Susan Buck-Morss: Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000)

“The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.

Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.

The book is in four parts. “Dreamworlds of Democracy” asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. “Dreamworlds of History” calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. “Dreamworlds of Mass Culture” explores the affinities between mass culture’s socialist and capitalist forms. An “Afterward” places the book in the historical context of the author’s collaboration with a group of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262523310, 9780262523318
386 pages

Publisher

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2022-10-17)

Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985–) [FR, ES, EN, RU]

Cinema 2: The Time-Image brings to completion Gilles Deleuze’s work on the theoretical implications of the cinematographic image. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze proposed a new way to understand narrative cinema, based on Henri Bergson’s notion of the movement-image and C. S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs. In Cinema 2, he explains why, since World War II, time has come to dominate film: the fragment or solitary image, in supplanting narrative cinema’s rational development of events, illustrates this new significance of time.

Deleuze ascribes this shift to the condition of postwar Europe: the situations and spaces “we no longer know how to describe”—buildings deserted but inhabited, cities undergoing demolition or reconstruction—and the new race of characters who emerged from this rubble, mutants, who “saw rather than acted.” Deleuze discusses the films of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Pasolini, Rohmer, Ophuls, and many others, suggesting that contemporary cinema, far from being dead, is only beginning to find new ways to capture time in the image.

Publisher Minuit, Paris, 1985
379 pages

English edition
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1989
ISBN 0816616779, 9780816616770
364 pages

Publisher (EN)

Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps (French, 1985; added 2015-7-17)
Estudios sobre cine 2: La imagen-tiempo (Spanish, trans. Irene Agoff, 1987)
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (English, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, 1989)
Кино: Образ-движение (Russian, trans. Олег Аронсон, 2004, updated on 2013-9-26)

See also Volume 1

Felicity Colman: Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (2011)

“Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze’s writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This ciné-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes.

Deleuze and Cinema presents a step-by-step guide to the key concepts behind Deleuze’s revolutionary theory of the cinema. Exploring ideas through key directors and genres, Deleuze’s method is illustrated with examples drawn from American, British, continental European, Russian and Asian cinema.

Deleuze and Cinema provides the first introductory guide to Deleuze’s radical methodology for screen analysis. It will be invaluable for students and teachers of Film, Media and Philosophy.”

Publisher Berg, 2011
ISBN 1847887708, 9781847887702
288 pages

Reviews: Kam Chui Ping (Film-Philosophy 2012), Dorothea Olkowski (Cultural Sociology 2012).

Publisher

PDF
Academia.edu (from author, added on 2015-10-20)