Archive for September 2020

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[Commlist] New Paperback: Non-Cinema

Tue Sep 29 18:04:30 GMT 2020



/Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude/, is now available in paperback.

A recent review <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/25785273.2020.1785148> by Romina Turana in /Transnational Screens/ said that "[t]he most controversial element of this book... is its price. It seems to negate the underlying message of Brown’s work related to a sense of a new democratic wave in film studies. I would recommend reading this book, but find it in a library."

Bearing in mind that Turana touches upon a common issue in relation to the pricing of new academic texts (an issue that collectively we really ought to try to sort out at some point, especially for less experienced authors who may not be able to move immediately into, say, open access book publishing for a variety of complex but intertwined reasons that are beyond the scope of this message), the appearance of the book in paperback hopefully does go some way to negating the price issue as identified.

(And what with libraries generally being out of action for the time being, it also provides an alternative to what is otherwise one of my favourite experiences, and one that Turana here recommends, namely sitting in a library reading a book.)

So... rather than the horrifically expensive £90 for a hardback copy, you can now pay a more reasonable £26.09 for the paperback (or even cheaper if you go full invertebrate and buy the spineless version).

To that end, should you ever wish to read a book about contemporary digital filmmaking from around the world, including case studies from Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Philippines, France and francophone Africa, the UK (via Turkey), the USA, Uruguay and Nigeria, then check it out.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/non-cinema-9781501361654/ <https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/non-cinema-9781501361654/>

FYI (or rather: here's some more sales spiel), here are some other thoughts on the book, should you feel that you have a spare £26.09 to spend, but are not quite sure what to spend it on (although I perhaps should point out that for the same you could get /Beloved/ for £9.99, /Ulysses/ for £8.99, and Audre Lorde's /The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House/, James Baldwin's /Dark Days/ and Chinua Achebe's /Africa's Tarnished Name/ each for £2 in the Penguin Modern series, with enough left over to pick up those LED String Lights that you fancied at Poundland - and **still** have enough left over for a Chomp - a set of selections for which, frankly, I'd admire you [and which you could get for even less if you bought the books by donating some money to the Jeff Bezos Immortality Fund... but all the same):-

“Brown brilliantly introduces the concept of non-cinema as anti-thesis, remainder and emergent condition of a "post-colonial" world dominated and impoverished by the logistics of capital-cinema. Non-cinema investigates zones of invisibility at the margins of spectacle, in the poor image, and in the poor world, while also providing a powerful survey of global (non-)cinema, its various attributes and its urgent commitments to socially transformative modes of relation. The book is a significant theoretical elaboration and critique of the world-media system, that also collects and concentrates globally distributed, often liminal, instances of struggle, inspiration and liberation.” – Jonathan Beller, Professor and Director, Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, USA

“Whether we understand it as 'acinema', 'paracinema', or 'post-cinema', William Brown's extremely important text on all such non-cinemas is deeply impressive: its breadth of knowledge, both theoretical and geo-cultural, has clearly demonstrated Brown to be the best thinker of non-standard cinemas working today.” – John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film, Kingston University, UK

“William Brown's Non-Cinema is a brilliant speculative history of cinema acting out against itself, against every convention and institution of film. This masterpiece unfolds everywhere else, forming the contours of a cinema that is not one, but rather a series of interventions that articulate the deep values that forge a cinema in spite itself, a total cinema understood as the very limits of cinema, non-cinema.” – Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Literature and Film, University of Southern California, USA

“'Prompted by the digital explosion which allowed for the excluded to come into the picture, William Brown took on the challenge of navigating through and making sense of the multitude – that is, the images and sounds of those who populate the outside of the narrow frame of capitalism. Truly global in scope and erudition, Non-Cinema takes us on a revelatory journey through the hidden audiovisual jewels from Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Philippines, Uruguay, France, the UK, the US, culminating in Nigeria with the ultimate non-cinematic production of Nollywood. Exemplary in its intellectual ambition and analytical acumen, this is a must-read book by one of today's most original audiovisual specialists.'” – Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK

“Non-Cinema is a ground-breaking book that provides a remarkable analysis of the political and ethical issues at stake in the global postcinematic profusion of digital film practices.” – *Frédéric Brayard in *Screen


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