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Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film (Art After Nature)
by Tessa LairdA foray through the wilds where experimental films and animals collide Like the flash of a tropical bird&’s iridescent wing, cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird&’s passionate inquiry into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals,her field notes from countless hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat. Part of a growing focus on nonhuman animals in film, Cinemal ventures to the &“furry underbelly&” of global experimental film practice, focusing on films from New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Laird examines how animals are depicted in film and analyzes the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colors, and voices (barking, howling, or echolocation). Burrowing into the work of filmmakers such as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz, Laird&’s energetic prose embodies the films she discusses, seamlessly combining personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy to spread a wide sensory buffet. Lively and optimistic, Laird uses cinematic animal tropes to encourage readers to rethink what it means to be human. She argues that, in a time of ecological collapse, such an impulse is a necessary means of imagining other, healthier ways of being in this world. Connecting us with the more-than-human, Cinemal lures us toward the beastly becomings of film and, ultimately, our own animal natures. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies
by Andrew Degraff A. D. JamesonThis beautifully illustrated atlas of beloved movies is an essential reference for cinephiles, fans of great films, and anyone who loves the art of mapmaking. Acclaimed artist Andrew DeGraff has created beautiful hand-painted maps of all your favorite films, from King Kong and North by Northwest to The Princess Bride, Fargo, Pulp Fiction, even The Breakfast Club—with the routes of major characters charted in meticulous cartographic detail. Follow Marty McFly through the Hill Valley of 1985, 1955, and 1985 once again as he races Back to the Future. Trail Jack Torrance as he navigates the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. And join Indiana Jones on a globe-spanning journey from Nepal to Cairo to London on his quest for the famed Lost Ark. Each map is presented in an 11-by-14-inch format, with key details enlarged for closer inspection, and is accompanied by illuminating essays from film critic A. D. Jameson, who speaks to the unique geographies of each film.
Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India
by Lalitha GopalanThis book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.
Cinemas of Boyhood: Masculinity, Sexuality, Nationality
by Timothy SharyDrawing from political sociology, pop psychology, and film studies, Cinemas of Boyhood explores the important yet often overlooked subject of boys and boyhood in film. This collected volume features an eclectic range of films from British and Indian cinemas to silent Hollywood and the new Hollywood of the 1980s, culminating in a comprehensive overview of the diverse concerns surrounding representations of boyhood in film.
Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics
by Amir Taha Dilip M MenonThis book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt.The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general.The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.
Cinemastrology: The Movie Lover's Guide to the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
by Stella WonderlyPicking your perfect flick can be an overwhelming experience. But fear not! Cinemastrology answers a question that has stumped even the most avid film buff for over a century: "What movie should I watch?"From contemporary comedies to Hollywood classics, from date movies to adrenaline fests, Cinemastrology is your guide to the art of selecting viewing based on your astrological sign. It includes profiles of all the sun signs and offers an extensive list of movie recommendations for each, complete with descriptions, behind-the-scenes stories, and insights into the unique qualities of each sign, from Aries to Pisces. Sections covering the stars that light up the screen and sign-compatible suggestions based on the sign of your partner or film-viewing friend round out Cinemastrology.Getting started is easy! All you need is a birthday and a passion for movies.
Cinematherapy Goes to the Oscars
by Beverly West Nancy PeskeGet ready for some of the best movie medicine ever made. The smash hit women's film guide Cinematherapy taught women that comfort, self-acceptance, inspiration, and humor were no farther away than the video store - and inspired the daily prime-time show on the WE Network (Women's Entertainment). Now the authors are back with a Cinematherapy take on the Oscar canon and how these award-winning films serve not only as a celluloid pharmacy but also as a window into ourselves, our relationships, and our times. Starting with the present and working backward by decade, Cinematherapy Goes to the Oscars uncovers the grand themes of each decade's award-winning films, from the Father Issue films of the seventies, with their ambiguous father figures (Patton, Kramer vs. Kramer) to bad girls acting out for disapproving fathers' love (Klute, Cabaret), to the Unsung Hero films of the fifties (On the Waterfront, The African Queen). Along the way there is great dish on who wore what on the Red Carpet, who said what in their acceptance speeches, and party tips for throwing a four-star Oscar bash, as well as returning popular sidebars like the Handy Hunk Chart. As the first female take on these sacred cows of the Silver Screen, focusing on the moments, messages, leading ladies, and supporting men that matter to us most, Cinematherapy Goes to the Oscars is the ultimate indulgence for every woman ready to curl up and take charge of her own remote control.
