Minimal Film is a book on film narrated through the visual magic of graphic design or a graphic design book told through the evocative magic of cinema. The goal of Minimal Film lies in representing the emotion of cinema through extreme synthesis and simplicity of forms. Plus there's colour, which makes each illustration visually stunning and effective. For example: a white circle resting on a blue field is enough to portray the ball Wilson from Cast Away , while two white triangles perfectly perpendicular to a red field suffice to evoke Dracula . From Game of Thrones to Breaking Bad , even TV series, which have been elected to "prime-time" for Hollywood productions, are visually represented in the book. Shortology is a direct language that can narrate anything through pictograms. This has allowed the author to see cinema from a different perspective, reinterpreting and reviewing it up to isolating its very essence. Exactly like the philosophy of Shortology, this publication is based on this notion: eliminating the superfluous and focusing on the essential. A book on emotions, on unforgettable traces cinema has left on our imagination as spectators and lovers of the seventh art.
Plateau's problem is a scientific trend in modern mathematics that unites several different problems connected with the study of minimal surfaces. In its simplest version, Plateau's problem is concerned with finding a surface of least area that spans a given fixed one-dimensional contour in three-dimensional space--perhaps the best-known example of such surfaces is provided by soap films. From the mathematical point of view, such films are described as solutions of a second-order partial differential equation, so their behavior is quite complicated and has still not been thoroughly studied. Soap films, or, more generally, interfaces between physical media in equilibrium, arise in many applied problems in chemistry, physics, and also in nature. In applications, one finds not only two-dimensional but also multidimensional minimal surfaces that span fixed closed ``contours'' in some multidimensional Riemannian space. An exact mathematical statement of the problem of finding a surface of least area or volume requires the formulation of definitions of such fundamental concepts as a surface, its boundary, minimality of a surface, and so on. It turns out that there are several natural definitions of these concepts, which permit the study of minimal surfaces by different, and complementary, methods. In the framework of this comparatively small book it would be almost impossible to cover all aspects of the modern problem of Plateau, to which a vast literature has been devoted. However, this book makes a unique contribution to this literature, for the authors' guiding principle was to present the material with a maximum of clarity and a minimum of formalization. Chapter 1 contains historical background on Plateau's problem, referring to the period preceding the 1930s, and a description of its connections with the natural sciences. This part is intended for a very wide circle of readers and is accessible, for example, to first-year graduate students. The next part of the book, comprising Chapters 2-5, gives a fairly complete survey of various modern trends in Plateau's problem. This section is accessible to second- and third-year students specializing in physics and mathematics. The remaining chapters present a detailed exposition of one of these trends (the homotopic version of Plateau's problem in terms of stratified multivarifolds) and the Plateau problem in homogeneous symplectic spaces. This last part is intended for specialists interested in the modern theory of minimal surfaces and can be used for special courses; a command of the concepts of functional analysis is assumed.
Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.
Anyone can make a short film, right? Just grab some friends and your handheld and you can do it in a weekend or two before being accepted to a slew of film festivals, right? Wrong. Roberta Munroe screened short film submissions at Sundance for five years, and is an award-winning short filmmaker in her own right. So she knows a thing or two about how not to make a short film. From the first draft of your script to casting, production, editing, and distribution, this is your one-stop primer for breaking into the business. Featuring interviews with many of today's most talented writers, producers, and directors, as well as revealing stories (e.g., what to do when the skinhead crack addict next door begins screaming obscenities as soon as you call "action") from the sets of her own short films, Roberta walks you through the minefield of mistakes that an aspiring filmmaker can make--so that you don't have to make them yourself.
This clear, well illustrated text takes the reader through the basics of film analysis, drawing on a wide range of film for discussion. Questions of genre and the contexts and meanings of film are considered.
VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. -- Publisher description.
The best-selling phenomenon from Japan that shows us a minimalist life is a happy life. Fumio Sasaki is not an enlightened minimalism expert or organizing guru like Marie Kondo—he’s just a regular guy who was stressed out and constantly comparing himself to others, until one day he decided to change his life by saying goodbye to everything he didn’t absolutely need. The effects were remarkable: Sasaki gained true freedom, new focus, and a real sense of gratitude for everything around him. In Goodbye, Things Sasaki modestly shares his personal minimalist experience, offering specific tips on the minimizing process and revealing how the new minimalist movement can not only transform your space but truly enrich your life. The benefits of a minimalist life can be realized by anyone, and Sasaki’s humble vision of true happiness will open your eyes to minimalism’s potential.
This text introduces students to the major aspects of film aesthetics, criticism, and history, while emphasizing the relationship between art, artists, and the film industry itself.
Many of the modern variational problems of topology arise in different but overlapping fields of scientific study: mechanics, physics and mathematics. In this work, Professor Fomenko offers a concise and clear explanation of some of these problems (both solved and unsolved), using current methods of analytical topology. His book falls into three interrelated sections. The first gives an elementary introduction to some of the most important concepts of topology used in modern physics and mechanics: homology and cohomology, and fibration. The second investigates the significant role of Morse theory in modern aspects of the topology of smooth manifolds, particularly those of three and four dimensions. The third discusses minimal surfaces and harmonic mappings, and presents a number of classic physical experiments that lie at the foundations of modern understanding of multidimensional variational calculus. The author's skilful exposition of these topics and his own graphic illustrations give an unusual motivation to the theory expounded, and his work is recommended reading for specialists and non-specialists alike, involved in the fields of physics and mathematics at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
