Death And The Moving Image

Exploring gender, race, nation and narration, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives and specific socio-cultural identities in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the pol

Winner of the 2015 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. Examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema. Death and the Moving Image reveals the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation or narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Key Features. Examines the formal, psychological and political exchange between cinema and death Accessible 'before, during, after' structure: of death's presence as narrative promise, physical event and spectatorial reaction. Considers how filmmaking practice or visual medium affect the representation of death and its cultural significance

A fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film.

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study closely explores emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing, with new readings of works by Agnès Varda, Pedro Almodóvar, Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Calle, and many others.

In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Valiaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium's morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.

A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, Isabelle McNeill investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the author examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the author argues that memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience.Memory and the Moving Image:*Introduces new ways of thinking about the relation between film and memory, arising from a compelling, interdisciplinary study of theories and films*Subtly explores the French context while drawing theoretical conclusions with wider implications and applicability*Provides detailed and illuminating close readings of varied moving image works to aid theoretical explorations*Moves away from auteurist approaches, examining work by canonical directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and AgnA*s Varda alongside that of less well-known filmmakers such as Claire Simon and Yamina Benguigui*Brings together thinkers such as Bergson, Deleuze, Bazin and Barthes with, for example, Rodowick and Mulvey, in an engaging interweaving of theories.Works considered include Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du CinA(c)ma (1989-98), Yamina Benguigui's MA(c)moires d'ImmigrA(c)s (1997), Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory (1998), Claire Simon's Mimi (2003), Michael Haneke's CachA(c) (2005) and AgnA*s Varda's multi-media exhibition, L'Ale et Elle (2006).

Provocative polemic on digital media; Features foreword by Martin Scorsese, extract overleaf; It is estimated that about one and a half billion hours of moving images were produced in 1999, twice as many as a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, one hundred billion hours of moving images will be made in the year 2025. In 1895 there was just above forty minutes of moving images to be seen, and most of them are now preserved. Today, for every film made, thousands of them disappear forever without leaving a trace. Meanwhile, public and private institutions are struggling to save the film heritage with largely insufficient resources and ever increasing pressures from the commercial world. Are they wasting their time? Is the much feared and much touted Death of Cinema already occurring before our eyes? Is digital technology the solution to the problem, or just another illusion promoted by the industry? In a provocative essay designed as a collection of aphorisms and letters, the author brings an impassioned scrutiny to bear on these issues with a critique of film preservation, an indictiment of the crimes perpetuated in its name, and a proposal to give a new analytical framework to a major cultural phenomenon of our time.

This is the first book to explore all central issues surrounding the relationship between the film-image and philosophy. It tackles the work of particular philosophers of film (Žižek, Deleuze and Cavell) as well as general philosophical positions (Cognitivist and Culturalist), and analyses the ability of film to teach and create philosophy.