Process Cinema

Process Cinema

Author: Scott MacKenzie

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 0773558101

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Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective. Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema – unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film – with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States. Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.


The Process Genre

The Process Genre

Author: Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-03-20

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1478007079

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From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.


The Cinematic Mode of Production

The Cinematic Mode of Production

Author: Jonathan Beller

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1611683823

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A revolutionary reconceptualization of capital and perception during the twentieth century.


Cinema Verite in America

Cinema Verite in America

Author: Stephen Mamber

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1976-02-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780262630580

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One of the first full-length critical studies of a documentary technique, it discusses the filmmakers who pioneered in this genre and the films they created.


Live Cinema and Its Techniques

Live Cinema and Its Techniques

Author: Francis Ford Coppola

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2017-09-26

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1631493736

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From a master of cinema comes this “gold mine of a book . . . a rocket ride to the potential future” of filmmaking (Walter Murch). Celebrated as an “exhilarating account” of a revolutionary new medium (Booklist), Francis Ford Coppola’s indispensable guide to live cinema is a boon for moviegoers, film students, and teachers alike. As digital movie-making, like live sports, can now be performed by one director—or by a collaborative team online— it is only a matter of time before cinema auteurs will create “live” movies to be broadcast instantly in faraway theaters. “Peppered with brilliant personal observations” (Wendy Doniger), Live Cinema and Its Techniques offers a behind-the-scenes look at a consummate career: from Coppola’s formative boyhood obsession with live 1950s television shows and later attempts to imitate the spontaneity of live performance on set, the book usefully includes a guide to presenting state-of-the-art techniques on everything from rehearsals to equipment. A testament to Coppola’s prodigious enthusiasm for reinvigorating the form, Live Cinema is an indispensable guide that “reenergizes . . . the search for a new way of storytelling” (William Friedkin).


Cinema of Choice

Cinema of Choice

Author: Nitzan Ben Shaul

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-07-01

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0857455923

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Standard Hollywood narrative movies prescribe linear narratives that cue the viewer to expect predictable outcomes and adopt a closed state of mind. There are, however, a small number of movies that, through the presentation of alternate narrative paths, open the mind to thoughts of choice and possibility. Through the study of several key movies for which this concept is central, such as Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Inglourious Basterds, and Rashomon, Nitzan Ben Shaul examines the causes and implications of optional thinking and how these movies allow for more open and creative possibilities. This book examines the methods by which standard narrative movies close down thinking processes and deliver easy pleasures to the viewer whilst demonstrating that this is not the only possibility and that optional thinking can be both stimulating and rewarding.


World Socialist Cinema

World Socialist Cinema

Author: Masha Salazkina

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-06-13

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0520393759

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"World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities reconstructs the trajectories of international film circulation between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late Twentieth Century. The book takes as its focal point the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America that took place in Uzbekistan (USSR) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Centering on the vast body of cinematic work from the three continents screened at the festival and paying particular attention to the internal tensions and gender dynamics within it, the book proposes world socialist cinema as a distinct formation, providing an alternative to Euro-centric and/or national and regional narratives of film history: an international socialist cinema as seen from the vantage point of the Global South"--


Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

Author: Yingjin Zhang

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2009-10-09

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0824833376

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In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics. Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.


Flicker

Flicker

Author: Jeffrey M. Zacks

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0199982872

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How is it that a patch of flickering light on a wall can produce experiences that engage our imaginations and can feel totally real? From the vertigo of a skydive to the emotional charge of an unexpected victory or defeat, movies give us some of our most vivid experiences and most lasting memories. They reshape our emotions and worldviews--but why? In Flicker, Jeff Zacks delves into the history of cinema and the latest research to explain what happens between your ears when you sit down in the theatre and the lights go out. Some of the questions Flicker answers: Why do we flinch when Rocky takes a punch in Sylvester Stallone's movies, duck when the jet careens towards the tower in Airplane, and tap our toes to the dance numbers in Chicago or Moulin Rouge? Why do so many of us cry at the movies? What's the difference between remembering what happened in a movie and what happened in real life--and can we always tell the difference? To answer these questions and more, Flicker gives us an engaging, fast-paced look at what happens in your head when you watch a movie.