Category: List

Some recent books on cinema (II)

Previously on some recent books on cinema (I)

Dell’Aria, A. (2021). The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, Palgrave & Macmillan.

Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the field of experimental film and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge not only to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and cultural norms it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting voices. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as medium-specificity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic exhibition and the complex interrelationships between moving image technology, aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes out exciting new directions for the study of alternative film practice–from the black box to the white cube, from film to digital, crossing continents and disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised histories. Although employing the terms ‘experimental film’ and ‘artists’ moving image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to interrogate the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional filmmaking.

  1. Introduction
  2. Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images on Urban Surfaces
  3. Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art
  4. Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition
  5. The Light Festival Phenomenon
  6. Precarious Platforms: The Paradox of Permanent Moving Images
  7. Superimposition: Forms of Moving Image Site-Specificity
  8. Postscript: Reflections from a Summer Without Public Space

Combe, K. (2021), Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film: Rant Against the Regime, Routledge.

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

  1. The Briefest of Introductions: What, Why, How
  2. The Rant
  3. The Regime
  4. Ranting Against the Regime
  5. Living Under a Lousy Orthodoxy
  6. Special Topic Rants
  7. Neoliberal A.I.
  8. The Briefest of Conclusions: So What? Why Bother?
  9. How Does This Matter?

Klecker, C. & Grabher, Gudrun M. (ed.), 2022, The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, Routledge.

The face, being prominent and visible, is the foremost marker of a person’s identity as well as their major tool of communication. Facial disfigurements, congenital or acquired, not only erase these significant capacities, but since ancient times, they have been conjured up as outrageous and terrifying, often connoting evil or criminality in their associations – a dark secret being suggested “behind the mask,” the disfigurement indicating punishment for sin. Complemented by an original poem by Kenneth Sherman and a plastic surgeon’s perspective on facial disfigurement, this book investigates the exploitation of these and further stereotypical tropes by literary authors, filmmakers, and showrunners, considering also the ways in which film, television, and the publishing industry have more recently tried to overcome negative codifications of facial disfigurement, in the search for an authentic self behind the veil of facial disfigurement. An exploration of fictional representations of the disfigured face, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, American studies and literary studies with interests in representations of disfigurement and the Other.

  1. Ugliness as deformity in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Flavor of the Month
  2. Drawing a broader picture of facial disfigurement: Moving beyond “narrative prosthesis” in James Hankins’ Drawn
  3. Writing against the stigma: Facial disfigurement in R. J. Palacio’s Wonder
  4. Song of my self or “I become the wounded person”: Kenneth Sherman’s poetic tribute to Elephant Man
  5. Loving the monster: The Elephant Man as modern fable
  6. Facial disfigurement on screen: James Bond and the politics of portraying the post-9/11 terrorist
  7. Masculinity and facial disfigurement in contemporary US television characters
  8. Fictional ‘dissections’ of a medical curiosity? Facial disfigurement in Grey’s Anatomy

Law, H. L. (2021), Ambiguity and Film Criticism: Reasonable Doubt, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book defends an account of ambiguity which illuminates the aesthetic possibilities of film and the nature of film criticism. Ambiguity typically describes the condition of multiple meanings. But we can find multiple meanings in what appears unambiguous to us. So, what makes ambiguity ambiguous? This study argues that a sense of uncertainty is vital to the concept. Ambiguity is what presses us to inquire into our puzzlement over a movie, to persistently ask “why is it as it is?” Notably, this account of the concept is also an account of its criticism. It recognises that a satisfying assessment of what is ambiguous involves both our reason and doubt; that is, reason and doubt can work together in our practice of reading. This book, then, considers ambiguity as a form of reasonable doubt, one that invites us to reflect on our critical efforts, rethinking the operation of film criticism.

  1. Introduction: Why Is It as It Is?
  2. Difficulty of Reading
  3. Perplexity of Style
  4. Depth of Suggestion
  5. Uncertainty of Viewpoint
  6. Threat of Insignificance
  7. Concluding Remarks: Reasonable Doubt

Jayamanne, L. (2021), Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, Amsterdam University Press.

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor – a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.

  1. Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser
  2. Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity
  3. A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)
  4. Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov
  5. Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
  6. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)
  7. Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy

 

Some recent books on cinema (I)

I’m still copy-pasting the shallow content that I gather from my recent Google searches here — to the desolate library. Day by day I’m getting more and more superficial. One day I’ll melt into the air. Like many other things that I haven’t been doing in the last few years, I wasn’t also reading any books on cinema or watching many films. The latter, I kind of restarted lately, warming up now. I also visited Odeon in Hauptstraße and wailed while Mr. Hopkins was looking for his watch or his daughter’s painting. It will stay next to the other play-like films I’ve seen in the past like Sleuth (1972), My Dinner with Andre (1981), The Man from Earth (2007), Carnage (2011), The Sunset Limited (2011), or Amour (2012). I guess we’ll see way more family drama by Florian Zeller in the future.

