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Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era
by Brigitta B. WagnerScarred by the Second World War, divided during the Cold War, and turned into a massive construction site in the early postwall years, Berlin has dramatically reinvented itself in the new millennium. Film has served a neglected but important function in this transformation.In Berlin Replayed, Brigitta B. Wagner shows how old and new films set in Berlin created a collective urban nostalgia for the city's best, most inclusive, and most conciliatory pasts in the face of its renewed purpose as the all-German capital. Exploring films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, and Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, the book establishes that these films don't merely feature the city but actively construct how viewers come to know different Berlins of the past and present. To illustrate how film has repeatedly remade the image of the city, Berlin Replayed focuses on four key periods: the golden 1920s, when the city was a major filmmaking center; the prewall 1950s, when Berlin had two ideologically opposed film industries; the politically transformative late 1980s and early 1990s; and the hyped start of the twenty-first century.By showing how films have helped revive memories of the "good" Berlin and, by extension, the "good" Germany, Berlin Replayed reveals the underappreciated but powerful role film has played in the process of unifying Germany's historical experience and bridging its physical and political divisions.
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
by André M. CarringtonIn Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction--including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures--to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Our Gang
by Julia LeeIt was the age of Jim Crow, riddled with racial violence and unrest. But in the world of Our Gang, black and white children happily played and made mischief together. They even had their own black and white version of the KKK, the Cluck Cluck Klams--and the public loved it. The story of race and Our Gang, or The Little Rascals, is rife with the contradictions and aspirations of the sharply conflicted, changing American society that was its theater. Exposing these connections for the first time, Julia Lee shows us how much this series, from the first silent shorts in 1922 to its television revival in the 1950s, reveals about black and white American culture--on either side of the silver screen. Behind the scenes, we find unconventional men like Hal Roach and his gag writers, whose Rascals tapped into powerful American myths about race and childhood. We meet the four black stars of the series--Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, Allen "Farina" Hoskins, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas--the gang within the Gang, whose personal histories Lee pursues through the passing years and shifting political landscape. In their checkered lives, and in the tumultuous life of the series, we discover an unexplored story of America, the messy, multiracial nation that found in Our Gang a comic avatar, a slapstick version of democracy itself.
Our Own Image
by Barry BarclayAcclaimed Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay's Our Own Image relates the experiences of making his documentaries and his critically acclaimed feature-length film Ngati (1987), widely credited as the first fiction feature by a member of an indigenous community. Barclay details his views on the process of filmmaking within his own Maori community and discusses how his work differed from popular cinema, advocating for indigenous control, participation, and perspectives in media.Our Own Image gives an in-depth depiction of the changes Barclay's approach contributed to the field of documentaries, as well as displaying the respect for community Barclay brought to his filming technique. His insistence on letting people speak for themselves demonstrated authenticity to audiences, creating awareness of indigenous cinema in New Zealand and worldwide.
Key Change: New Musicals for Young Audiences
by Peter Brosius Elissa Adams Children’s Theatre Company Jeanine TesoriKey Change: New Musicals for Young Audiences presents four groundbreaking musicals developed by Children's Theatre Company, widely regarded as the leading theatre of its kind in North America. These works embody singular styles and sounds, yet all represent the robust spirit of unique people finding their way in the world. They are all sure to entertain, including the Broadway hit A Year with Frog and Toad. The quirky Tale of a West Texas Marsupial Girl, by Lisa D'Amour, with music by Sxip Shirey, is set in a town unprepared to accept a girl born with a pouch. But eventually, with the help of her friend Sue, everyone comes to understand just how wonderful Marsupial Girl is. Madeline and the Gypsies--adapted by Barry Kornhauser from the popular book by Ludwig Bemelmans, with music by Michael Koerner--gives little Madeline and her friend Pepito a taste of circus life after they get lost at a carnival and Gypsies carry them away. In Buccaneers! (written by Liz Duffy Adams, with music by Ellen Maddow) a girl leads the young pirates who capture her toward a better life through her wits and tenacity. A Year with Frog and Toad chronicles the unlikely friendship of silly Toad and responsible Frog that endures all seasons. Based on the classic books by Arnold Lobel, adapted by Willie Reale, with music by Robert Reale, it made its mark on Broadway and was nominated for three Tony Awards, including Best Musical.Each of these musicals guarantees a distinctive, delightful theatrical experience. Now teachers and children far and wide can read them in one volume and produce them in their own schools, theatres, and communities.
Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating
by Scott C. RichmondDo contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power.Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry.
Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissim Adrift
by Akira Mizuta LippitCinema without Reflection traces an implicit film theory in Jacques Derrida's oeuvre, especially in his frequent invocation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Derrida's reflections on the economies of image and sound that reverberate in this story, along with the spectral dialectics of love, mirrors, and poiesis, serve as the basis for a theory of cinema that Derrida perhaps secretly imagined. Following Derrida's interventions on Echo and Narcissus across his thought on the visual arts, Akira Mizuta Lippit seeks to return to a theory of cinema adrift in Derrida's philosophy. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Film as Philosophy
by Bernd HerzogenrathFilm and philosophy have much in common, and books have been written on film and philosophy. But can films be, or do, philosophy? Can they “think”? Film as Philosophy is the first book to explore this fascinating question historically, thematically, and methodically.Bringing together leading scholars from universities across the globe, Film as Philosophy presents major new research that leads film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue. It provides a uniquely sweeping, historical overview of the confluence of film and philosophy for more than a century, considering films from Jean Renoir, Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, and others; the written works of filmmakers who also theorized on the medium, including Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein; and others who have written on cinema, including Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and many more. Representing a major step toward establishing a media philosophy that puts the status, role, and function of film into a new perspective, Film as Philosophy removes representational techniques from the center of inquiry, replacing these with the medium’s ability to “think.” Hence it accords film with “agency,” and the dialogue between it and philosophy (and even neuroscience) is negotiated anew.Contributors: Nicole Brenez, U of Paris 3–Sorbonne; Elisabeth Bronfen, U of Zurich; Noël Carroll, CUNY; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology; Gregory Flaxman, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Alex Ling, Western Sydney U; Adrian Martin, Monash U; John Ó Maoilearca, Kingston U, London; Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie U, Sydney; Murray Smith, U of Kent, Canterbury; Julia Vassilieva, Monash U, Melbourne; Christophe Wall-Romana, U of Minnesota; and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College.
Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema
by Alanna ThainBodies in Suspense presents a powerful new way to think through postdigital cinema and the affective turn in critical theory. According to Alanna Thain, suspense films allow us to experience the relation between two bodies: that of the film and that of the viewer. Through the “time machine” of suspense, film form, gender, genre, and spectatorship are revealed in innovative and different ways. These films not only engage us directly in ethical concerns, but also provide a key for understanding corporeal power in the digital era. Offering a new framework for understanding cinematic suspense, Bodies in Suspense argues that the “body in time” enables us to experience the temporal dimension of the body directly. This is the first book to link two contemporary frames of analysis: questions of cinematic temporality and contemporary affect theory. Thain conducts close readings of influential suspense films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Christian Marclay, Rian Johnson, and Lou Ye, and sets forth a compelling new theory of cinema, reading for the productivity of the “crime of time” that stages the duplicity of cinematic bodies. Through these films that foreground doubled characters and looping, Thain explores Gilles Deleuze’s claim that “the direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted cinema.”A vital new addition to film theory, corporeality and affect theory, feminist theory, and the philosophy of time—and one of the first books to explore David Lynch’s Hollywood trilogy—Bodies in Suspense asks us to pay attention, above all, to the ways in which the condition of spectatorship creates a doubling sensation with important philosophical repercussions.
Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary
by Nicholas De VilliersThe turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries.De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected sex work and sex workers. Throughout, Sexography analyzes the films of a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and their documentary historiography.De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and consuming films about sex work.
Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard beyond Cinema
by Michael CramerTelevision has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. Utopian Television examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of its existing practices.Utopian Television illustrates how each director imagined television’s improved or “utopian” version by drawing on elements that had come to characterize it by the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the public service model of Western European broadcasting, each used television to realize works that would never have been viable in the commercial cinema. All three directors likewise seized on television’s supposed affinity for information and its status as a “useful” medium, but attempted to join this utility with aesthetic experimentation, suggesting new ways to conceive of the relationship between aesthetics and information.As beautifully written as it is theoretically rigorous, Utopian Television turns to the writing of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch in treating the three directors’ television experiments as enactments of “utopia as method.” In doing so it reveals the extent to which the medium inspired and shaped hopes not only of a better future but of better moving image art as well.
Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
by Elena GorfinkelOne of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films—salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town screens over the course of the decade. Yet despite their vital importance to the film scene, and though they are now understood as a gateway to the emergence of publicly exhibited hardcore pornography in the early 1970s, these films have been largely overlooked by scholars.Defined by low budgets, quick production times, unknown actors, strategic uses of nudity, and a sensationalist obsession with unbridled female sexuality, sexploitation films provide a unique window into a tumultuous period in American culture and sexual politics. In Lewd Looks, Elena Gorfinkel examines the social and legal developments that made sexploitation films possible: their aesthetics, their regulation, and their audiences. Gorfinkel explores the ways sexploitation films changed how spectators encountered and made sense of the sexualized body and set the stage for the adult film industry of today. Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture—a subject that will engross readers interested in media, sexuality, gender, and the 1960s. Gorfinkel investigates the films and their contexts with scholarly depth and vivid storytelling, producing a new account of the obscene image, screen sex, and adult film and media.
The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous
by Lutz KoepnickIn The Long Take, Lutz Koepnick posits extended shot durations as a powerful medium for exploring different modes of perception and attention in our fast-paced world of mediated stimulations. Grounding his inquiry in the long takes of international filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Michael Haneke, Koepnick reveals how their films evoke wondrous experiences of surprise, disruption, enchantment, and reorientation. He proceeds to show how the long take has come to thrive in diverse artistic practices across different media platforms: from the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to the screen-based installations of Sophie Calle and Tacita Dean, from experimental work by Francis Alÿs and Janet Cardiff to durational images in contemporary video games.Deeply informed by film and media theory, yet written in a fluid and often poetic style, The Long Take goes far beyond recent writing about slow cinema. In Koepnick’s account, the long take serves as a critical hallmark of international art cinema in the twenty-first century. It invites viewers to probe the aesthetics of moving images and to recalibrate their sense of time. Long takes unlock windows toward the new and unexpected amid the ever-mounting pressures of 24/7 self-management.
Zombie Theory: A Reader
by Sarah Juliet LauroZombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other.Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film
by John David RhodesMuch of our time at the movies is spent in other people’s homes. Cinema is, after all, often about everyday life. Spectacle of Property is the first book to address the question of the ubiquitous conjuncture of the moving image and its domestic architecture. Arguing that in cinema we pay to occupy spaces we cannot occupy, John David Rhodes explores how the house in cinema both structures and criticizes fantasies of property and ownership.Rhodes tells the story of the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at private property onscreen, analyzing the security and ease the house promises along with the horrible anxieties it produces. He begins by laying out a theory of film spectatorship that proposes the concept of the “spectator-tenant,” with reference to films such as Gone with the Wind and The Magnificent Ambersons. The book continues with three chapters that are each occupied with a different architectural style and the films that make use of it: the bungalow, the modernist house, and the shingle style house. Rhodes considers a variety of canonical films rarely analyzed side by side, such as Psycho in relation to Grey Gardens and Meet Me in St. Louis. Among the other films discussed are Meshes of the Afternoon, Mildred Pierce, A Star Is Born, Killer of Sheep, and A Single Man.Bringing together film history, film theory, and architectural history as no book has to date, Spectacle of Property marks a new milestone in examining cinema’s relationship to realism while leaving us vastly more informed about, if less at home inside, the houses we occupy at the movies.
Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis
by Luka ArsenjukA major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.
Scenarios: Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Every Man for Himself and God Against All; Land of Silence and Darkness; Fitzcarraldo
by Werner Herzog Martje Herzog Alan GreenbergI do not follow ideas, I stumble into stories or into people; and I know that this is so big, I have to make a film. Very often, films come like uninvited guests, like burglars in the middle of the night. They are in your kitchen; something is stirring, you wake up at 3 a.m. and all of a sudden they come wildly swinging at you.When I write a screenplay, I write it as if I have the whole film in front of my eyes. Then it is very easy for me, and I can write very, very fast. It is almost like copying. But of course sometimes I push myself; I read myself into a frenzy of poetry, reading Chinese poets of the eighth and ninth century, reading old Icelandic poetry, reading some of the finest German poets like Hölderlin. All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of my film, but I work myself up into this kind of frenzy of high-caliber language and concepts and beauty.And then sometimes I push myself by playing music, for example, a piano concerto by Beethoven, and I play it and write furiously. But none of this is an answer to the question of how you focus on a single idea for a film. And then, during shooting, you have to depart from it sometimes, while keeping it alive in its essence. —Werner Herzog, on filmmakingWerner Herzog doesn’t write traditional screenplays. He writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.
