Archive for 2015

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[ecrea] new book - Surveillance Cinema

Fri Jul 03 20:11:44 GMT 2015




*Surveillance Cinema*

/Catherine Zimmer/

//"/Surveillance Cinema/ presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field
of cinema studies in its reconceptualization of the centrality of
surveillance to film narratives, subject formations, and temporalities.
Smartly pushing beyond the critical models that have long been
associated with surveillance in and outside of cinema, Zimmer makes a
persuasive case for examining surveillance within historical and
political contexts.  An excellent book, both far-reaching and convincing
in its claims, /Surveillance Cinema/ is sure to become one of the
central works in the emerging field of surveillance studies."—Aviva
Briefel, co-editor of /Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror/

    In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In
Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims.
And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite
technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies.
Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that
have become commonplace in recent cinema.

    Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come
together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of
surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and
the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that
screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective,
and even material formations around and through surveillance. She
considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current
political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and
torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The
Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, /Surveillance Cinema/
explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that
characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.

New York University Press

April 2015 288pp 9781479836673 Paperback £18.99now only £15.19* when you
quote *_CSF715FILM_* when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/surveillance-cinema

*French Cinema—A Critical Filmography*

*Volume 1, 1929–1939*

/Colin Crisp/

    This invaluable resource by one of the world’s leading experts in
French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th
century and its place and function in French society. Each filmography
includes 101 films listed chronologically (Volume 1: 1929–1939 and
Volume 2: 1940–1958) and provides accessible points of entry into the
remarkable world of 20th-century French cinema. All entries contain a
list of cast members and characters, production details, an overview of
the film's cultural and historical significance, and a critical summary
of the film's plot and narrative structure. Each volume includes an
appendix listing rewards earned and an extensive reference list for
further reading and research. A third volume, covering the period
1958–1974, is forthcoming.

*Colin Crisp* is a leading scholar in French film history and author of
/The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960/ (IUP, 1993) and /Genre, Myth, and
Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939/ (IUP, 2002).

Indiana University Press

June 2015 342pp 9780253016966 Paperback £23.99now only £19.19* when you
quote *_CSF715FILM_* when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/french-cinema-a-critical-filmography

*Orienting Hollywood*

*A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay*

/Nitin Govil/

    “Impressively researched and astutely argued, /Orienting Hollywood/
will no doubt change the way we think about and research
transnationalism in film and media. Govil brilliantly integrates notions
of aspirational practice, affective labor, contact tropes, industrial
mirroring, and cultural echoing in a compelling and original analysis.
Orienting Hollywood stands as an exemplary model of exactly the kind of
integration between ‘cultural’ and ‘political economic’ research that
many have called for, but few have realized. This book will be widely
recognized and embraced as a key, innovative text in our field.”-John T.
Caldwell,author of /Production Culture /

    With American cinema facing intense technological and financial
challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to
globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional
connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years.
Many accounts have proclaimed India’s transformation in a relatively
short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.

/Orienting Hollywood/ moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that
Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined
because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of
exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources,
policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents
encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections
were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative
framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of
interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay
cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.

New York University Press

March 2015 272pp 9780814789346 Paperback £18.99now only £15.19* when you
quote *_CSF715FILM_* when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/orienting-hollywood

*Orphans of the East*

*Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject*

/Constantin Parvulescu/

    "A stunning, brilliant, and very rich book!" —Robert A. Rosenstone,
author of /History of Film/Film on History/

    "This groundbreaking study figures the orphan as a key cinematic
trope for interrogating socialist representations in feature films
produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland.  The author's comparative,
transnational perspective in chapters devoted to close textual analyses
of each narrative demonstrates the value of reading film as a primary
source for understanding the relationships among state power,
intergenerational trauma, and revolutionary subjectivity.  Parvulescu's
highly original portrayal of a landscape of parentless children evokes
the trauma of war and the specificity of the socialist experiment in the
former Eastern Bloc." —Catherine Portuges, University of
Massachusetts-Amherst

    Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid or
the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar
Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role,
embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and
grappling with an unknown future under Soviet rule. By exploring films
produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, Parvulescu traces the way in which
cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-World War II
subject and the "new man" of Soviet-style communism. In these films, the
orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of
ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent
critic of the system’s shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has
resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state.

*   Constantin Parvulescu* is Senior Lecturer at West University of
Timisoara, Romania. He is editor (with Robert A. Rosenstone) of /A
Companion to the Historical Film./

Indiana University Press

June 2015 198pp 16 b&w illus. 9780253016850 Paperback £18.99now only
£15.19* when you quote *_CSF715FILM_* when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/orphans-of-the-east

*African Appropriations*

*Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media*

/Matthias Krings/

    "Matthias Krings has brilliantly fused together vignettes of
contemporary African visual mediascapes that cause us to revise our
perceptions of eddies and translocations of transnational mediated
popular culture to Africa and within Africa." —Adballa Uba Adamu, Bayero
University, Kano

    "An original, stimulating, and convincing discussion of mimetic
behaviors in the fields of cultural production and artistic expression."
—Peter Probst, Tufts University

    Why would a Hollywood film become a Nigerian video remake, a
Tanzanian comic book, or a Congolese music video? Matthias Krings
explores the myriad ways Africans respond to the relentless onslaught of
global culture. He seeks out places where they have adapted pervasive
cultural forms to their own purposes as photo novels, comic books,
songs, posters, and even scam letters. These African appropriations
reveal the broad scope of cultural mediation that is characteristic of
our hyperlinked age. Krings argues that there is no longer an "original"
or "faithful copy," but only endless transformations that thrive in the
fertile ground of African popular culture.

*Matthias Krings* is Professor of Anthropology and African Popular
Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He is editor (with
Onookome Okome) of /Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an
African Video Film Industry /(IUP, 2013).

Indiana University Press

July 2015 328pp 33 b&w illus. 9780253016294 Paperback £20.99now only
£16.79* when you quote *CSF715FILM* when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/african-appropriations

*Cultural Techniques*

*Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real*

/Bernhard Siegert /

/Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young/

//"An excellent collection of essays from one of the most widely known
and respected scholars of media, media theory, and cultural techniques
working in Germany. The scholarship is erudite, sophisticated, and
impressively wide-ranging."—Michael Wutz, Weber State University//

//In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard
Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that
reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental
for a given culture. /Cultural Techniques/ aims to forget our
traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through
something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium's
individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or
aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a
level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and
form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real
are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology
into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur.
Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic
practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis
of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status
as "in-betweens," shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques,
from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the
natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational.
/Cultural Techniques/ ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the
production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the
reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of
trompe-l'oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert
addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be
replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological
distinctions within the ontic.  Grounding posthumanist theory both
historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue
between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.//

*   Bernhard Siegert* is Gerd Bucerius Professsor of the History and
Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus Universitat Weimar and
Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques
and Media Philosophy at Weimar. Together with Friedrich Kittler, Norbert
Bolz, and Wolfgang Coy, he is one of the pioneers of German media
theory. He is the author of /Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the
Postal System./

*Geoffrey Winthrop-Young* is Professor of German at the Department of
Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of
British Columbia.

Fordham University Press

May 2015 288pp 9780823263769 Paperback £18.99now only £15.19* when you
quote *_CSF715FILM_* when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/cultural-techniques

*FREE UK POSTAGE, Europe £4.50 *

*(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER:**_CSF715FILM_ **for discount) *

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