Cut The Unseen Cinema

El proyecto de recuperación de películas históricas Unseen Cinema explora en detalle los logros, desconocidos hasta la fecha, de los cineastas pioneros que desarrollaron su labor dentro y fuera de las fronteras de Estados Unidos durante el periodo formativo del cine americano. Con la colaboración de innumerables instituciones, desde los archivos de la Academia de Cine de Hollywood, el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York (MOMA), el British Film Institute, el Deustchen Film museum hasta el Gosfilmofond de Russia, la recuperación de estas películas y su posterior organización en 7 discos postula una visión innovadora del cine experimental. Un buen número de estas películas no había estado disponible desde su creación hace más de un siglo, algunas nunca se habían proyectado en público, y en casi todos los casos, hasta ahora, no se disponía de una copia prístina de proyección. En palabras de su compilador se trata de rectificar una pequeña parte de la negligencia con la que se ha tratado a los primeros cineastas y películas de vanguardia. Pese a la exhaustiva labor de busca y rastreo por parte de Posner y otros historiadores del cine para desenterrar las copias de los filmes incluidos en la colección, a día de hoy muchas no han sido recuperadas.

Victor J. Vitanza (author of Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing) continues to rethink the problem of sexual violence in cinema and how rape is often represented in "chaste" ways, in the form of a Chaste Cinematics. Vitanza continues to discuss Chaste Cinematics as participating in transdisciplinary-rhetorical traditions that establish the very foundations (groundings, points of stasis) for nation states and cultures. In this offering, however, the initial grounding for the discussions is "base materialism" (George Bataille): divine filth, the sacred and profane. It is this post-philosophical base materialism that destabilizes binaries, fixedness, and brings forth excluded thirds. Vitanza asks: why is it that a repressed third, or a third figure, returns, most strangely as a "product" of rape and torture? He works with Jean-Paul Sartre and Page duBois's suggestion that the "product" is a new "species." Always attempting unorthodox ways of approaching social problems, Vitanza organizes his table of contents as a DVD menu of "Extras" (supplements). This menu includes Alternate Endings and Easter Eggs as well as an Excursus, which invokes readers to take up the political exigency of the DVD-Book. Vitanza's first "Extra" studies a trio of films that need to be reconsidered, given what they offer as insights into Chaste Cinematics: Amadeus (a mad god), Henry Fool (a foolish god), and Multiple Maniacs (a divine god who is raped and eats excrement). The second examines Helke Sander's documentary Liberators Take Liberties, which re-thinks the rapes of German women by the Russians and Allies during the Battle of Berlin. The third rethinks Margie Strosser's video-film Rape Stories that calls for revenge. In the Alternate Endings, Vitanza rethinks the problem of reversibility in G. Noé's Irréversible. In the Easter Eggs, he considers Dominique Laporte's "the Irreparable," as the object of loss and Giorgio Agamben's "the Irreparable," as hope in what is without remedy. The result is not another film-studies book, but a new genre, a new set of rhetorics, for new ways of thinking about cinematics, perhaps postcinematics. Victor J. Vitanza is Professor of English and Rhetorics and is the founding Director of the Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design in the College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities, at Clemson University. He is also Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy, as well as the holder of the Jean-François Lyotard Chair in the Media and Communication Division at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He is the Editor of PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. His books include Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape (Palgrave, 2011), Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY, 1997), Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Southern Illinois, 1993); and PRE/TEXT: A Retrospective (Pittsburgh, 1993).

"According to Guins, these new "control technologies" are designed to embody an ethos of neoliberal governance - through the very media that have been previously presumed to warrant management, legislation, and policing. Repositioned within a discourse of empowerment, security, and choice, the action of regulation, he reveals, has been relocated into the hands of users."--BOOK JACKET.

Children have long been one of cinema's largest audiences yet, from its infancy, cinema has in the minds of moral watchdogs accompanied a succession of pastimes and new technologies as catalysts for juvenile delinquency. From 'penny dreadfuls' and comic books to television, 'video nasties' and computer games, and more recently, gangsta rap, mobile phones and the Internet - all have been seen as threats to children's safety, health, morality and literacy, and cinema is no exception. Writing with energy and wit and mobilising impressive original research, Sarah J. Smith explores recurring debates in Britain and America about children and how they use and respond to the media, focusing on a key example: the controversy and apparent moral panic surrounding children and cinema in its heyday, the 1930s. She shows how children colonised the cinema and established their own distinct cinema culture. And, considering films from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to "Scarface" and "King Kong", she explores attempts to control children's viewing, the underlying ideas that supported these approaches and the extent to which they were successful. Revealing the ways in which children subverted or circumvented official censorship - including the Hays Code and the British Board of Film Censors - she develops a challenging new proposition: that children were agents in the regulation of their own viewing, not simply passive consumers.

Now over twenty years old, the original edition of Nightmare Movies has retained its place as a true classic of cult film criticism. In this new edition, Kim Newman brings his seminal work completely up-to-date, both reassessing his earlier evaluations and adding a second part that assess the last two decades of horror films with all the wit, intelligence and insight for which he is known. Since the publication of the first edition, horror has been on a gradual upswing, and taken a new and stronger hold over the film industry. Newman negotiates his way through a vast back-catalogue of horror, charting the on-screen progress of our collective fears and bogeymen from the low budget slasher movies of the 60s, through to the slick releases of the 2000s, in a critical appraisal that doubles up as a genealogical study of contemporary horror and its forebears. Newman invokes the figures that fuel the ongoing demand for horror - the serial killer; the vampire; the werewolf; the zombie - and draws on his remarkable knowledge of the genre to give us a comprehensive overview of the modern myths that have shaped the imagination of multiple generations of cinema-goers. Nightmare Movies is an invaluable companion that not only provides a newly updated history of the darker side of film but a truly entertaining guide with which to discover the less well-trodden paths of horror, and re-discover the classics with a newly instructed eye.