The Endless End Of Cinema

Film is dead! Three little words that have been heard around the world many times over the life of the cinema. Yet, some 120 years on, the old dog's ability to come up with new tricks and live another day remains as surprising and effective as ever. This book is an exploration of film's ability to escape its own 'The End' title card. It charts the history of cinema's development through a series of crises that could, should, ought to have 'ended' it. From its origins to Covid - via a series of unlikely friendships with sound, television and the internet - the book provides industry professionals, scholars and lovers of cinema with an informing and intriguing journey into the afterlife of cinema and back to the land of the living. It is also a rare collaboration between an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a film scholar, a chronicle of their attempt to bridge two worlds that have often looked at each other with as much curiosity as doubt, but that are bound by the deep love of cinema that they both share.

Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies. The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games. With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.

For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.

Presents in chronological order the themes and ideas of his twenty-three feature films, and the complexity of their cinematic style.

A study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media. Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience. Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.

 Much of 20th century science fiction foretold technological and social developments beyond the year 2000. Since then, a key theme has been: what happens when the future no one anticipated arrives faster than anyone expected? Focusing on 21st century independent science fiction films, the author describes a seismic shift in subject matter as society moves into a new technological age. Independent films since the millennium are more daring, incisive and even plausible in their depiction of possible futures than blockbuster films of the same period. Twenty-one chapters break down today’s subgenres, featuring interviews with the filmmakers who created them.

This book explores the creation and destruction of Abel Gance’s most ambitious film project, and seeks to explain why his meteoric career was so nearly extinguished at the end of silent cinema. By 1929, Gance was France’s most famous director. Acclaimed for his technical innovation and visual imagination, he was also admonished for the excessive length and expense of his productions. Gance’s first sound film, La Fin du Monde (1930), was a critical and financial disaster so great that it nearly destroyed his career. But what went wrong? Gance claimed it was commercial sabotage whilst critics blamed the director’s inexperience with new technology. Neither excuse is satisfactory. Based on extensive archival research, this book re-investigates the cultural background and aesthetic consequences of Gance’s transition from silent filmmaking to sound cinema. La Fin du Monde is revealed to be only one element of an extraordinary cultural project to transform cinema into a universal religion and propagate its power through the League of Nations. From unfinished films to unrealized social revolutions, the reader is given a fascinating tour of Gance’s lost cinematic utopia.

In this updated and expanded version of this classic study of contemporary American film, Kolker reassesses the landscape of American cinema over the past decade, as he examines works like Munich, A Prairie Home Companion, The Departed, and Funny People, in addition to classics by Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Altman.