[ecrea] new book - Cinema's Bodily Illusions - Scott C. Richmond

A new publication from University of Minnesota Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/cinemas-bodily-illusions

**

*Cinema's Bodily Illusions***

*Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating***

/Scott C. Richmond///

"In laying out his theory of proprioceptive aesthetics in cinema, 
/Cinema’s Bodily Illusions/ makes a boldly provocative contribution to 
the study of bodies, film screens, and media technology. Rescuing 
cinematic illusion from the perjorative sense with which modernist film 
scholarship disparages it, Scott C. Richmond finds a visceral (rather 
than cerebral) thematization of the resonance between ordinary 
perception and cinematic perception."—Jennifer M. Barker, author of /The 
Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience/

"Richmond’s theory and method offers an important tool for doing some of 
the critical work that spectator theory cannot. /Cinema’s Bodily 
Illusions/ may become an influential vein within postmodern 
phenomenology. It offers a critical method for understanding the 
aesthetic moment outside of representational blinders."—/PopMatters/

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like /Gravity/ move 
something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and 
experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful 
challenge to mainstream film theory, /Cinema’s Bodily Illusions/ 
demonstrates that this is the case.

Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, 
on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through 
space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues 
that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. 
He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema 
becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works 
primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the 
body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual 
illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s 
/The Flicker/, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp’s /Anémic Cinéma/, 
the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley 
Kubrick’s /2001/, Godfrey Reggio’s /Koyaanisqatsi/, and Alfonso Cuarón’s 
/Gravity/. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 
phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to 
perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, 
which allows us to refocus on the cinema’s perceptual, rather than 
representational, power.

Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, 
and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death or irrelevance, 
Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an 
urgent site of contemporary inquiry.

*Scott C. Richmond*is assistant professor of cinema and digital media in 
the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

University of Minnesota Press | October 2016| 264pp | 9780816690992 | PB 
| £22.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL2017CBI**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

Author and independent bookshop blog - Bookscombined.com 
<https://bookscombined.com/>


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