"We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory-affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to incendiary artworks that provoke mass boycotts, many of the images in our media culture strike as beyond the pale of consumption. Yet what does it mean to proclaim a media object "unwatchable": disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, Unwatchable offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in our global visual culture, from cinema, television, and video games through museums and classrooms to laptops, smart phones, and social media platforms. This anthology assembles 60 original essays by scholars, theorists, critics, archivists, curators, artists, and filmmakers who offer their own responses to the broadly suggestive question: What do you find unwatchable? The diverse answers include iconoclastic artworks that have been hidden from view, dystopian images from the political sphere, horror movies, TV advertisements, classic films, and recent award-winners"--
Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's The Idiots to Michael Haneke's Caché, Asbjørn Grønstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics, and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.
Known as a highly entertaining and controversial filmmaker, John Waters is also an artist and photographer. "John Waters: Change of Life" is a collection of his still photographic works made over the past decade. Includes essays by guest authors and an interview with Waters.
The art houses and cinema clubs of his youth are gone, but the films that D. A. Miller discovered there in the 1960s and ’70s are now at his fingertips. With DVDs and streaming media, technology has turned the old cinematheque’s theatrical offerings into private viewings that anyone can repeat, pause, slow, and otherwise manipulate at will. In Second Time Around, Miller seizes this opportunity; across thirteen essays, he watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he first saw in them but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing frames, or simple censorship. At last he has an unobstructed view of the gay leather scene in Cruising, the expurgated special effects in The H-Man, and the alternative ending to Vertigo. Now he can pursue the finer details of Chabrol’s debt to Hitchcock, Visconti’s mystificatory Marxism, or the unemotive emotion in Godard. Yet this recaptured past is strangely disturbing; the films and the author have changed in too many ways for their reunion to be like old times. The closeness of Miller’s attention clarifies the painful contradictions of youth and decline, damaged prints and flawless restorations.
Explosive images of sex and violence characterise what has come to be known as the 'new extremism' in contemporary European cinema. This collection of essays is devoted to the new extremism in contemporary European cinema and will critically interrogate t
Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012).
