Mary Ann Doane: The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · afterimage, archive, chronophotography, cinema, contingency, entropy, film, film history, modernity, photography, time, vision
Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, the cinema emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time—and this at a moment when disciplines from physics to philosophy, and historical trends from industrialization to the expansion of capitalism, were transforming the very idea of time. In a work that itself captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.
At this book’s heart is the cinema’s essential paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through “stopped time,” the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images. Doane explores the role of this paradox, and of notions of the temporal indeterminacy and instability of an image, in shaping not just cinematic time but also modern ideas about continuity and discontinuity, archivability, contingency and determinism, and temporal irreversibility. A compelling meditation on the status of cinematic knowledge, her book is also an inquiry into the very heart and soul of modernity.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2002
ISBN 0674007298, 9780674007291
288 pages
review (Meredith Morse, Senses of Cinema)
Comment (0)James Donald, Anne Friedberg, Laura Marcus (eds.): Close Up: Cinema And Modernism (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, cinema, film, film history, film theory
Between 1927 and 1933, the journal “Close Up” championed a European avant-garde in film-making. This volume republishes articles from the journal, with an introduction and a commentary on the lives of, and complex relationships between, its writers and editors.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001
ISBN 0304335169, 9780304335169
352 pages
PDF (the link fixed on 2012-10-25)
Comment (0)Michelle Langford: Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film history, film theory, new german cinema
Werner Schroeter is one of the most important and influential directors of the New German Cinema, yet discussion of his films within film theory has been intermittent and un-sustained. This book provides a long-overdue introduction to Schroeter’s visually lavish, idiosyncratic and conceptually rich cinema, situating its emergence within the context of the West German television and film subsidy system during the 1970s, then moving on to engage with some of the most pertinent and important arguments in contemporary film theory.
Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, the author negotiates her way through the complex allegorical terrain of Schroeter’s films by focusing on their insistent and original use of the cinematic tableaux, allegorical montage, temporal layering and gestural expression. In doing so, this book also makes a valuable contribution to developing a theory of cinematic allegory by locating Schroeter’s films in the context of a wider “allegorical turn” in contemporary European and post-colonial filmmaking.
Allegorical Images serves not only as a compelling and sophisticated introduction to Schroeter’s cinema, but also makes a major contribution to a range of debates in contemporary film theory around allegory, tableaux, time and gesture.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2006
European Communication Research and Education Association Series
ISBN 1841501387, 9781841501383
215 pages