Jimena Canales: A Tenth of a Second: A History (2010)

“In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant.

Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226093182, 9780226093185
288 pages

review (Val Dusek, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

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Rudolf Arnheim: Film as Art (1932/1957)

“This is a book of standards, a theory of film. The greater part of it is an adaptation of “Film als Kunst,” first published in 1932 in the original German and in English by Faber and Faber in 1933 – an edition long out of print but still in demand because it raises fundamental questions that the intervening years have by no means answered. This edition expands the original translation by four essays.”

Originally published as Film als Kunst by Ernst Rowohlt, Berlin, 1932.

Publisher University of California Press, 1957
ISBN 0520000358, 9780520000353
230 pages

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Virgilio Tosi: Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography (2005)

This classic history of early film and photography, first published in 1984, describes the scientific impulses behind sequence photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and E.J. Marey, whose work led directly to the birth of cinema. Now entitled Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, the book has been updated to include recent research in the field. The English translation was done by BUFVC Library and Database Manager Sergio Angelini. The BUFVC is the distributor of the English-language version of the film series THE ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC CINEMATOGRAPHY, which Tosi produced over 1990-1993 to complement his written researches. The BUFVC has produced a DVD edition of the films, to mark the publication of the English edition of the book.

Publisher British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005
Film Studies series
ISBN 0901299758, 9780901299758
234 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-1-23)