Incomplete

Author: Alix Beeston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520381467
Category : Motion pictures and women
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
This field-defining collection establishes unfinished film projects--abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended--as rich and underappreciated resources for feminist film and media studies. In deeply researched and creatively conceived chapters, scholars join with film practitioners in approaching the unfinished film as an ideal site for revealing the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of women's film production across historical periods and national borders. Incomplete recovers projects and practices marginalized in film industries and scholarship alike, while also showing how feminist filmmakers have cultivated incompletion as an aesthetic strategy. Objects of loss and of possibility, incomplete films raise profound historiographical and ethical questions about the always unfinished project of film history, film spectatorship, and film studies.

Absence in Cinema

Author: Justin Remes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548281
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
Absence has played a crucial role in the history of avant-garde aesthetics, from the blank canvases of Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein’s invisible paintings, from the “silent” music of John Cage to Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theater. Yet little attention has been given to the important role of absence in cinema. In the first book to focus on cinematic absence, Justin Remes demonstrates how omissions of expected elements can spur viewers to interpret and understand the nature of film in new ways. While most film criticism focuses on what is present, such as images on the screen and music and dialogue on the soundtrack, Remes contends that what is missing is an essential part of the cinematic experience. He examines films without images—such as Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930), a montage of sounds recorded in Berlin—and films without sound—such as Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which documents the birth of the filmmaker’s first child. He also examines found footage films that erase elements from preexisting films such as Naomi Uman’s removed (1999), which uses nail polish and bleach to blot out all the women from a pornographic film, and Martin Arnold’s Deanimated (2002), which digitally eliminates images and sounds from a Bela Lugosi B movie. Remes maps out the effects and significations of filmic voids while grappling with their implications for film theory. Through a careful analysis of a broad array of avant-garde works, Absence in Cinema reveals that films must be understood not only in terms of what they show but also what they withhold.

"We Support Everything Since the Dawn of Time that Has Struggled and Still Struggles"

Author: Nicole Brenez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783956791062
Category : Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Book Description
In this pocket-sized book on the history of Lettrist Cinema, French historian and theorist Nicole Brenez elucidates the formal innovations of this unique art form that prefigured breakthroughs in film including the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema in the United States. Key figures and basic concepts such as the use of jarring dissonant and disassociated soundtracks, scratched and bleached celluloid and the place of Lettrist Cinema in avant-garde history are discussed and illustrated with black-and-white stills. Founded by Romanian-born French poet, film critic and artist Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, the Lettrist movement took its inspiration from Dada and Surrealism. The movement remains active to this day, having lost none of the aesthetic or ethical radicalism seeded by Isou in 1951 with his revolutionary film Venom and Eternity, which became the movement's visual manifesto, influencing such avant-garde filmmakers as Stan Brakage.

Constructions of Cultural Identities in Newsreel Cinema and Television after 1945

Author: Kornelia Imesch
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839429757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Newsreel cinema and television not only served as an important tool in the shaping of political spheres and the construction of national and cultural identities up to the 1960s. Today's potent televisual forms were furthermore developed in and strongly influenced by newsreels, and much of the archived newsreel footage is repeatedly used to both illustrate and re-stage past events and their significance. This book addresses newsreel cinema and television as a medium serving the formation of cultural identities in a variety of national contexts after 1945, its role in forming audiovisual narratives of a »biopic of the nation«, and the technical, aesthetical, and political challenges of archiving and restaging cinematic and televisual newsreel.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski

Author: Cael M. Keegan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050878
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture. Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis' films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn "to sense beyond the limits of the given world." Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded

Author: Wanda Strauven
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9053569456
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies. The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games. With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.

The Important Cinema Club Journal

Author: Justin Decloux
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781794544581
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
The blockbuster podcast is now an UNMISSABLE NEW BOOK! Will Sloan and Justin Decloux, hosts of The Important Cinema Club podcast, take you on a spine-tingling journey through the darkest recesses of film history to share their twisted cinematic obsessions! You'll GASP at studies of Albert Pyun, Joe D'Amato, William Beaudine, Mabel Normand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jackie Chan... SCREAM at primers on the Bruceploitation and Hong Kong Girls-with-Guns genres... SHUDDER at reportage from Hamilton's Trash Cinema and the Laser Blast Film Society... SHRIEK at appreciations of Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, and Steve Oedeker's Kung Pow: Enter the Fist... RAISE AN EYEBROW at interviews on the eccentric cinema of Matt Farley, David DeCoteau, and Gary Graver... and so much more! DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO JOIN THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB?

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality

Author: António Marques
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
The essays presented here are the outcome of research carried out by members of IFILNOVA (Institute for Philosophy of New University of Lisbon) in 2016. The IFILNOVA Permanent Seminar seeks to show how values are relevant to humans (both socially and individually). This seminar is the 'place' where different research will converge towards a unified viewpoint. This includes the discussion of the following questions: What is the philosophical contribution to current affairs and decisions that depend crucially on values? Can philosophy make a difference, namely by bringing practical reason to bear on these affairs and decision? And how to do it? Which are our scientific 'allies' in this enterprise; psychology, communication sciences, even sociology and history? This volume shows the connection between practical rationality and values and covers the dimensions ethics, aesthetics and politics.

Sergei M. Eisenstein

Author: Naum Kleiman
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048517117
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : nl
Pages : 546

Book Description
Sovjetregisseur en filmtheoreticus Sergei M. Eisenstein werkte in 1946 en 1947 een jaar voor zijn dood aan een algemene geschiedenis van de cinema. De manier waarop hij de geschiedschrijving van van de cinema benadert, is tegelijk fascinerend in haar ambitie en uiterst modern in haar methode. Eisenstein presenteert hier een virtuele wereldkaart van alle aan de bioscoop gerelateerde media, en ontwikkelt op hetzelfde moment een methode voor het schrijven van een geschiedenis die net als de cinema is gebaseerd op montage. De teksten van Eisenstein worden begeleid door een reeks kritische essays, geschreven door enkele van 's werelds meest gekwalificeerde Eisensteinkenners.

Dusk, Night, Dawn

Author: Anne Lamott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780593418680
Category : Christian biography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
"In Anne Lamott's new book, she confronts the harsh truth that many of us grapple with every day: How can we recapture the confidence we once had in the world and in the future as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up every day -- from climate crises to threats to democracy to daily assaults on civility -- how can we mere mortals cope? Where, Lamott asks, "do we start to get our joy and hope and our faith in life itself back ... with sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?" We begin, Lamott explains, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity "in the here and now ... We look up and around for [the] brighter ribbons" of connection, loyalty, and support. Drawing from her own experiences and her own faith journey, Lamott offers insights into the intimate and human ways we can bring back hope by demonstrating we can travel through the darkest places toward a more hopeful light that is still burning. As she does in Help, Thanks, Wow and her other bestselling books, Lamott explores the thorny issues of life and faith by breaking them down into manageable, human-sized questions for readers to ponder, and in the process she shows how each of us can amplify life's small moments of joy by staying open to love and connection even in these dark times. As Lamott notes, "I got Medicare three days before I got hitched, which sounds like something an old person might do, which does not describe adorably ageless me." Marrying for the first time with a grown son and a grandson, Lamott explains that finding happiness with a partner isn't a function of age or beauty but of outlook and perspective. Full of the honesty, humor and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, this book is classic Anne Lamott -- thoughtful and comic, warm and wise -- and further proof that Lamott truly speaks to the better angels in all of us"--