Cinematherapy: The Girl's Guide to Movies For Every Mood
by Beverly West Nancy PeskeWhat can take the edge off a bad day at the office better than a movie where the boss gets his (9-5)? And, of course, that close-up of Antonio Banderas, wet and naked in a cage, is the best cure for the break-up blahs known to modern science (Never Talk to Strangers). Now, for the first time, Cinematherapy acknowledges what women have known for years, and provides a sage guide to the best movie medicine currently available for whatever ails you, whether it's a sudden hormonal shift, a bad-hair day, or a full-fledged identity crisis.
Cinematic Appeals
by Ariel RogersCinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer's physical response and more with generating information flow, awe, disorientation, and the disintegration of spatial boundaries. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time. Films discussed include Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Matrix (1999), and Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme film Celebration (1995).
Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies (Film and Culture Series)
by Ariel RogersCinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen cinema promised to draw the viewer into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. This technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with the viewer's physical response and more with information flow, awe, and the reevaluation of spatiality and embodiment. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time.
Cinematic Articulation in Motion Graphics (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice)
by Michael BetancourtThis book develops a critical and theoretical approach to the semiotics of motion pictures as they are applied to a broader range of constructions than traditional commercial narrative productions. This interdisciplinary approach begins with the problems posed by motion perception to develop a model of cinematic interpretation that includes both narrative and non-narrative types of productions. Contrasting traditional theatrical projection and varieties of new media, this book integrates analyses of title sequences, music videos, and visual effects with discussions on classic and avant-garde films. It further explores the intersection between formative audio-visual cues identified by viewers and how viewers’ desires direct engagement with the motion picture to present a framework for understanding cinematic articulation. This new theoretical model incorporates much of what was neglected and gives greater prominence to formerly critical marginal productions by showing the fundamental connections that link all moving imagery and text, whether it tells a story or not. This insightful work will appeal to students and academics in film and media studies.
Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings (SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)
by Sheila KunkleEditing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film's ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending's hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator's sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed.
Cinematic Digital Television: Negotiating the Nexus of Production, Reception and Aesthetics
by Chris ComerfordChris Comerford explores cinematic digital television as an artistic classification and an academic object of study, and illuminates the slippage in definitions of previously understood media forms. The growth of television as an artistic, informative medium has given rise to shifts in the aesthetic style of the programmes we watch, and this book outlines these shifts along with the contemporary debates and critical theory surrounding them. Comerford looks at the forms and aesthetics of television, the production standards influencing streaming television and the agency of audiences, and provides case studies of key TV shows illustrating these shifts, including Twin Peaks: The Return, WandaVision, Hacks and Russian Doll. Navigating the levels of production and reception in cinematic digital television, the book uses film-inspired TV as a lightning rod for understanding our narrative screen media landscape and the classifications we use to negotiate it. As an essential reading for both scholars and students of media and television studies, this book provides a much-needed consideration of the changing landscape of television.
Cinematic Encounters 2: Portraits and Polemics
by Jonathan RosenbaumEschewing the idea of film reviewer-as-solitary-expert, Jonathan Rosenbaum continues to advance his belief that a critic's ideal role is to mediate and facilitate our public discussion of cinema. Portraits and Polemics presents debate as an important form of cinematic encounter whether one argues with filmmakers themselves, on behalf of their work, or with one's self. Rosenbaum takes on filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Richard Linklater, Manoel De Oliveira, Mark Rappaport, Elaine May, and Béla Tarr. He also engages, implicitly and explicitly, with other writers, arguing with Pauline Kael--and Wikipedia--over Jacques Demy, with the Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviewers of Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, with David Thomson about James L. Brooks, and with many American and English film critics about misrepresented figures from Jerry Lewis to Yasujiro Ozu to Orson Welles. Throughout, Rosenbaum mines insights, pursues pet notions, and invites readers to join the fray.
Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues
by Jonathan RosenbaumGodard. Fuller. Rivette. Endfield. Tarr. In his celebrated career as a film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum has undertaken wide-ranging dialogues with many of the most daring and important auteurs of our time. Cinematic Encounters collects more than forty years of interviews that embrace Rosenbaum's vision of film criticism as a collaboration involving multiple voices. Rosenbaum accompanies Orson Welles on a journey back to Heart of Darkness , the unmade film meant to be Welles's Hollywood debut. Jacques Tati addresses the primacy of décor and soundtrack in his comedic masterpiece PlayTime, while Jim Jarmusch explains the influence of real and Hollywoodized Native Americans in Dead Man. By arranging the chapters chronologically, Rosenbaum invites readers to pursue thematic threads as if the discussions were dialogues between separate interviews. The result is a rare gathering of filmmakers trading thoughts on art and process, on great works and false starts, and on actors and intimate moments.
Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood
by Rashna Wadia RichardsCinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of "cinephiliac" historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural fragments rather than composing grand narratives, this unorthodox history of the films of the studio system reveals how classical Hollywood emerges as a disjointed network of accidents, excesses, and coincidences.
Cinematic Geopolitics
by Michael J. ShapiroIn recent years, film has been one of the major genres within which the imaginaries involved in mapping the geopolitical world have been represented and reflected upon. In this book, one of America's foremost theorists of culture and politics treats those aspects of the "geopolitical aesthetic" that must be addressed in light of both the post cold war and post 9/11 world and contemporary film theory and philosophy. Beginning with an account of his experience as a juror at film festival’s, Michael J. Shapiro’s Cinematic Geopolitics analyzes the ways in which film festival space and both feature and documentary films function as counter-spaces to the contemporary "violent cartography" occasioned by governmental policy, especially the current "war on terror." Influenced by the cinema-philosophy relationship developed by Gilles Deleuze and the politics of aesthetics thinking of Jacques Ranciere, the book’s chapters examines a range of films from established classics like the Deer Hunter and the Battle of Algiers to contemporary films such as Dirty Pretty Things and the Fog of War. Shapiro’s use of philosophical and theoretical works makes this cutting edge examination of film and politics essential reading for all students and scholars with an interest in film and politics.
Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China
by Jie LiHow might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals.Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies.Cinematic Guerrillas considers cinema’s meanings for revolution and nation building; successive generations of projectionists; workers, peasants, and soldiers; women and ethnic minorities; and national leaders, local cadres, and cultural censors. By reading diverse, vivid, and often surprising accounts of moviegoing, Li excavates Chinese media theories that provide a critical new perspective on world cinema.
Cinematic Guide: Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter)
by Felicity BakerThe Essential Film Companion for ALBUS DUMBLEDORE that's perfect for the youngest fans! This hardcover guidebook features your favorite scenes and quotes from all eight Harry Potter movies!The experience of this eBook will be best if viewed on a tablet.
Cinematic Histospheres: On the Theory and Practice of Historical Films
by Rasmus GreinerIn this Open Access book, film scholar Rasmus Greiner develops a theoretical model for the concept of the histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modelled, physically experienceable historical world. His analysis of practices of modelling and perceiving, immersion and empathy, experience and remembering, appropriation and refiguration, combine approaches from film studies, such as Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience, with historiographic theories, such as Frank R. Ankersmit’s concept of historical experience. Building on this analysis, Greiner examines the spatial and temporal organization of historical films and presents discussions of mood and atmosphere, body and memory, and genre and historical consciousness. The analysis is based around three historical films, spanning six decades, that depict 1950s Germany: Helmut Käutner’s Sky Without Stars (1955), Jutta Brückner’s Years of Hunger (1980), and Sven Bohse’s three-part TV series Ku’damm 56 (2016).
