A Cinema Without Walls

Corrigan argues that in the past 25 years the increased conglomerization of film production/distribution companies and the rise of VCR, satellite, and cable television technologies have altered the way films are made and how we view them. The result is a growing internationalization of national cinema cultures and an increasing fragmentation of the audience. Video has reduced the movie to private and domestic performance. At the same time, audiences are bombarded with a surfeit of images that leaves them with a battered sense of their place in history and culture. Corrigan notes that, combined with what many critics have recognized as the growing incoherence in film texts, these facts make it more meaningful to discuss films not as texts but as multiple cultural and commercial processes constructed by increasingly specialized audiences. ISBN 0-8135-1667-6: $36.00.

This volume closely examines the near-ubiquitous images of state security walls, domes, and other such defense enclosures flashing across movie screens since 2006, the year of the ratification of George W. Bush's Secure Fence Act. This study shows that many of the films of this era enable us to imaginatively test the effects of these security mechanisms on citizens, immigrants, refugees, and other sovereign states, challenging our commitment to constructing them, maintaining them, staffing them, and subsidizing their enormous overheads. With case studies ranging from Atomic Blonde and Ready Player One to Black Panther and Elysium; Walls without Cinema serves as a timely counterpoint to the xenophobic rhetoric and abusive, carceral security conditions that characterize the Trump administration's management of the Mexico-U.S. border situation.

In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future. By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the museum film, this collection includes detailed discussions of installation art, and close analyses of media relations which range from dance to painting to performance art. Thanks to the title of Andre Malraux's famous project, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? invites readers to reflect on the museum of the future, where twentieth-century cinema will play a pivotal role by interrogating the relation between art and science, technology and nature, from the side of photography in dialogue with digitalization.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, transnational European cinema has risen, not only in terms of production but also in terms of a growing focus on multiethnic themes within the European context. This shift from national to trans-European filmmaking has been profoundly influenced by such historical developments as the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent ongoing enlargement of the European Union. In European Cinema after the Wall: Screening East–West Mobility, Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heuckelom have brought together essays that critically examine representations of post-1989 migration from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe, uncovering an array of common tropes and narrative devices that characterize the influences and portrayals of immigration. Featuring essays by contributors from backgrounds as divergent as film studies, Slavic and Russian studies, comparative literature, sociology, contemporary history, and communication and media studies, this volume will appeal to scholars of film, European history, and those interested in the impact of migration, diaspora, and the global flow of cinematic culture.

How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh’s career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate. Gallagher investigates Soderbergh’s work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant!, as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh’s role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.

What is the relationship between the road movie, American experimental filmmaking and the body?

“The open road”—it’s a phrase that calls to mind a sense of freedom, adventure, and new possibilities that make driving one of our most liberating activities. In Drive, Iain Borden explores the way driving allows us to encounter landscapes and cities around the world. He takes particular notice of how driving is portrayed in film from America to Europe to Asia and from Hollywood to the avant-garde, covering over a century of history and referencing hundreds of movies. From the dusty landscapes of The Grapes of Wrath to the city streets of The Italian Job; from the aesthetic delights of Rain Man and Traffic to the existential musings of Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point;from the freeway pleasures of Radio On and London Orbital to the high-speed dangers of Crash, Bullitt, and C’était un Rendezvous; this book shows how driving with different speeds, cars, roads, and cities provides experiences and challenges beyond compare. Borden concludes that as an integral part of modern life, car driving is something to be celebrated and even encouraged, making Drive a timely riposte to anti-car attitudes, and those blind to the richness of life behind the wheel.

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues. Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics, ethics, history and politics. This Encyclopedia offers a wide-range of perspectives on postmodernism that illustrates the plurality of this critical concept that is so much part of our current intellectual debates. In this regard, the volume does not adhere to a single definition of postmodernism as much as it documents the use of the term across a variety of academic and cultural pursuits. The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, it must be noted, resists simply presenting postmodernism as a new style among many styles occuring in the post-disciplinary academy. Documenting the use of the term acknowledges that postmodernism has a much deeper and long-lasting effect on academic and cultural life. In general, the volume rests on the understanding that postmodernism is not so much a style as it is an on-going process, a process of both disintegration and reformation.