Double Visions, Double Fictions: The Doppelgänger in Japanese Film and Literature
by Baryon Tensor PosadasA fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature—past and present Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Dopplegänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the dopplegänger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day.According to author Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgänger marks the intersection of the historical impact of psychoanalytic theory, the genre of detective fiction in Japan, early Japanese cinema, and the cultural production of Japanese colonialism. He examines the doppelgänger’s appearance in the works of Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, as well as the films of Tsukamoto Shin’ya and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not only as a recurrent motif but also as a critical practice of concepts. Following these explorations, Posadas asks: What were the social, political, and material conditions that mobilized the desire for the dopplegänger? And how does the dopplegänger capture social transformations taking place at these historical moments?Double Visions, Double Fictions ultimately reveals how the dopplegänger motif provides a fascinating new backdrop for understanding the enmeshment of past and present.
Interpreting Anime
by Christopher BoltonFor students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades.Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium—like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama—to reveal what is unique about anime’s way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton’s incisive responses.Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton’s original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation’s imaginative and compelling visual forms.
Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave
by Steven UngarThirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issuesCritical Mass is the first sustained study to trace the origins of social documentary filmmaking in France back to the late 1920s. Steven Ungar argues that socially engaged nonfiction cinema produced in France between 1945 and 1963 can be seen as a delayed response to what filmmaker Jean Vigo referred to in 1930 as a social cinema whose documented point of view would open the eyes of spectators to provocative subjects of the moment.Ungar identifies Vigo’s manifesto, his 1930 short À propos de Nice, and late silent-era films by Georges Lacombe, Boris Kaufman, André Sauvage, and Marcel Carné as antecedents of postwar documentaries by Eli Lotar, René Vautier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jean Rouch, associated with critiques of colonialism and modernization in Fourth and early Fifth Republic France. Close readings of individual films alternate with transitions to address transnational practices as well as state- and industry-wide reforms between 1935 and 1960. Critical Mass is an indispensable complement to studies of nonfiction film in France, from Georges Lacombe’s La Zone (1928) to Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963).
The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
by Thomas LamarreA major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation With the release of author Thomas Lamarre’s field-defining study The Anime Machine, critics established Lamarre as a leading voice in the field of Japanese animation. He now returns with The Anime Ecology, broadening his insights to give a complete account of anime’s relationship to television while placing it within important historical and global frameworks. Lamarre takes advantage of the overlaps between television, anime, and new media—from console games and video to iOS games and streaming—to show how animation helps us think through television in the contemporary moment. He offers remarkable close readings of individual anime while demonstrating how infrastructures and platforms have transformed anime into emergent media (such as social media and transmedia) and launched it worldwide. Thoughtful, thorough illustrations plus exhaustive research and an impressive scope make The Anime Ecology at once an essential reference book, a valuable resource for scholars, and a foundational textbook for students.
The Sound of Things to Come: An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film
by Trace ReddellA groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film.Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear.Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.
The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor
by Jennifer RheeTracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.
Scenarios II: Signs of Life; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Fata Morgana; Heart of Glass
by Werner Herzog Krishna WinstonThe second in a series: the master filmmaker’s prose scenarios for four of his notable filmsOn the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: “With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema.” And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker’s genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog’s signature fashion—more prose poem than screenplay, transcribing the vision unfolding before him as if in a dream—the four scenarios here (three never before translated into English) reveal an iconoclastic craftsman at the height of his powers.Along with his template for the film poem Fata Morgana (1971), this volume includes the scenarios for Herzog’s first two feature films, Signs of Life (1968) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), along with the hypnotic Heart of Glass (1976). In a brief introduction, Herzog describes the circumstances surrounding each scenario, inviting readers into the mysterious process whereby one man’s vision becomes every viewer’s waking dream.
Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema
by Morgan AdamsonAn integrated look at the political films of the 1960s and ’70s and how the New Left transformed cinema A timely reassessment of political film culture in the 1960s and ’70s, Enduring Images examines international cinematic movements of the New Left in light of sweeping cultural and economic changes of that era. Looking at new forms of cinematic resistance—including detailed readings of particular films, collectives, and movements—Morgan Adamson makes a case for cinema’s centrality to the global New Left. Enduring Images details how student, labor, anti-imperialist, Black Power, and second-wave feminist movements broke with auteur cinema and sought to forge local and international solidarities by producing political essay films, generating new ways of being and thinking in common. Adamson produces a comparative and theoretical account of New Left cinema that engages with discussions of work, debt, information, and resistance. Enduring Images argues that the cinemas of the New Left are sites to examine, through the lens of struggle, the reshaping of global capitalism during the pivotal moment in which they were made, while at the same time exploring how these movements endure in contemporary culture and politics. Including in-depth discussions of Third Cinema in Argentina, feminist cinema in Italy, Newsreel movements in the United States, and cybernetics in early video, Enduring Images is an essential examination of the political films of the 1960s and ’70s.