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Science is Fiction
Essays examining the work of maverick scientific documentary filmmaker Jean Painleve.
Biocentrism and Modernism
Examining the complex intersections between art and scientific approaches to the natural world, Biocentrism and Modernism reveals another side to the development of Modernism. While many historians have framed this movement as being mechanistic and "against" nature, the essays in this collection illuminate the role that nature-centric ideologies played in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Modernism. The essays in Biocentrism and Modernism contend that it is no accident that Modernism arose at the same time as the field of modern biology. From nineteenth-century discoveries, to the emergence of the current environmentalist movement during the 1960s, artists, architects, and urban planners have responded to currents in the scientific world. Sections of the volume treat both philosophic worldviews and their applications in theory, historiography, and urban design. This collection also features specific case studies of individual artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock.
Birth and Death in British Culture
Why discuss birth and death when they lie outside discourse? And why look at them together when they are so much unlike each other, one the moment of fresh beginnings, joys, and the relative certainties of existence, the other the moment of life’s end, grief, and the relative uncertainties of non-existence? Because it turns out that both events, while virtually unrepresentable, have spawned a host of representations, narratives, rites, and attempts at making sense of them; and because they may have more similarities than appears at first sight. The 13 interdisciplinary articles collected in this volume prove that looking at the two phenomena in tandem throws into sharp relief the distinct patterns and functions of each, while also highlighting some of the fundamental historical developments, cultural functions, and socio-political issues shared by both. The contributions take stock of the discourses of birth and death prevalent in British (and Western) culture, probing into the way the two phenomena have been subjected to strategies of medialisation, commodification, and bio-politics.
Avant-doc
MacDonald explores the cinematic territory between the traditional categories of "documentary" and "avant-garde" film, through candid, in-depth conversations with filmmakers whose work has challenged these categories. Arranged in an imaginative chronology and written to be accessible to any film-interested reader, the interviews in Avant-Doc chart half a century of thinking by inventive filmmakers such as Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias, Jonathan Caouette, Pawel Wojtasik, and Todd Haynes. Recent breakthroughs by Amie Siegel, Jane Gillooly, Jennifer Proctor, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio are discussed; and considerable attention is paid to Harvard's innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab, producer of Sweetgrass, Leviathan, and Manakamana. A rare interview with pioneering scholar Annette Michelson begins Avant-Doc's meta-conversation.
Science Fiction
Science Fiction explores the genre from 1895 to the present day, drawing on examples from over forty countries. It raises questions about the relationship between science fiction, science and technology, and examines the interrelationships between spectacle, narrative and self-reflexivity, paying particular attention to the role of special effects in creating meaning and affect. It explores science fiction's evocations of the sublime, the grotesque, and the camp, and charts the ways in which the genre reproduces and articulates discourses of colonialism, imperialism and neo-liberal globalization. At the same time, Science Fiction provides a thorough analysis of the genre's representation of race, class, gender and sexuality, making this text an essential guide for students, academics and film fans alike. Key films discussed include: Le voyage dans la lune (1902) 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916) L'Atlantide (1921) King Kong (1933, 2005) Gojira (1954) La Jet e (1962) The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) Tetsuo (1989) Sleep Dealer (2008) Avatar (2009)
Medical Visions
This book explores 120 years of medical image-making to explain how visual representations came to play a central role in medical education and practice. She demonstrates how medical images acquire cultural meaning and influence, shaping professional and popular understandings of health and disease.
Rural Inventions
"In post-World War II France, commitment to cutting-edge technological modernization and explosive economic growth uprooted rural populations and eroded the village traditions of a largely peasant nation. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. The attachment of the French to rural ways and the agricultural past became a widely-shared preoccupation in the 1970s; this, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Though the French countryside is often imagined as stable and enduring, this book presents it as a site not just of decline and loss but also of change and adaptation. Rural Inventions explores the rise o...
Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth
This book examines post-war surrealist cinema in relation to surrealism’s change in direction towards myth and magic following World War II. Intermedial and interdisciplinary, the book unites cinema studies with art history and the study of Western esotericism, closely engaging with a wide range of primary sources, including surrealist journals, art, exhibitions, and writings. Kristoffer Noheden looks to the Danish surrealist artist Wilhelm Freddie’s forays into the experimental short film, the French poet Benjamin Péret’s contribution to the documentary film L’Invention du monde, the Argentinean-born filmmaker Nelly Kaplan’s feature films, and the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s work in short and feature films. The book traces a continuous engagement with myth and magic throughout these films, uncovering a previously unknown strain of occult imagery in surrealist cinema. It broadens the scope of the study of not only surrealist cinema, but of surrealism across the art forms. Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth will appeal to film scholars, art historians, and those interested in the impact of occultism on modern culture, film, and the arts.
Adventures of Perception
"Over the past twenty-five years, Scott MacDonald's kaleidoscopic explorations of independent cinema have become the most important chronicle of avant-garde and experimental film in the United States. In this collection of thematically related personal essays and conversations with filmmakers, he takes us on a fascinating journey into many under-explored territories of cinema. MacDonald illuminates topics including race and avant-garde film, the political implications of the nature film, the inventive single shot films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, why men use pornography and what they are looking at when they do, poetry and the poetic in avant-garde film, the widespread failure of film studies academicians to honor those who keep film exhibition alive, and other topics. Several of the interviews--those with Korean filmmaker Gina Kim, French nature filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou (Microcosmos), Canadian media artist Clive Holden, formalist/conceptualist David Gatten, and New York's Film Forum director Karen Cooper--are the first substantial conversations with these filmmakers available in English."--Publisher's description.
The 5K Zone
Peter Ackerman and Trudi Kehle were youngsters in 1945 when the Russians occupied the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland. Peter escaped as a boy and structured his life to enable a return to find his parents and evidence of horrific ethnic German expulsions. In 1958 Peter returned as a US Army Special Forces sergeant. When he found Trudi, quite accidentally, on her temporary pass in West Germany, they plotted her family escape from behind the east-west border. In his young life, Peter has the unique experience of life under Nazi control in the Sudetenland, the American military in West Germany, as a refugee boy on a post-war West German hops farm and as a displaced person in America. All before he ...
