Videographic Cinema
Videographic Cinema

Author: Jonathan Rozenkrantz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1501362402

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In 1957, A Face in the Crowd incorporated live video images to warn about the future of broadcast TV. In 2015, Kung Fury was infused with analogue noise to evoke the nostalgic feeling of watching an old VHS tape. Between the two films, numerous ones would incorporate video images to imagine the implications of video practices. Drawing on media archaeology, Videographic Cinema shows how such images and imaginaries have emerged, changed and remained over time according to their shifting technical, historical and institutional conditions. Rediscovering forgotten films like Anti-Clock (1979) and reassessing ones like Lost Highway (1997), Jonathan Rozenkrantz charts neglected chapters of video history, including self-confrontation techniques in psychiatry, their complex relation with surveillance, and the invention/discovery of the “videographic psyche” by artists, therapists and filmmakers. Spanning six decades, Videographic Cinema discovers an epistemic shift from prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission, to retrospective ones concerned with videotape as a recording memory. It ends by considering videographic filmmaking itself as a form of archaeology in the age of analogue obsolescence.

The Videographic Essay
The Videographic Essay

Author: Christian Keathley

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 9781927852118

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"This book is about the new practice of "videographic essays", aka video essays, in which users construct a short video (short film) out of pieces of existing work, generally with a voice-over commentary, to engage in a critique of a film or general artistic/cultural/social etc commentary. The book examines the aesthetic issues raised by such work in the context of the cinema studies discipline, the experience of some of its leading practitioners, how newcomers can best approach the task of making such a videographer essay, the question of copyright, the history of the medium, etc."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian
Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian

Author: Michael Witt

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0253007305

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Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.

Towards a Film Theory from Below
Towards a Film Theory from Below

Author: Jiri Anger

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13:

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Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiri Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks? Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kríženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic function and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age. The specific clashes between the figurative and material spheres are understood through the concept of a “crack-up.” This term, developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and theoretically reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, allows us to capture the convoluted relationship between figuration and materiality as inherent to the medium of film, containing negativity and productivity, difference and simultaneity, contingency and fate, at the same time, even within the tiniest cinematic units.

The Essay Film
The Essay Film

Author: Elizabeth Papazian

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0231851030

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With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema
The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

Author: Ronald Gregg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 865

ISBN-13: 0190877995

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"Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. While many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich, the "new queer cinema") in the United States, films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms. Cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance: at some points, for example in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing "history" not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as a uneven story of struggle, writers on queer cinema in this volume stress how that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but describes currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, instead foregrounding indigenous genders and sexualities, or those forged in the global South, or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, while "cinema" is in our title, many scholars in this collection see that term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as "queer cinema" shifts into new configurations"--

Expanded Cinema
Expanded Cinema

Author: Gene Youngblood

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0823287432

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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.

A Dictionary of Film Studies
A Dictionary of Film Studies

Author: Annette Kuhn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 0192568043

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A Dictionary of Film Studies covers all aspects of its discipline as it is currently taught at undergraduate level. Offering exhaustive and authoritative coverage, this A-Z is written by experts in the field, and covers terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism; national, international, and transnational cinemas; film history, movements, and genres; film industry organizations and practices; and key technical terms and concepts. Since its first publication in 2012, the dictionary has been updated to incorporate over 40 new entries, including computer games and film, disability, ecocinema, identity, portmanteau film, Practice as Research, and film in Vietnam. Moreover, numerous revisions have been made to existing entries to account for developments in the discipline, and changes to film institutions more generally. Indices of films and filmmakers mentioned in the text are included for easy access to relevant entries. The dictionary also has 13 feature articles on popular topics and terms, revised and informative bibliographies for most entries, and more than 100 web links to supplement the text.

Metacinema
Metacinema

Author: David LaRocca

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-27

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0190095377

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When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of arteither by reference to itself or to other workswe have become accustomed to calling this move "meta." While scholars and critics have, for decades, acknowledged reflexivity in films, it is only in Metacinema, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists join to enthusiastically debate the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In new essays on generative films, including Rear Window, 8 1/2, Holy Motors, Funny Games, Fight Club, and Clouds of Sils Maria, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What results is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise-en-abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual and intermedial traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study found in Metacinema.