Hillel Schwartz: The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, 2nd ed. (1996/2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · animal, appropriation, art, children, computing, copy, death, fashion, film, gender, genetics, history, imitation, japan, language, machine, memory, music, photography, piracy, property, reenactment, reproduction, sculpture, simulation, slavery, statistics, surgery, technology, theatre, time, war
The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates a stunning array of simulacra—counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, and portraits; ditto marks, genetic cloning, war games, and camouflage; instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, and photocopies; wax museums, apes, and art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. Working through a range of theories on biological, mechanical, and electronic reproduction, Schwartz questions the modern esteem for authenticity and uniqueness. The Culture of the Copy shows how the ethical dilemmas central to so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, of our own creations, indeed of our very selves.
This updated edition takes notice of recent shifts in thought with regard to such issues as biological cloning, conjoined twins, copyright, digital reproduction, and multiple personality disorder. At once abbreviated and refined, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with proglems of authenticity, identity, and originality.
First published in 1996
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 2013
ISBN 1935408453, 9781935408451
480 pages
Review (Terence Hawkes, London Review of Books, 1997)
Review (Francis Kane, The New York Times, 1997)
Review (Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times, 1997)
Download (removed on 2014-3-20 upon request of the publisher)
Comment (1)Hans Günther, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Soviet Power and the Media (2006) [Russian]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, cinema, communism, film, media, media theory, photography, politics, print, radio, socialist realism, sound, soviet union, technology, theatre
Proceedings from the conference “The Political as Communicative Space in History” (Bielefeld, October 2003) devoted to the comparative analysis of the media in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s provide a pioneering media-theoretical exploration of the role of radio, film, photography and print in the engineering of the communist Soviet power.
Sovetskaya vlast’ i media [Советская власть и медиа]
Publisher Akademicheskiy proekt, St. Petersburg, 2006
Open Access
ISBN 5733103353, 9785733103358
621 pages
Reviews: Wolfgang Schlott (Die Welt der Slaven, 2007, DE, PDF), Alexander Prokhorov (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2007), Alexander Ulanov (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007, RU), Jana Klenhova (ArtMargins, 2008), Yuliya Liderman (Usloviya teatra, RU, 2010).
PDF (broken link fixed on 2014-1-28)
PDFs
Pavle Levi: Cinema by Other Means (2012–) [EN, SR]
Filed under book | Tags: · antifilm, art, art history, avant-garde, cinema, dada, experimental film, film, film history, film theory, lettrism, montage, structural film, surrealism, technology, yugoslavia
“Cinema by Other Means explores avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the materials and the techniques different from those commonly associated with the cinematographic apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde — Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, “structural-materialist” film, and more — Pavle Levi reveals a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed, the “movies” with or without directly grounding their work in the materials of film. The study considers artists and theorists from all over Europe — France, Italy, Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary — but it particularly foregrounds the context of the Yugoslav avant-garde. Cinema by Other Means offers the English-language reader a thorough explication of an assortment of distinctly Yugoslav artistic phenomena, such as the Zenithist cine-writings of the 1920s, the proto-structural Antifilm movement of the early 1960s, and the “ortho-dialectical” film-poetry of the 1970s.”
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2012
ISBN 019984142X, 9780199841424
224 pages
Reviews: Matilde Nardelli (Oxford Art Journal, 2013), Greg DeCuir (Jump Cut, 2013), Bojan Jovic (Biblid, 2013, SR).
Exh. review: De Cuir (ARTMargins, 2013).
Cinema by Other Means (English, 2012, updated on 2024-4-26)
Kino drugim sredstvima (Serbian, trans. Đorđe Tomić, 2013, added on 2024-4-26)