Sean Cubitt: The Cinema Effect (2004)

“It has been said that all cinema is a special effect. In this highly original examination of time in film Sean Cubitt tries to get at the root of the uncanny effect produced by images and sounds that don’t quite align with reality. What is it that cinema does? Cubitt proposes a history of images in motion from a digital perspective, for a digital audience.

From the viewpoint of art history, an image is discrete, still. How can a moving image–constructed from countless constituent images–even be considered an image? And where in time is an image in motion located? Cubitt traces the complementary histories of two forms of the image/motion relationship–the stillness of the image combined with the motion of the body (exemplified by what Cubitt calls the “protocinema of railway travel”) and the movement of the image combined with the stillness of the body (exemplified by melodrama and the magic lantern). He argues that the magic of cinema arises from the intertwining relations between different kinds of movement, different kinds of time, and different kinds of space.

He begins with a discussion of “pioneer cinema,” focusing on the contributions of French cinematic pioneers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He then examines the sound cinema of the 1930s, examining film effects in works by Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Hollywood’s RKO studio. Finally he considers what he calls “post cinema,” examining the postwar development of the “spatialization” of time through slow motion, freeze-frame, and steadi-cam techniques. Students of film will find Cubitt’s analyses of noncanonical films like Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as enlightening as his fresh takes on such classics as Renoir’s Rules of the Game.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262033127, 9780262033121
456 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-1-29)

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980–) [FR, IT, EN, ES, BR-PT, RU, CR]

“A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.”

Publisher Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1980
Volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie
ISBN 2707303070
645 pages

English edition
Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1987
ISBN 0816614024, 9780816614028
xix+610 pages

Key words and phrases: deterritorialization, abstract machine, rhizome, body without organs, semiotic, haecceities, war machine, stratum, black hole, nomad, fascism, destratification, psychoanalysis, line of flight, Gilles Deleuze, molar, haptic, schizoanalysis, surplus value, Paul Virilio

Review: Sander L. Gilman (Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1989).

Wikipedia
Publisher

Mille plateaux (French, 1980, 7 MB, added on 2015-3-24, updated on 2016-8-3)
A Thousand Plateaus (English, trans. Brian Massumi, 1987, 6 MB, updated on 2019-8-19)
Mille piani: capitalismo e schizofrenia (Italian, trans. Giorgio Passerone, 1987/2003, 10 MB, added on 2016-8-3)
Mil mesetas: capitalismo y esquizofrenia (Spanish, trans. José Vázquez Pérez with Umbelina Larraceleta, 1988, 23 MB, added on 2016-8-3)
Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (BR-Portuguese, trans. Ana Lúcia de Oliveira, et al., 1995-97, added on 2016-8-3)
Kapitalizm i shizofreniya: tysyacha plato (Russian, trans. Ya.I. Svirsky, 2010, DJV, 11 MB, added on 2016-8-3)
Kapitalizam i shizofrenija 2. Tisuću platoa (Croatian, trans. Marko Gregorić, 2013, 19 MB, added on 2021-3-24)

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–) [FR, ES, DE, IT, GR, EN, RU, PT]

“When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and “a work of heretical madness” by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society’s innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person’s unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What’s more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.”

Publisher Les Editions de Minuit, 1972

English edition
Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
Preface by Michel Foucault
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1983
400 pages

Key terms: schizoanalysis, desiring-production, deterritorialization, Anti-Oedipus, psychoanalysis, Oedipus complex, anti-production, surplus-value, nuclear family, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Marxism, incest, exclusive disjunction, death instinct, Nietzsche, Spinoza, permanent revolution, paralogism, capitalist

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (French, added on 2012-10-18)
El Anti Edipo: Capitalismo y esquizofrenia (Spanish, trans. Francisco Monge, 1973/1985, added on 2013-1-1)
Anti-Ödipus: Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I (German, trans. Bernd Schwips, 1974/1977, no OCR, added on 2013-1-2)
L’anti-Edipo: Capitalismo e schizofrenia (Italian, trans. Alessandro Fontana, 1975, added on 2013-1-1)
Kapitalismós kai schizofréneia: o anti-Oidípous (Greek, trans. Καίτη Χατζηδήμου and Ιουλιέττα Ράλλη, 1981, 24 MB, added on 2016-8-3)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (English, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, 1983, updated on 2012-10-18)
Анти-Эдип: Капитализм и шизофрения (Russian, trans. Д.Кралечкина, 2008, DJVU, no OCR, added on 2013-1-2)
O anti-Édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Portuguese, trans. Luiz B. L. Orlandi, 2010, added on 2013-1-1)

See also their A Thousand Plateaus.