Cinematic Motion

"Cinematic Motion has helped directors create a personal camera style and master complex staging challenges for over a decade. In response to the opportunities offered by digital technology, this second edition adds essential chapters on digital visualization and script breakdown."--Jacket.

This book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It turns to the in-betweens that characterise the cinematic experience to discover how the different elements involved in film and its viewing collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of different forms of screen media, such as films that reassemble archive footage, animations, apps and museum installations, in dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, art critic-cum-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and film phenomenologies. The result is a careful and unique examination of how Holocaust memory can emerge from the relationship between different media, objects and bodies during the film experience. This work challenges the existing concentration on representation in writing about Holocaust films, turning instead to the materials of screen works and the spectatorial experience to highlight the powerful contribution of the cinematic to Holocaust memory.

Since the development of film as an artistic medium in the 1890s, there has been an inherent tension between still photographic images and moving cinematic images, from their form and function to the messages they convey and their impact on the beholder and on culture at large. This volume, one of the first book-length works to analyze, critique, and further the international debate about the meaning and use of motion and stillness in film and photography, takes these concepts out of the theoretical arena of cinematic studies and applies them to the wider and ever-changing landscape of images and media. With contributions from such acclaimed international scholars as Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B. N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom, and Christa Blümlinger, these collected essays examine the strategic uses of stillness and motion in art from the mid-nineteenth century to the technologically driven present.

The ubiquity of digital images has profoundly changed the responsibilities and capabilities of anyone and everyone who uses them. Thanks to a range of innovations, from the convergence of moving and still image in the latest DSLR cameras to the growing potential of interactive and online photographic work, the lens and screen have emerged as central tools for many artists. Vision Anew brings together a diverse selection of texts by practitioners, critics, and scholars to explore the evolving nature of the lens-based arts. Presenting essays on photography and the moving image alongside engaging interviews with artists and filmmakers, Vision Anew offers an inspired assessment of the medium’s ongoing importance in the digital era. Contributors include Ai Weiwei, Gerry Badger, David Campany, Lev Manovich, Christian Marclay, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Murch, Trevor Paglen, Pipilotti Rist, Shelly Silver, Rebecca Solnit, and Alec Soth, among others. This vital collection is essential reading for artists, educators, scholars, critics, and curators, and anyone who is passionate about the lens-based arts.

The first systematic study of classical literature and arts to explain their close affinities with modern visual technologies and media.

New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in film. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in films of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of "agitated urban modernity" articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of film, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City.

Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the intersection of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that existed before the camera. When cinema’s indexicality is so narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is called into question the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The central argument of this book is that these more complex indices encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks (2013); Richard Linklater’s oeuvre; Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006); Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006); Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation.

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art is a systematic study of cinema as an art form, showing how the medium conditions fundamental features of cinematic artworks. It discusses the status of cinema as an art form, whether there is a language of film, realism in cinema, cinematic authorship, intentionalist and constructivist theories of interpretation, cinematic narration, the role of emotions in responses to films, the possibility of identification with characters, and the nature of the cinematic medium. Groundbreaking in its coverage of a wide range of contemporary cinematic media, it analyses not only traditional photographic films, but also digital cinema, and a variety of interactive cinematic works, including videogames. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book examines the work of leading film theorists and philosophers of film, and develops a powerful framework with which to think about cinema as an art.