Cinema Off Screen


Book Description

At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.




Cinema Off Screen


Book Description

At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.




The Off-Screen


Book Description

From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.




Off-Screen Cinema


Book Description

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.




Off Screen


Book Description

This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women’s engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen to represent themselves and how they have been represented, and how they deal with the cinematic apparatus, as subjects of production, objects of representation, and spectators. A variety of approaches are offered, ranging from psychoanalysis and semiology to history. With an exhaustive filmography, this anthology of chapters by eminent theorists demonstrates the central importance of recent developments in Italy for the whole spectrum of film and feminist studies.




Morgan Fisher


Book Description

A collection of texts by researchers, artists and critics, exploring Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices. Positioned at the intersection of cinema, painting, installation, architecture, video, drawing and photography, the work of filmmaker Morgan Fisher remains to be explored, as is its influence on new generations of artists. This collection considers Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices, and investigates the very special temporality created by Fisher's structural interventions. The publication gathers researchers, artists and critics, to draw up the unprecedented profile of a work guided by the love of cinema, while going beyond it. Morgan Fisher, an artist and filmmaker, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1942. He received an A.B. in art history from Harvard College, then studied film production in Los Angeles. His early work was predominantly in film. His films have been shown at international film festivals (Berlin, Rotterdam, London, among others) and in one-person screenings or exhibitions at, among other places, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the early 1990s he started making works on paper, then paintings and sculptures. One-person exhibitions that included examples of such work were at Portikus, Raven Row, Museum Abteiberg, Generali Foundation, and Aspen Art Museum. More recently, he has exhibited photographs. He was in the 1985, 2004, and 2014 Whitney Biennials. A collection of his writings was published in 2012 by Walther König. He has been a visiting teacher at Brown University, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Los Angeles.




Dreams of a Nation


Book Description

Over the last quarter-century, Palestinian cinema has emerged as a major artistic force on the global scene. Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-determination, this cinema is the single most important artistic expression of a much-maligned people. In Dreams of a Nation, filmmakers, critics and scholars discuss the extraordinary social and artistic significance of Palestinian film. It is the only volume of its kind in any language.




Screening Nature


Book Description

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.




Cinema, MD


Book Description

Cinema, MD follows the intersection of medicine and film and how filmmakers wrote a history of medicine over time, analyzing not only changing practices, changing morals, and changing expectations but also medical stereotypes, medical activism, and violations of patients' integrity and autonomy. Examining over 400 films with medical themes over a century of cinema, this book establishes the cultural, medical, and historical importance of the artform.




Silver Screen Fiend


Book Description

"Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol or sex: it was film. After moving to L.A., Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton's life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships. Set in the nascent days of L.A.'s alternative comedy scene, Oswalt's memoir chronicles his journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way"--