Cinematic Homelands: The Cultural and Gendered Imaginaries of Iranian Diasporic Women’s Filmmaking
by Mara AnticThis book maps an emerging cycle of films made by Iranian diasporic women filmmakers and produced outside of Iran, focusing on five significant examples: Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009), Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014), Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance (2011), Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014). These films speak to the emergence of feminist concerns surrounding gender relations, female subjectivity and sexuality in diasporic filmmaking. The book intends to show how the body of recent Iranian diasporic women’s films demonstrates a substantial shift within the existing exilic and diasporic paradigm, requiring analysis of intersectional relations not only between ethnicity, culture and nationality, but also gender and sexuality. Attending closely to the vibrant feminist film culture generated by Iranian women in diaspora, this book aims to interrogate the diversity of women’s filmmaking practices and their role in shaping new representations of female subjectivity and the diasporic condition.
Cinematic Independence: Constructing the Big Screen in Nigeria
by Noah TsikaA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. However, after 1999, the exhibition sector was revitalized with the construction of multiplexes. Cinematic Independence is about the periods that straddle this disappearing act: the immediate decades bracketing independence in 1960, and the years after 1999. At stake is the Nigerian postcolony’s role in global debates about the future of the movie theater. That it was eventually resurrected in the flashy form of the multiplex is not simply an achievement of commercial real estate, but also a testament to cinema’s persistence—its capacity to stave off annihilation or, in this case, come back from the dead.
Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media
by Seung-hoon JeongIn this book, Seung-hoon Jeong introduces the cinematic interface as a contact surface that mediates between image and subject, proposing that this mediation be understood not simply as transparent and efficient but rather as asymmetrical, ambivalent, immanent, and multidirectional. Jeong enlists the new media term "interface" to bring to film theory a synthetic notion of interfaciality as underlying the multifaceted nature of both the image and subjectivity. Drawing on a range of films, Jeong examines cinematic interfaces seen on screen and the spectator’s experience of them, including: the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, the character’s bodily contact with such a medium-interface, the object’s surface and the subject’s face as "quasi-interface," and the image itself. Each of these case studies serves as a platform for remapping and revamping major concepts in film studies such as suture, embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality. Looking to such theories as the ontology of the image and the phenomenology of the body, this original theorization of the cinematic interface not only offers a conceptual framework for rethinking and re-linking film and media studies, but also suggests a general theory of the interface.
Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory
by Victoria Grace WaldenThis book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It turns to the in-betweens that characterise the cinematic experience to discover how the different elements involved in film and its viewing collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of different forms of screen media, such as films that reassemble archive footage, animations, apps and museum installations, in dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, art critic-cum-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and film phenomenologies. The result is a careful and unique examination of how Holocaust memory can emerge from the relationship between different media, objects and bodies during the film experience. This work challenges the existing concentration on representation in writing about Holocaust films, turning instead to the materials of screen works and the spectatorial experience to highlight the powerful contribution of the cinematic to Holocaust memory.
Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
by Annette InsdorfA great movie’s first few minutes provide the key to the rest of the film. Like the opening paragraphs of a novel, they draw the viewer in, setting up the thematic concerns and stylistic approach that will be developed over the course of the narrative. A strong opening sequence leads the viewer to trust the filmmakers. Other times, opening shots are intentionally misleading as they invite alert, active participation with the film. In Cinematic Overtures, Annette Insdorf discusses the opening sequence so that viewers turn first impressions into deeper understanding of cinematic technique.From Joe Gillis’s voice-over in Sunset Boulevard as he lies dead in a swimming pool to the hallucinatory opening of Apocalypse Now, from the stream-of-consciousness montage as found in Hiroshima, mon amour to the slowly unfolding beginning of Schindler’s List, Cinematic Overtures analyzes opening shots from a range of Hollywood as well as international films. Insdorf pays close attention to how the viewer makes sense of these scenes and the cinematic world they are about to enter. Including dozens of frame enlargements that illustrate the strategies of opening scenes, Insdorf also examines how films explore and sometimes critique the power of the camera’s gaze. Along with analyses of opening scenes, the book offers a series of revelatory and surprising readings of individual films by some of the leading directors of the past seventy-five years. Erudite but accessible, Cinematic Overtures will lead film scholars and ardent movie fans alike to greater attentiveness to those fleeting opening moments.