1968 and Global Cinema

1968 and Global Cinema
Author: Christina Gerhardt
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2018-10-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0814342949

The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.

The Essay Film

The Essay Film
Author: Elizabeth Papazian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-11-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231851030

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

How the Essay Film Thinks

How the Essay Film Thinks
Author: Laura Rascaroli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190656395

This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where and how such strategies operate. Against the backdrop of Adorno's discussion of the essay form's anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Deleuze's understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay film can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.

The Essay Film

The Essay Film
Author: Timothy Corrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0199781699

Why have certain kinds of documentary and non-narrative films emerged as the most interesting, exciting, and provocative movies made in the last twenty years? Ranging from the films of Ross McElwee (Bright Leaves) and Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I) to those of Abbas Kiarostami (Close Up) and Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), such films have intrigued viewers who at the same time have struggled to categorize them. Sometimes described as personal documentaries or diary films, these eclectic works are, rather, best understood as cinematic variations on the essay. So argues Tim Corrigan in this stimulating and necessary new book. Since Michel de Montaigne, essays have been seen as a lively literary category, and yet--despite the work of pioneers like Chris Marker--seldom discussed as a cinematic tradition. The Essay Film, offering a thoughtful account of the long rapport between literature and film as well as novel interpretations and theoretical models, provides the ideas that will change this.

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction
Author: Nora M. Alter
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231545983

Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. Like its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre’s origins in early silent cinema and follows its transformation with the advent of sound, its legitimation in the postwar period, and its multifaceted development at the turn of the millennium. In addition to exploring the broader history of the essay film, Alter addresses the innovative ways contemporary artists such as Martha Rosler, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, and Hito Steyerl have taken up the essay film in their work.

Godard and the Essay Film

Godard and the Essay Film
Author: Rick Warner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2018-07-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810137399

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. Warner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The essay film has often been understood by scholars as an eccentric development within documentary, but Warner shows how an essayistic process of thinking can materialize just as potently within narrative fiction films, through self-critical investigations into the aesthetic, political, and philosophical resources of the medium. Studying examples by Godard and other directors, such as Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki, Warner elaborates a fresh account of essayistic reflection that turns on the imaginative, constructive role of the viewer. Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard’s work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery.

World Cinema and the Essay Film

World Cinema and the Essay Film
Author: Hollweg Brenda Hollweg
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-05-29
Genre: Experimental films
ISBN: 1474429270

World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by non-Western filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalization. With case studies of essayistic works by John Akomfrah, Nguyen Trinh Thi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, amongst many others, and with a photo-essay by Trinh T. Min-ha and a discussion of Frances Calvert's work, it expands current research on the essay film beyond canonical filmmakers and frameworks, and presents transnational perspectives on what is becoming a global film practice.

Cultures of Representation

Cultures of Representation
Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231850964

Cultures of Representation is the first book to explore the cinematic portrayal of disability in films from across the globe. Contributors explore classic and recent works from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Senegal, and Spain, along with a pair of globally resonant Anglophone films. Anchored by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's coauthored essay on global disability-film festivals, the volume's content spans from 1950 to today, addressing socially disabling forces rendered visible in the representation of physical, developmental, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities. Essays emphasize well-known global figures, directors, and industries – from Temple Grandin to Pedro Almodóvar, from Akira Kurosawa to Bollywood – while also shining a light on films from less frequently studied cultural locations such as those portrayed in the Iranian and Korean New Waves. Whether covering postwar Italy, postcolonial Senegal, or twenty-first century Russia, the essays in this volume will appeal to scholars, undergraduates, and general readers alike.

The Personal Camera

The Personal Camera
Author: Laura Rascaroli
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Documentary-style films
ISBN: 9781906660130

Provides novel answers to some of the seminal questions of cinema: on the nature of the cinematographic experience, on authorship and spectatorship, on the filmic commitment to truth and on the state of subjectivity today." --Book Jacket.

Directory of World Cinema: Brazil

Directory of World Cinema: Brazil
Author: Louis Bayman
Publisher: Intellect Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2014-02-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1783202300

Best known to international audiences for its carnivalesque irreverence and recent gangster blockbusters, Brazilian cinema is gaining prominence with critics, at global film festivals and on DVD shelves. This volume seeks to introduce newcomers to Brazilian cinema and to offer valuable insights to those already well versed in the topic. It brings into sharp focus some of the most important movements, genres and themes from across the eras of Brazilian cinema, from cinema novo to musical chanchada, the road movie to cinema de bordas, avant-garde to pornochanchada. Delving deep beyond the surface of cinema, the volume also addresses key themes such as gender, indigenous and diasporic communities and Afro-Brazilian identity. Situating Brazilian cinema within the country's changing position in the global capitalist system, the essays consider uneven modernization, class division, dictatorship, liberation struggles and globalization alongside questions of entertainment and artistic innovation.