Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations

Publisher
Author

PDF (29 MB)

Scott MacKenzie (ed.): Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014)

“This is the first book to collect manifestos from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestos, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world.

This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI’s Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2014
ISBN 0520276744, 9780520276741
xxi+651 pages
via slowrotation

Author’s talk (video, 2017, 20 min).

Reviews: Wheeler Winston Dixon (Film International), Matthew Hunt, Bill Nichols (Film Quarterly).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-7-14)

François Laplantine: The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology (2005/2015)

“Both a vital theoretical work and a fine illustration of the principles and practice of sensory ethnography, this much anticipated translation is destined to figure as a major catalyst in the expanding field of sensory studies.

Drawing on his own fieldwork in Brazil and Japan and a wide range of philosophical, literary and cinematic sources, the author outlines his vision for a ‘modal anthropology’. François Laplantine challenges the primacy accorded to ‘sign’ and ‘structure’ in conventional social science research, and redirects attention to the tonalities and rhythmic intensities of different ways of living. Arguing that meaning, sensation and sociality cannot be considered separately, he calls for a ‘politics of the sensible’ and a complete reorientation of our habitual ways of understanding reality.”

First published as Le social et le sensible: introduction à une anthropologie modale, Téraèdre, Paris, 2005.

Translated by Jamie Furniss
With an Introduction by David Howes
Publisher Bloomsbury, London, 2015
Sensory Studies series, 1
ISBN 1472534808, 9781472534804
xviii+152 pages

Reviews: Claude Rivière (Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 2006, FR), Fabien Pernet (Anthropologie et sociétés, 2006, FR), Georges Bertin (Esprit critique, 2009, FR).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2016-8-20)

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