e pintura, criado por Philippe de Loutherbourg entre 1781 e 1782 –, insere-se nesse processo e, com a fantasmagoria de Robertson (no final (...) do século XVIII, em França), constitui uma das modalidades do que hoje designamos por pré-cinema. No entanto, apropriando-se das novas condições de representação e de percepção do teatro introduzidas por David Garrick em Drury Lane – que promovem a “absorção” do espectador naquilo que vê em palco –, o Eidophusikon de Loutherbourg (ele próprio, pintor) pode ser considerado um elo em processo da nova concepção de pintura de Diderot – da qual a “promenade Vernet” do Salon de 1767 constitui como que a actualização por escrito. (shrink)

Introduction : cinema, memory, modernity: the return of memory as film -- No escape from time : memory and redemption in the international postwar art film -- The "crisis" of memory : "traumatic identity" in the contemporary memory film -- "Global memory" : cinema as lingua franca and the commodification of the image -- The eye of history : memory, surveillance and ethicality in the contemporary art film -- "Prosthetic memory" and transnational cinema : globalized identity and narrative recursivity in (...) City of God -- Conclusion: remembering to forget: the catachreses of modernity. (shrink)

This is a philosophical investigation into the differing sensations of time in cinema and photography.

This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people worldwide are watching films and series via their smartphones or personal computers, we here explore the educative aspects of this popular activity. Does this wide-ranging habit mis-educate the next generation? Or does cinema carry a potential for ethical-political education, parallel to the ancient Greek tragedies and the modernist Bildungsroman? The authors of this special issue deliberate this (...) question by exploring the intersection between cinema and philosophy and the potential powers of cinematic education. (shrink)

Cinema against Spectacle -- Introduction -- Cinema against Spectacle -- I. Opening the Window? -- II. Inventing the Cinema? -- III. Filming the Disaster? -- IV. Cutting the Figure? -- V. Changing the Spectator? -- Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field -- Introduction -- I. On a Dual Origin -- The ideological place of the "base apparatus" -- Birth = deferral: The invention of the cinema -- II. Depth of Field: The Double Scene -- Bazin's "surplus realism" -- (...) The work of "transparency" -- For a materialist history of the cinema -- "For the first time ..." -- III."Primitive" Depth of Field -- IV. Effacement of Depth/Advent of Speech -- V. Which Speech? (shrink)

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, (...) Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. (shrink)

Interactive Cinema explores cinematic practices that work to transform what is often seen as a receptive activity into a participatory, multimedia experience. Combining cutting-edge theory with updated conventional film studies methodologies, Marina Hassapopoulou presses at the conceptual limits of cinema and offers an essential road map to the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary media.

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies remember and represent themselves. In the last quarter century, film has been an important medium in the public debate around the memory of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima; of the Algerian war for independence and of the Spanish Civil War; of the Allende legacy in Chile, the utopian dreams of 1968, and the aborted project of the German Democratic Republic; in identity formation in Palestine and in the African (...) diaspora. Hedges discusses the role of cinema within a global perspective that spans five continents, and proposes an original typology of cultural memory. In the process, she re-evaluates the contributions of major directors and uncovers hitherto neglected yet important works. The author develops her arguments in an approachable style that will encourage readers to rethink their own memories of films and to reflect on the way that cinema contributes to collective and cultural memory. The book's innovative approach should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between technology and aesthetics in contemporary Hollywood, using experiments with frame rates and shutter speeds to show how deep, systemic changes in cinematic technologies can alter our relation to the image’s referential functions. For eighty years, cinema’s registration of movement relied upon a standardized frame rate and shutter speed, meaning that cinema’s sense of motion was constant. With the proliferation of ever more powerful digital capture systems, however, these formerly inflexible options are made variable and (...) put into question. By changing the registration of movement, the high frame rate experiments in The Hobbit and the open-shutter cinematography of Miami Vice offer an estranged relation to cinema’s presentation of worldly motion. I argue here that this altered sense of the image’s referentiality is well suited to depictions of our contemporary reality, which, being profoundly bound up in digital technologies, seems similarly disorienting, estranging, and aesthetic. In the first section of the article, I trace out the origins of this style of movement in the logics of the corporate tech industry, which rolls out continual upgrades in audio-visual technologies in order to justify new product lines. According to industry rhetoric, these upgrades ostensibly lead to a heightened sense of realism, but viewer response has been torn over whether this new sense of motion is realistic or unrealistic. In the second section, I closely analyze The Hobbit and the recent work of Michael Mann to show how established film form shifts in relation to this problem in digital cinema’s representation of worldly movement. In The Hobbit’s case, film form is altered in order to assimilate the HFR’s unfamiliar sense of motion, but the cinematography in Miami Vice embraces a productive aesthetic estrangement which is both realistic and hyperaestheticized, leaving the divide between immanent experience and technologized disorientation an open question. (shrink)

In Selfless Cinema?, Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making, and viewing, documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of filmmaking are often examined in largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participantse(tm) or film-makerse(tm) rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film-makers e" Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agns Varda e" in a far less juridical way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite of Levinase(tm)s iconoclastic, anti-ocular (...) thinking, his concept of visage is richly applicable to film, and especially to documentary. (shrink)

Queer cinema takes shape between experimental film, the intimate diary form, art video, documentary, dream fiction, recording and militant video-tracts. In the introductory article, we address several dimensions of this creation : one reflects a practice in queer art according to localized experience, as in the films of Hervé Guibert, David Wojnarowicz, and Raphaël Vincent or the photographic work of Del LaGrace Volcano, based on the experience of AIDS or trans-identities. Another dimension is the attempt to constitute a sexual cinema, (...) with Hans Scheirl or Maria Beatty : these are explorations of an exploded, « de-gendered » body, which directly connects moving images to chemical and bodily transformations, inner mental sensations, jouissance and deterritorialized sexual practices. Lastly, we discuss in more general terms the emergence of a queer cinema which serves as a site for the elaboration of a counter-cinema, a withdrawal from cinema which casts a hegemonic gaze on subaltern political subjects. The documentary genre is then hollowed out from within by this decolonizing gesture. (shrink)