Jeffrey Skoller: Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, avant-garde, cinema, experimental film, film, film history, film theory
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.
Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films.
Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664232X, 9780816642328
233 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)
Comment (0)Terry Bolas: Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, education, film, film theory, mass media, media studies
Film and media studies now attract large numbers of students in schools, colleges and universities. However the setting up of these courses came after many decades of pioneering work at the educational margins in the post-war period. Bolas’ account focuses particularly on the voluntary efforts of activists in the Society for Education in Film and Television and on that Society’s interchanging relationship with the British Film Institute’s Education Department. It draws on recent interviews with many of the individuals who contributed to the raising of the status of film, TV and media study. Through detailed examination of the scattered but surviving documentary record, the author seeks to challenge versions of the received history.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
ISBN 1841502375, 9781841502373
Length 384 pages
David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital culture, film theory, new media, philosophy, philosophy of history, postmodernism, poststructuralism, semiotics, utopia
In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.
Publisher Duke University Press, 2001
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822327228, 9780822327226
276 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)
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