Dreaming of Cinema

Adam Lowenstein is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film.

Lowenstein turns technological teleology on its head, arguing that new media studies urgently needs a theory of cinema-both what it was and what it continues to be. -- Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick Just how should we access cinema today? Adam Lowenstein, perfectly positioned between two eras, can tell us. Not through nostalgia, that's certain, but through every modern means possible. Curiously this returns him to the Surrealists who were already living our future. He deploys their strategies (serendipity, automatism, collective creativity) first in ingenious analyses of visual and narrative experiments, and then, more daringly, in striking instances in which DVDs, blogs, museum installations, and YouTube take cinema beyond film. A risky mission that Lowenstein pulls off dexterously. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University This highly imaginative and innovative book argues for an expanded sense both of the medium of cinema and of the forms of spectatorship that cinema yields, and it finds the promise of surrealism alive in contemporary media practices. Dreaming of Cinema will be of great interest to a wide range of film and media scholars. -- Richard Allen, New York University Here's a smart, sophisticated book that takes a topic-surrealism-that has been thoroughly (some would say exhaustively) investigated and gives it new life... This fascinating, obsessive, wide-ranging book will provoke a great deal of discussion. CHOICE

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Cinema as Digital Dream Machine 1. Enlarged Spectatorship: From Realism to Surrealism: Bazin, Barthes, and The (Digital) Sweet Hereafter 2. Interactive Spectatorship: Gaming, Mimicry, and Art Cinema: Between Un chien andalou and eXistenZ 3. Globalized Spectatorship: Ring Around the Superflat Global Village: J-Horror Between Japan and America 4. Posthuman Spectatorship: The Animal in You(Tube): From Los olvidados to "Christian the Lion" 5. Collaborative Spectatorship: The Surrealism of the Stars: From Rose Hobart to Mrs. Rock Hudson Afterword: Marking Cinematic Time Notes Bibliography Index