This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. She offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity.
In Black and White Agnieszka Piotrowska presents a unique insight into the contemporary arts scene in Zimbabwe – an area that has received very limited coverage in research and the media. The book combines theory with literature, film, politics and culture and takes a psychosocial and psychoanalytic perspective to achieve a truly interdisciplinary analysis. Piotrowska focuses in particular on the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as well as the cinema, featuring the work of Rumbi Katedza and Joe Njagu. Her personal experience of time spent in Harare, working in collaborative relationships with Zimbabwean artists and filmmakers, informs the book throughout. It features examples of their creative work on the ground and examines the impact it has had on the community and the local media. Piotrowska uses her experiences to analyse concepts of trauma and post-colonialism in Zimbabwe and interrogates her position as a stranger there, questioning patriarchal notions of belonging and authority. Black and White also presents a different perspective on convergences in the work of Doris Lessing and iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and how it might be relevant to contemporary race relations. Black and White will be intriguing reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically engaged scholars, film makers, academics and students of post-colonial studies, film studies, cultural studies, psychosocial studies and applied philosophy.
Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured by new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as "worldbuilding," "virtual reality," and "transmedia" introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Fast Forward answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end. From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca Méndez's projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.
The growing body of films in and around Africa, and the seemingly incongruent growth in African film scholarship, suggests the need for new perspectives, approaches and insights into film cultures in Africa. Although it is impossible to capture the entire diversity of existing African film cultures, this collection, which has resulted from African film conferences organized by the University of Westminster, United Kingdom, has recognized the significance and urgency of this task. The book offers a unique engagement with widened African film ‘cultures’ in the context of diverse peoples, histories, geographies, languages and changing film production cultures shaped by audiences and users at home and in the diaspora. The volume is a significant contribution to the processes of representing the self and other, as well as the emergence of alternative, non-official dialogues, circulation and consumption, including on social media. Students, researchers, film policy makers, film producers, distributors and anyone else with an interest in African screen media will find in the book useful and readable analyses of socio-political factors that affect and are shaped by African film.
Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.
Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.
Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our habits and excite our imaginations. Casetti travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing relevance of cinema. He does away with traditional notions of canon, repetition, apparatus, and spectatorship in favor of new keywords, including expansion, relocation, assemblage, and performance. The result is an innovative understanding of cinema's place in our lives and culture, along with a critical sea-change in the study of the art. The more the nature of cinema transforms, the more it discovers its own identity, and Casetti helps readers realize the galaxy of possibilities embedded in the medium.
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.
Adam Lowenstein argues that Surrealism's encounter with film can help redefine the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in an era of popular digital entertainment. Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of ÒnewÓ media have made theatrical cinema seem Òold.Ó A sense of Òcinema lostÓ has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry filmÕs special capacity to record the real is either disappearing or being fundamentally changed by new mediaÕs different technologies. The Surrealist movement offers an ideal platform for resolving these tensions, undermining the claims of cinemaÕs crisis of realism and offering an alternative interpretation of filmÕs aesthetics and function. The Surrealists never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Reading the writing, films, and art of Luis Bu–uel, Salvador Dal’, Man Ray, AndrŽ Breton, AndrŽ Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell, and tracing their influence in the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson, this innovative approach puts past and present cinema into conversation to recast the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.
Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890s through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadent cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau's long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement's enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Fischer begins with the portrayal of women and nature in the magical "trick films" of the Spanish director Segundo de Chomón; the elite dress and décor design choices in Cecil B. DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921); and the mise-en-scène of fantasy in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Reading Salome (1923), Fischer shows how the cinema offered an engaging frame for adapting the risqué works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Moving to the modern era, Fischer focuses on a series of dramatic films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), that make creative use of the architecture of Antoni Gaudí; and several European works of horror—The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Deep Red (1975), and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)—in which Art Nouveau architecture and narrative supply unique resonances in scenes of terror. In later chapters, she examines films like Klimt (2006) that portray the style in relation to the art world and ends by discussing the Art Nouveau revival in 1960s cinema. Fischer's analysis brings into focus the partnership between Art Nouveau's fascination with the illogical and the unconventional and filmmakers' desire to upend viewers' perception of the world. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.
