Thomas Elsaesser (ed.): Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004)

“For more than thirty years Harun Farocki has been a filmmaker, documentarist, film-essayist and installation artist. What preoccupies him above all is not so much an image of life, but the life of images, as they surround us in the newspapers, the cinema, history books, user manuals, posters, CCTV footage and advertising.

His vast oeuvre of some sixty films includes three feature films (Zwischen den Kriegen/Between the Wars, Etwas wird sichtbar: Vietnam/In Your Eyes: Vietnam, Wie Man sieht/As You See), essay films (e.g. Images of the World-Inscription of War), critical media-pieces, experimental work, children’s features for television, historical film essays (e.g. on Peter Lorre), `learning-films’ in the tradition of Brecht (e.g. Workers Leaving the Factory) and installation pieces (e.g. Still Life).

In this monograph, Elsaesser approaches Farocki’s work from different critical perspectives, as well as reflecting on his extraordinary biography. The volume is complemented by interviews, a selection of writings by Farocki and an annotated filmography.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004
Film Culture in Transition series
ISBN 905356635X, 9789053566350
379+[32] pages

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Gary Indiana: Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (2008)

Gary Indiana is one of America’s leading cultural critics—a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia’s Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture—trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors—to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana’s most conspicuous feature is skepticism—his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.

Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 046500248X, 9780465002481
315 pages

publisher
google books

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Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination (2012)

“Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book – the first of its kind in English – comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections between art, politics, and social change.”

Edited by Tara Forrest
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Film Culture in Transition series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9089642722, 9789089642721
440 pages

Publisher
OAPEN

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