Film and Female Consciousness


Book Description

Film and Female Consciousness analyses three contemporary films that offer complex and original representations of women's thoughtfulness and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003) and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these recent works with well-known and influential films that offer more familiar treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, celebrated films alongside the recent, unconventional works illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Bolton's approach demonstrates how the encounter between the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield a fuller understanding of the fundamental relationship between film and philosophy. Furthermore, the book explores the implications of this approach for filmmakers and spectators, and suggests Irigarayan models of authorship and spectatorship that reinvigorate the notion of women's cinema.




Film Consciousness


Book Description

The notion of film consciousness is one that has played around various film and philosophical discourses without ever really surfacing as a cogent theory. Representing the first major expression of film consciousness as a tangible concept, this critical study revisits notions of memory, retentional consciousness, narrative expectation, and spatio-temporal perception while also analyzing several major films. The first half of the book focuses on understanding the elements of the film experience--and its associated consciousness--through the descriptive tools of phenomenology. The second part develops the idea of film consciousness as a unique vision of the world and as a large element in the human understanding of reality. Throughout the work, the author combines the ideas of philosophers and film theorists from phenomenology--such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bazin, and Kracauer--with the postmodernist work of Deleuze and transitional theorists Bergson and Benjamin.




African American Cinema Through Black Lives Consciousness


Book Description

The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike.




Screen Consciousness


Book Description

This collection of essays is driven by the question of how we know what we know, and in particular how we can be certain about something even when we know it is an illusion. The contention of the book is that this age-old question has acquired a new urgency as certain trends in science, technology and ideas have taken the discussion of consciousness out of the philosophy department and deposited it in the world at large. As a consequence, a body of literature from many fields has produced its own sets of concerns and methods under the rubric of Consciousness Studies. Each contribution in this collection deals with issues and questions that lots of people have been thinking about for many years in many different contexts, things such as the nature of film, cinema, world, mind and so on. Those of us fascinated by these diverse yet related issues may have often felt we were working in a disciplinary no-man's-land. Now suddenly, it seems with Consciousness Studies we have a coherent intellectual home - albeit one that is self-consciously eclectic. The essays included in Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World are from a range of disciplines -- art, philosophy, film theory, anthropology and technology studies -- each represented by significant international figures, and each concerned with how their field is being transformed by the new discipline of Consciousness Studies. Together they attempt to reconcile the oncoming rush of new data from science and technology about how we know what we know, with the insights gained from the long view of history, philosophy and art. Each of the contributions seeks to interpose Consciousness Studies between film and mind, where for cultural theorists psychoanalysis had traditionally stood. This is more than simply updating Film Studies or nodding in the direction of cognitive film theory. Film, with all its sentient, sensuous and social qualities, is a common reference point between all these forces, and Consciousness Studies provides the intellectual impetus for this book to revisit familiar problems with fresh insight.




Expanded Cinema


Book Description

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.




Innovation in Ethnographic Film


Book Description

In the first coprehensive introduction to the nature and development of ethnographic film, Peter Loizos reviews fifty of the most important films made between 1955 and 1985. Going beyond programmatic statements, he analyzes the films themselves, identifying and discussing their contributions to ethnographic documentation. Loizos begins by reviewing works of John Marshall and Timothy Asch in the 1950s and moves through those of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and many more recent filmmakers. He reveals a steady course of innovations along four dimensions: production technology, subject matter, strategies of argument, and ethnographic authentication. His analyses of individual films address questions of realism, authenticity, genre, authorial and subjective voice, and representation of the films' creators as well as their subjects. Innovation in Ethnographic Film, as a systematic and iluminating review of developments in ethnographic film, will be an important resource for the growing number of anthropologists and other scholars who use such films as tools for research and teaching.




Movement as Meaning


Book Description

This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.




Transmodern Cinema and Decolonial Film Theory


Book Description

In this book, Robert K. Beshara applies decolonial film theory to an analysis of Youssef Chahine's (1997) Al-Masir (Destiny). Transmodern Cinema and Decolonial Film Theory is the first book on decolonial film theory, which unpacks key concepts in decoloniality and decolonial aesthetics. Decolonial film theory is then applied to Youssef Chahine's (1997) historical drama al-Ma?ir in an effort to juxtapose the Egyptian filmmaker (Chahine) and his decolonial cinema to the Andalusian polymath (Ibn Rushd) and his Islamic philosophy.




The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures


Book Description

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject.




The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema


Book Description

This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises does the "camera eye" continue to survive in media that is called new?