As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by th…
Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very…
This volume explores new ways of considering, experiencing and making films in a time of technological transition. It brings together an international group of scholars and artists from a variety of countries, who speak different languages and come from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds.
For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's influential thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved…
Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice analyses the histories, practices, identities and subject which form and shape the daily working lives of screenwriters. Author Bridget Conor considers the ways in which contemporary screenwriters navigates and make sense of the labor markets in which they are immersed. Chapters explore areas including screenwriting as creative labor, scre…
In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room,…
For most of the twentieth century, the making of animated cartoons was mechanized and standardized to allow for high-volume production: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called "cels") and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians, most of them anonymous. In order …
This volume brings together a wide range of explorations of the ways in which technological innovations have established new and changing conditions for the experience and study of film. The book offers analyses by such leading figures in film studies as Tom Gunning and Charles Musser, who examine the ways in which technological changes have altered the ways how cinema is conceived and how it i…
Since the late 1990s, there has been a marked increase in academic interest in what are sometimes called 'utility films', intended for purposes of information, training, teaching or advertising. Although such research was long overdue, the current academic output tends to be restricted in scope, paying little attention to the films' textual features: the means they deploy in defending their inf…
Film criticism is in crisis. Dwelling on the many film journalists made redundant at newspapers, magazines, and other 'old media' in past years, commentators have voiced existential questions about the purpose and worth of the profession in the age of WordPress blogospheres and proclaimed the 'death of the critic'. Bemoaning the current anarchy of internet amateurs and the lack of authoritative…