Cinematic Cuts

Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings.
Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film’s ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending’s hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator’s sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed.

Toward a Structural Psychology of Cinema Approaches to Semiotics [AS].

Film Editing provides an introduction to the craft of editing in the non-silent film. In clear and accessible language, Valerie Orpen considers editing as an expressive strategy rather than a mere technique. She reveals that editing can be approached and studied in a similar way to other aspects of film. Traditionally, studies on editing or montage tend to focus on silent cinema, yet this book claims that an examination of editing should also consider the role of the soundtrack. The aim of Film Editing is to examine the way in which editing can make meaning. The book addresses editing as part of a wider context and as a crucial element of the overarching design and vision of a film. Consequently, this book incorporates other parameters, such as mise-en-scène, framing, sound, genre, history, and performance. By examining a number of mainstream and art films, such as Godard's A bout de souffle, Hitchcock's Rear Window, and Scorsese's Raging Bull, Film Editing seeks to dispel the notion that editing is necessarily polarized as continuity versus discontinuity.

Film Editing: Great Cuts Every Filmmaker and Movie Lover Must Know makes the invisible art of editing visible by using nearly 600 colorful frames from popular, recent films. The frames, accompanied by brisk descriptions, make it perfectly suited for quick study readers who like to 'gaze' rather than 'graze' and don't want to read a book. Written by an editor and the author of Cut by Cut: How to Edit your Film or Video, it shows how editors can make or break a movie.

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds.

This groundbreaking book presents a brand-new methodology for improving a film edit.

This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.