Real Objects in Unreal Situations is a lucid account of a much-neglected subject in art and cinema studies: the material significance of the art object incorporated into the fiction film. By examining the historical, political, and personal realities that situate the artworks, Susan Felleman offers an incisive account of how they operate not as mere objects but as powerful players within the films, thereby exceeding the narrative function of props, copies, pastiches, or reproductions. The book consists of a series of interconnected case studies of movies, including The Trouble with Harry, An U.
Regarding the real develops an original approach to documentary film, focusing on its aesthetic relations to visual arts such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting and architecture. Throughout, the book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form; an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot help but interrogate its own narratives and intentions. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern arts in subverting structures of realism typically associated with the documentary. In the course of its discussion, it charts a fascinating path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas and Raymond Depardon.
Examines the fascinating ties between Surrealist artist René Magritte and the cinema. Cinemagritte: René Magritte within the Frame of Film History, Theory, and Practice investigates the dynamic relationship between the Surrealist modernist artist René Magritte (1898–1967) and the cinema—a topic largely ignored in the annals of film and art criticism. Magritte once said that he used cinema as "a trampoline for the imagination," but here author Lucy Fischer reverses that process by using Magritte's work as a stimulus for an imaginative examination of film. While Fischer considers direct influences of film on Magritte and Magritte on film, she concentrates primarily on "resonances" of Magritte's work in international cinema—both fiction and documentary, mainstream and experimental. These resonances exist for several reasons. First, Magritte was a lover of cinema and created works as homages to the medium, such as Blue Cinema (1925), which immortalized his childhood movie theater. Second, Magritte's style, though dependent on bizarre juxtapositions, was characterized by surface realism—which ties it to the nature of the photographic and cinematic image. Third, Magritte shares with film a focus on certain significant concepts: the frame, voyeurism, illusionism, the relation between word and image, the face, montage, variable scale, and flexible point of view. Additionally, the volume explores art documentaries concerning Magritte as well as the artist's whimsical amateur "home movies," made with his wife, Georgette, friends, and Belgian Surrealist associates. The monograph is richly illustrated with images of Magritte's oeuvre as well as film stills from such diverse works as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Eyes Without a Face, American Splendor, The Blood of a Poet, Zorns Lemma, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Draughtsman's Contract, and many more. Cinemagritte brings a novel and creative approach to the work of Magritte and both film and art criticism. Students, scholars, and fans of art history and film will enjoy this thoughtful marriage of the two.
Bringing together an international range of scholars, as well as filmmakers and curators, this book explores the rich variety in form and content of the contemporary art documentary. Since their emergence in the late 1940s as a distinct genre, documentaries about the visual arts have made significant contributions to art education, public television, and documentary filmmaking, yet they have received little scholarly attention from either art history or film studies. Documenting the Visual Arts brings that attention to the fore. Whether considering documentaries about painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, site-specific installation, or fashion, the chapters of this book engage with the key question of intermediality: how film can reframe other visual arts through its specific audio-visual qualities, in order to generate new ways of understanding those arts. The essays illuminate furthermore how art documentaries raise some of the most critical issues of the contemporary global art world, specifically the discourse of the artist, the dynamics of documentation, and the visuality of the museum. Contributors discuss documentaries by filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jia Zhangke, and Trisha Ziff, and about artists such as Michael Heizer, Ai Weiwei, Do Ho Suh, and Marina Abramović. This collection of new international and interdisciplinary scholarship on visual art documentaries is ideal for students and scholars of visual arts and filmmaking, as well as art history, arts education, and media studies.
"Central Works of Philosophy" is a major multi-volume collection of essays on the core texts of the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato's "Republic" to the present day, the five volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work, clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas, and an assessment of the work's importance. Together these books provide an unrivaled companion for studying and reading philosophy, one that introduces the reader to the masterpieces of the western philosophical canon. The period, 1900-60, which this volume covers, witnessed changes in logical and linguistic analysis far beyond anything dreamt of in the previous history of the subject. The volume begins with chapters on the key texts of the Cambridge philosophers, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, which together marked the emergence of analytical philosophy. The Vienna Circle of the 1920s, and the development of logical positivism in the 1930s and 1940s are represented by chapters on two fundamental works by Carnap and Ayer. William James' "Pragmatism," which formulated pragmatism's epistemology and made it known throughout the world represents in the volume the distinctive ideas of the American pragmatists. Essays on Husserl's "The Idea of Phenomenology," Heidegger's "Being and Time," Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" and Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" cover the core texts of the hugely significant phenomenological movement. Of the linguistic philosophy that dominated the English-speaking world in the immediate postwar years, Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and Ryle's "The Concept of the Mind" are discussed in turn. The volume concludes with Karl Popper's influential account of the nature of science. Volume 4 covers the key works of philosophy written in the period 1900-60, which witnessed developments in logical and linguistic analysis far beyond anything dreamt of in the previous history of the subject. The volume includes chapters on central works by the Cambridge philosophers Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, which together contributed to the emergence of analytic philosophy. The ideas of the Vienna Circle of the 1920s, and the logical positivism of the 1930s and 1940s are explored in chapters dealing with the works of Carnap and Ayer, and the distinctive ideas of the American pragmatists are discussed in a chapter on William James' Pragmatism, which propagated pragmatism by presenting its central tenets in a clear and accessible form. Essays on Husserl's "The Idea of Phenomenology," Heidegger's "Being and Time," Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" and Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" cover the core texts of the continental European traditions of phenomenology and existentialism. Of the linguistic philosophy that dominated the English-speaking world in the immediate postwar years, Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" are discussed in turn. The volume concludes with a chapter on Karl Popper's influential account of the nature of scientific method in his seminal work, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery."
