Cinephilia In The Age Of Digital Reproduction

This title explores the increasing relevance of digital media in the consumption and analysis of film.

What role does love—of cinema, of cinema studies, of teaching and learning—play in teaching film? For the Love of Cinema brings together a wide range of film scholars to explore the relationship between cinephilia and pedagogy. All of them ask whether cine-love can inform the serious study of cinema. Chapter by chapter, writers approach this question from various perspectives: some draw on aspects of students' love of cinema as a starting point for rethinking familiar films or generating new kinds of analyses about the medium itself; others reflect on how their own cinephilia informs the way they teach cinema; and still others offer new ways of writing (both verbally and audiovisually) with a love of cinema in the age of new media. Together, they form a collection that is as much a guide for teaching cinephilia as it is an energetic dialogue about the ways that cinephilia and pedagogy enliven and rejuvenate one another.

This study explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives and situating film-curating issues within an international context. Artistic and commercial film availability has increased overwhelmingly as a result of the digitization of the infrastructure of distribution and exhibition. The film trade's conventional structures are transforming and, in the digital age, supply and demand can meet without the intervention of traditional gatekeepers—everybody can be a film curator, in a passive or active way. This volume addresses three kinds of readers: those who want to become film curators, those who want to research the film-curating phenomenon, and those critical cinema visitors who seek to investigate the story behind the selection process of available films and the way to present them.

This book applies the discourse of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ to popular contemporary cinema, in particular the action sequences of twenty-first century Hollywood productions. Tackling a variety of spatial imaginations (contemporary iconic architecture; globalisation and non-places; phenomenological knowledge of place; consumerist spaces of commodity purchase; cyberspace), the diverse case studies not only detail the range of ways in which action sequences represent the challenge of surviving and acting in contemporary space, but also reveal the consistent qualities of spatial appropriation and spatial manipulation that define the form. Jones argues that action sequences dramatise the restrictions and possibilities of space, offering examples of radical spatial praxis through their depictions of spatial engagement, struggle and eventual transcendence.

Whether paying tribute to silent films in Hugo and The Artist or celebrating arcade games in Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It-Ralph, Hollywood suddenly seems to be experiencing a wave of intense nostalgia for outmoded technologies. To what extent is that a sincere lament for modes of artistic production that have nearly vanished in an all-digital era? And to what extent is it simply a cynical marketing ploy, built on the notion that nostalgia has always been one of Hollywood’s top-selling products? In Flickers of Film, Jason Sperb offers nuanced and unexpected answers to these questions, examining the benefits of certain types of film nostalgia, while also critiquing how Hollywood’s nostalgic representations of old technologies obscure important aspects of their histories. He interprets this affection for the prehistory and infancy of digital technologies in relation to an industry-wide anxiety about how the digital has grown to dominate Hollywood, pushing it into an uncertain creative and economic future. Yet he also suggests that Hollywood’s nostalgia for old technologies ignores the professionals who once employed them, as well as the labor opportunities that have been lost through the computerization and outsourcing of film industry jobs. Though it deals with nostalgia, Flickers of Film is strikingly cutting-edge, one of the first studies to critically examine Pixar’s role in the film industry, cinematic representations of videogames, and the economic effects of participatory culture. As he takes in everything from Terminator: Salvation to The Lego Movie, Sperb helps us see what’s distinct about this recent wave of self-aware nostalgic films—how Hollywood nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be.

This book tackles the broader issues of film production and consumption, the audience and the place of film culture in our lives.

To what extent have digital innovations transformed the UK film industry? What new practices and processes are emerging within the contemporary UK filmmaking landscape? What impact is this having upon filmmaking professionals? The business of conventional feature filmmaking is like no other, in that it assembles a huge company of people from a range of disciplines on a temporary basis, all to engage in the collaborative endeavour of producing a unique, one-off piece of work. By focusing on the pivotal year of 2012, and by considering the input of every single contributor to the process, this book illuminates how this period of analogue to digital transition is impacting upon working practices, cultures, opportunities and structures in the industry, and examines the various causative forces behind their adoptions and resistances. With an in-depth case study of Sally Potter's 2012 film 'Ginger & Rosa', and drawing upon interviews with international film industry practitioners, 'From Film Practice to Data Process' is a groundbreaking examination of film production in its totality, in a moment of profound change.

Cinema has the capacity to enflame our passions, to arouse our pity, to inspire our love. Feeling Film is a book that examines the emotional encounters found in contemporary popular cinema cultures. Examining melodrama, film noir, comic book franchises, cult indie movies and romantic comedy within the context of a Jungian-informed psychology and contemporary movements in film-philosophy, this book considers the various kinds of feelings engendered by our everyday engagements with cinema. Greg Singh questions the popular idea of what cinema is, and considers what happens during the anticipation and act of watching a movie, through to the act of sharing our feelings about them, the reviewing process and repeat-viewing practices. Feeling Film does this through a critique of purely textual approaches, instead offering a model which emphasises lived, warm (embodied and inhabited) psychological relationships between the viewer and the viewed. It extends the narrative action of cinema beyond the duration of the screening into realms of anticipation and afterlife, in particular providing insight into the tertiary and participatory practices afforded through rich media engagement. In rethinking the everyday, co-productive relationship between viewer and viewed from this perspective, Feeling Film reinstates the importance of feelings as a central concern for film theory. What emerges from this study is a re-engagement of the place of emotion, affect and feeling in film theory and criticism. In reconsidering the duration of the cinematic encounter, Feeling Film makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the inter-subjective relationship between viewer and viewed. It takes post-Jungian criticism into the realms of post-cinema technologies and reignites the dialogue between depth psychology and the study of images as they appear to, and for, us. This book will make essential reading for those interested in the relationship between film and aspects of depth psychology, film and philosophy students at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels, film and cinema academics and cinephiles.