The Skin Of The Film

DIVUses Deleuze to explore new ways of looking at intercultural and experimental cinema./div

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2020 TORONTO BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE OLA EVERGREEN AWARD FINALIST FOR THE WRITERS' TRUST SHAUGNESSY COHEN PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE *UPDATED with new foreword, postscript, and educator's guide* In this bracing, revelatory work of award-winning journalism, celebrated writer and activist Desmond Cole punctures the naive assumptions of Canadians who believe we live in a post-racial nation. Chronicling just one year in the struggle against racism in this country, The Skin We're In reveals in stark detail the injustices faced by Black Canadians on a daily basis: the devastating effects of racist policing, the hopelessness produced by an education system that fails Black children, the heartbreak of those separated from their families by discriminatory immigration laws, and more. Cole draws on his own experiences as a Black man in Canada, and locates the deep cultural, historical, and political roots of each event. What emerges is a personal, painful, and comprehensive picture of entrenched, systemic inequality. Updated with a new foreword, postscript, and an extensive educator's guide, The Skin We're In is essential reading for all Canadians, and a vital tool in the fight against racism.

Publisher Description

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

With an introduction by David Mitchell Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-built and alone? An utterly unpredictable and macabre mystery, Under the Skin is a genre-defying masterpiece.

In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself. These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years -- sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists. From this emerges a materialist theory -- an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks's approach leads to an appreciation of the works' mortal bodies: film's volatile emulsion, video's fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as "virtual" and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.

Tracing the connections—both visual and philosophical—between new media art and classical Islamic art. In both classical Islamic art and contemporary new media art, one point can unfold to reveal an entire universe. A fourteenth-century dome decorated with geometric complexity and a new media work that shapes a dome from programmed beams of light: both can inspire feelings of immersion and transcendence. In Enfoldment and Infinity, Laura Marks traces the strong similarities, visual and philosophical, between these two kinds of art. Her argument is more than metaphorical; she shows that the “Islamic” quality of modern and new media art is a latent, deeply enfolded, historical inheritance from Islamic art and thought. Marks proposes an aesthetics of unfolding and enfolding in which image, information, and the infinite interact: image is an interface to information, and information (such as computer code or the words of the Qur'an) is an interface to the infinite. After demonstrating historically how Islamic aesthetics traveled into Western art, Marks draws explicit parallels between works of classical Islamic art and new media art, describing texts that burst into image, lines that multiply to form fractal spaces, “nonorganic life” in carpets and algorithms, and other shared concepts and images. Islamic philosophy, she suggests, can offer fruitful ways of understanding contemporary art.

The Tactile Eye expands on phenomenological analysis and film theory in its accessible and beautifully written exploration of the visceral connection between films and their viewers. Jennifer M. Barker argues that the experience of cinema can be understood as deeply tactile—a sensuous exchange between film and viewer that goes beyond the visual and aural, gets beneath the skin, and reverberates in the body. Barker combines analysis of embodiment and phenomenological film theory to provide an expansive description of cinematic tactility. She considers feminist experimental film, early cinema, animation, and horror, as well as classic, modernist, and postmodern cinema; films from ten national cinemas; and work by Chuck Jones, Buster Keaton, the Quay Brothers, Satyajit Ray, Carolee Schneemann, and Tom Tykwer, among others.