Planetary Cinema

Download or read book Planetary Cinema written by DR. (ENG) Tiago de Luca and published by Film Culture in Transition. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

Download or read book Kafkaesque Cinema written by Angelos Koutsourakis and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all its familiarity as a widely used term, "e;Kafkaesque cinema"e; remains an often-baffling concept that is poorly understood by film scholars. Taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges' point that Kafka has modified our conception of past and future artists, and Andre Bazin's suggestion that literary concepts and styles can exceed authors and "e;novels from which they emanate"e;, this monograph proposes a comprehensive examination of Kafkaesque Cinema in order to understand it as part of a transnational cinematic tradition rooted in Kafka's critique of modernity, which, however, extends beyond the Bohemian author's work and his historical experiences. Drawing on a range of disciplines in the Humanities including film, literary, and theatre studies, critical theory, and history, Kafkaesque Cinema will be the first full-length study of the subject and will be a useful resource for scholars and students interested in film theory, World Cinema, World Literature, and politics and representation.

Download or read book Planetary Longings written by Mary Louise Pratt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.

Download or read book Cinema Against Doublethink written by David Martin-Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When is it OK to lie about the past? If history is a story, then everyone knows that the 'official story' is told by the winners. No matter what we may know about how the past really happened, history is as it is recorded: this is what George Orwell called doublethink. But what happens to all the lost, forgotten, censored, and disappeared pasts of world history? Cinema Against Doublethink uncovers how a world of cinemas acts as a giant archive of these lost pasts, a vast virtual store of the world’s memories. The most enchanting and disturbing films of recent years – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, Nostalgia for the Light, Even the Rain, The Act of Killing, Carancho, Lady Vengeance – create ethical encounters with these lost pasts, covering vast swathes of the planet and crossing huge eras of time. Analysed using the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (the time-image) and Enrique Dussel (transmodern ethics), the multitudinous cinemas of the world are shown to speak out against doublethink, countering this biggest lie of all with their myriad 'false' versions of world history. Cinema, acting against doublethink, remains a powerful agent for reclaiming the truth of history for the 'post-truth' era.

Download or read book Apocalypse Cinema written by Stephen Prince and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vivid images of the apocalypse proliferate throughout contemporary cinema, which pictures the death of civilization in wildly different ways. Some films imagine a future where humanity is wiped out entirely, while others envision humans as an endangered species, enslaved by alien invaders or hunted by zombie hordes. This book provides a lively overview of apocalypse cinema, including alien invasions, nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions, climate change, and terrifying plagues. Covering pivotal films from the silent era to the present day, including Metropolis, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dr. Strangelove, Contagion, and Avengers: Endgame, Stephen Prince explores how these dark visions are rooted in religious and prophetic traditions, and he considers how our love for apocalypse cinema is tied to fundamental existential questions and anxieties that never go out of fashion.

Download or read book The Moving Form of Film written by Lúcia Nagib and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moving Form of Film: Historicizing the Medium through Other Media charts the ways in which crossing borders between film and other arts and media can provide an encompassing, inclusive, and non-teleological understanding of film history. Evolutionary narratives of cinema have traditionally adopted the Second World War as a watershed that separates 'classical' Hollywood films from 'modern' European productions, a scheme that subjects the entire world to the cinematic history of two hegemonic centres. In turn, histories of film as a technological medium have focused on the specificity of cinema as it gradually separated from the other art and medial forms - theatre, dance, fairground spectacle, painting, literature, still photography and other pre-cinematic modes. Taking an ambitious step forward with relation to these approaches, this book focuses on the fluid quality of the film form by exploring an array of exciting and often neglected artistic expressions worldwide as they compare and interconnect films across temporal, geographical, and cultural borders. By observing the ebb and flow of film's contours within the bounds of other artistic and medial expressions, the chapters aspire to establish a flexible historical platform for the moving form of film, posited, from production to consumption, as a transforming and transformative medium.

Download or read book Ends of Cinema written by Richard Grusin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema, contributors reinvigorate this debate to contemplate the ends, as well as directions and new beginnings, of cinema in the twenty-first century. In this volume, scholars at the forefront of film and media studies interrogate multiple potential “ends” of cinema: its goals and spaces, its relationship to postcinema, its racial dynamics and environmental implications, and its theoretical and historical conclusions. Moving beyond the predictable question of digital versus analog, the scholars gathered here rely on critical theory and historical research to consider cinema alongside its media companions: television, the gallery space, digital media, and theatrical environments. Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive. Contributors: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown U; James Leo Cahill, U of Toronto; Francesco Casetti, Yale U; Mary Ann Doane, U of California Berkeley; André Gaudreault, U de Montréal; Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.