The Endless End of Cinema

The Endless End of Cinema
Author: Gianluca Sergi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-01-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501348574

Film is dead! Three little words that have been heard around the world many times over the life of the cinema. Yet, some 120 years on, the old dog's ability to come up with new tricks and live another day remains as surprising and effective as ever. This book is an exploration of film's ability to escape its own 'The End' title card. It charts the history of cinema's development through a series of crises that could, should, ought to have 'ended' it. From its origins to Covid - via a series of unlikely friendships with sound, television and the internet - the book provides industry professionals, scholars and lovers of cinema with an informing and intriguing journey into the afterlife of cinema and back to the land of the living. It is also a rare collaboration between an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a film scholar, a chronicle of their attempt to bridge two worlds that have often looked at each other with as much curiosity as doubt, but that are bound by the deep love of cinema that they both share.

The Endless End of Cinema

The Endless End of Cinema
Author: Gianluca Sergi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2023-01-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501348566

Film is dead! Three little words that have been heard around the world many times over the life of the cinema. Yet, some 120 years on, the old dog's ability to come up with new tricks and live another day remains as surprising and effective as ever. This book is an exploration of film's ability to escape its own 'The End' title card. It charts the history of cinema's development through a series of crises that could, should, ought to have 'ended' it. From its origins to Covid - via a series of unlikely friendships with sound, television and the internet - the book provides industry professionals, scholars and lovers of cinema with an informing and intriguing journey into the afterlife of cinema and back to the land of the living. It is also a rare collaboration between an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a film scholar, a chronicle of their attempt to bridge two worlds that have often looked at each other with as much curiosity as doubt, but that are bound by the deep love of cinema that they both share.

Ends of Cinema

Ends of Cinema
Author: Richard Grusin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9781517910587

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 Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.

Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema

Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema
Author: Paul Cuff
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319388185

This book explores the creation and destruction of Abel Gance’s most ambitious film project, and seeks to explain why his meteoric career was so nearly extinguished at the end of silent cinema. By 1929, Gance was France’s most famous director. Acclaimed for his technical innovation and visual imagination, he was also admonished for the excessive length and expense of his productions. Gance’s first sound film, La Fin du Monde (1930), was a critical and financial disaster so great that it nearly destroyed his career. But what went wrong? Gance claimed it was commercial sabotage whilst critics blamed the director’s inexperience with new technology. Neither excuse is satisfactory. Based on extensive archival research, this book re-investigates the cultural background and aesthetic consequences of Gance’s transition from silent filmmaking to sound cinema. La Fin du Monde is revealed to be only one element of an extraordinary cultural project to transform cinema into a universal religion and propagate its power through the League of Nations. From unfinished films to unrealized social revolutions, the reader is given a fascinating tour of Gance’s lost cinematic utopia.

Cinema of the Occult

Cinema of the Occult
Author: Carrol Lee Fry
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2008
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780934223959

Provides useful information on the occult religions and applies this discussion to selected films. Readers will find excellent background on these paths as well as perceptive commentary of film adaptations of them and their relevance to understanding our culture.--Publisher's note.

The End of Japanese Cinema

The End of Japanese Cinema
Author: Alexander Zahlten
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822372460

In The End of Japanese Cinema Alexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films' production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

The Cinema of Wim Wenders

The Cinema of Wim Wenders
Author: Alexander Graf
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2002
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781903364291

The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway is a new study of the films of this most prominent of German directors, and penetrates the seductive sounds and images for which he is best known. The book analyses the individual films in the context of a preoccupation central to all of Wenders' work and writings: why modern cinema - a recording art, solely composed of sounds and images - naturally developed into a primarily narrative medium, a domain traditionally associated with words and sentences? With its emphasis on analysing the films themselves, this book identifies and critically elucidates Wenders' chief artistic motivation: that the act of seeing can constitute a creative act in its own right.

The Cinema of Eric Rohmer

The Cinema of Eric Rohmer
Author: Jacob Leigh
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2012-05-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1441198318

Presents in chronological order the themes and ideas of his twenty-three feature films, and the complexity of their cinematic style.

Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy

Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy
Author: Kate Taylor-Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501306138

For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded
Author: Wanda Strauven
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9053569456

Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies. The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games. With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.