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The emergence of modern dance and the early history of cinema ran concurrent with the European avant-garde's development of pictorial abstraction in the first decades of the 20th century. However, many assume that modernist abstraction resulted from a century of natural, autonomous evolution to painting styles and tastes. In Moving Modernism, author Nell Andrew challenges this assumption. By examining dance and film created during this period, she argues that performative modes of art created the link between bodily movement and movement depicted in modernist paintings. In a seeming paradox, dance and film - durational arts, involving real bodies in space-participated in the development of a...
A couple’s been separated for six years—but it doesn’t stop them from sleuthing together—in this British mystery by a CWA Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Virginia Freer has had it with her sort-of-ex-husband’s taste for drama. A shopkeeper who lived in Virginia’s town has been murdered, and Felix Freer’s neighbor in London, a sweet old bird, has too. The crimes took place miles apart. But look at the coincidences, Felix insists. That unpleasant silversmith. That awful couple seeking revenge. These were not two separate murders, according to him—there is Something going on. Virginia raises an eyebrow and sighs deeply: The world lost a second Olivier, she thinks, when Felix opted for gambling, mooching, and petty theft rather than the stage. But eventually even her relentless pragmatism gets worn down, and thank goodness, because there is, indeed, Something going on. And Felix and Virginia are just the duo to sort it out, chalk and cheese though they may be . . . “There are few detective-story writers so consistently good.” —Sunday Times
"... will add much to the repertoire of film scholarship... " --Choice This film theory classic brings semiotics and psychoanalytic concepts to bear on the film experience, to answer questions such as: In what way does film address its spectator? How does the film prefigure the spectator? Is the film aware of its orientation towards its spectator? And to what extent does it posit itself as the spectator's lead?
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In Projecting a Camera, film theorist Edward Branigan offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding film theory. Why, for example, does a camera move? What does a camera "know"? (And when does it know it?) What is the camera's relation to the subject during long static shots? What happens when the screen is blank? Through a wide-ranging engagement with Wittgenstein and theorists of film, he offers one of the most fully developed understandings of the ways in which the camera operates in film. With its thorough grounding in the philosophy of spectatorship and narrative, Projecting a Camera takes the study of film to a new level. With the care and precision that he brought to Narrative Comprehension and Film, Edward Branigan maps the ways in which we must understand the role of the camera, the meaning of the frame, the role of the spectator, and other key components of film-viewing. By analyzing how we think, discuss, and marvel about the films we see, Projecting a Camera, offers insights rich in implications for our understanding of film and film studies.
In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida's recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all. In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed.
After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of 'Americanization' of retailing. National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. This volume presents a series of case-studies looking at transformations of retailing in several European countries, offering new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences consumerism had on the practices of retailing.
Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism, reflecting the often turbulent nature of their development. Throughout their history, the avant-garde and modernists have both confronted and instigated crises, be they economic or political, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. The seventh volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies addresses the myriad ways in which the avant-garde and modernism have responded and related to crisis from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. How have Europe’s avant-garde and modernist movements given aesthetic shape to their crisis-la...
In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future. By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the ...