Then I thought I can do some book searches with ‘cinema’ in their titles and shortlist some books to take a look at in the indefinite future. Every once in a while these kinds of random searches end up with little treasures. I was honestly expecting more books with a theme like ‘the death of the cinema’ but I didn’t encounter that particular branch per se, not sure if it exists anyway. There are some ‘crisis’ books though.

Chateau D., Moure J. (2020). Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era, Amsterdam University Press.

“Post-cinema designates a new way of making films. It is time to ask whether this novelty is complete or relative and to evaluate to what extent this novation represents a unitary current or multiple ways. The book proposes to integrate the post-cinema question within the post-art question in order to study the new way of making filmic images in new conditions more or less remote from the dispositif of the theater and in closer relationship with contemporary art. The issue will be considered at three levels: the impression of post-art on “regular” films; the “relocation” (Cassetti) of the same films that can be seen using devices of all kinds, in conditions more or less remote from the dispositif of the theater; parallel to the integration of contemporary art in “regular” cinema, the integration of cinema into contemporary art in all kinds of forms of creation and exhibition.” [from De Gruyter]

PART I A Tribute to Agnès Varda
PART II The End of Cinema?
PART III Technological Transformations
PART IV New Dispositif, New Conditions
PART V Transformations in Film Form
Part VI Post-cinema, an Artists’ Affair

Lahiji, N. (2021). Architecture, philosophy, and the pedagogy of Cinema: From Benjamin to Badiou, foreword by McGowan, T., Routledge: London & NY.

“Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture.

Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an ‘expert critic’ who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as ‘mass art’ and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only ‘artform’ that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.” [from the book]

1 Returning to the philosophy of masses: Benjamin and Badiou
2 From the photographic moment of critical philosophy to the optical unconscious
3 Mass art and impurity: Reading Benjamin with Badiou
4 In and out of Plato’s cave
5 Theory of distraction: Tactile and optical
6 Poverty of experience
7 Dialectics and mass
8 The proletarian mise-​en-​scène
Epilogue: The art of the masses in the age of pornography

Attfield, S., (2020), Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book provides an analysis of the global working class on film and considers the ways in which working-class experience is represented in film around the world. The book argues that representation is important because it shapes the way people understand working-class experience and can either reinforce or challenge stereotypical depictions. Film can shape and shift discussions of class, and this book provides an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which working-class experience is portrayed through this medium. It analyses the impact of contemporary films such as Sorry To Bother You, This is England and Le Harve [sic] that focus on working class life. Attfield demonstrates that the global working class are characterised by diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality but that there are commonalities of experience despite geographical distance and cultural difference. The book is structured around themes such as work, culture, diasporas, gender and sexuality, and race. [from Palgrave]

1 Introduction
2 Work and Unemployment
3 Working-Class Culture
4 Immigration and Diaspora
5 Gender and Sexualities
6 Race and Class in Australian Indigenous Film
7 Afterword

Kalmár, G. (2020). Post-Crisis European Cinema: White Men in Off-Modern Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the 21st century brought to Europe and the world. Discussing films such as I, Daniel Blake, Cold War and Jupiter’s Moon, it puts distinctively “post-crisis”, gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that maps the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transition. Kalmar argues that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked many of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalized) civilization. The book focuses on the ways cinema reflects, interprets and shapes a rapidly changing world: the hot issues of the times, the new formations of identity, and the shifts in cinematic representation. This is an interdisciplinary research that is equally interested in what new the 21st century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and its responses to these socio-cultural changes. [from Palgrave]

1 Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and
Art Cinema [The Post-Crisis and the Off-Modern, White Masculinity, Post-Crisis European Cinema]
2 Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of European Cultural Geography [The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, Delta, Suntan, Conclusions: Men in Retreat]
3 Unprocessed Pasts [Amen, Days of Glory, Cold War]
4 Addiction and Escapism [Billy Elliot, T2 Trainspotting, Kills on Wheels]
5 Narratives of Migration [Terraferma, Morgen, Jupiter’s Moon]
6 The Lads of the New Right [The Wave, This Is England, July 22]
7 Angry Old Men [Tyrannosaur, I, Daniel Blake, A Man Called Ove]
8 Conclusions

And some other interesting books that have a rather specific focus:

  • Turquety, B. (2019). Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub:” Objectivists” in Cinema, Amsterdam University Press.
  • Lewis, I., & Canning, L. (ed., 2020). European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Baer, H. (2021). German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, Amsterdam University Press.
  • Papanikolaou, D. (2021). Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, Edinburgh University Press.