David Deamer - Böcker

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life. Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life.

David Deamer establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema.Each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. The author provides a series of tables to clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text, establishing a unique addition to Deleuze and cinema studies.

Deleuze’s two Cinema books explore film through the creation of a series of philosophical concepts. Not only bewildering in number, Deleuze’s writing procedures mean his exegesis is both complex and elusive. Three questions emerge: What are the underlying principles of the taxonomy? How many concepts are there, and what do they describe? How might each be used in engaging with a film?David Deamer’s book is the first to fully respond to these three questions, unearthing the philosophies inspiring Deleuze’s classifications, exploring every concept and reading a film for each. Clearly and concisely mapping the Cinema books for newcomers to Deleuzian film studies, Deamer also opens up new areas of enquiry for expert readers.Key Features:• An interpretation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory through Deleuze’s Bergsonism describing the ground of Deleuze’s film-philosophy;• A reading of Peirce’s semiosis from Pragmatism and Pragmaticism explicating the genesis and components of the movement-image;• An examination of Deleuze’s syntheses of time, space and consciousness from Difference and Repetition illuminating the genesis and components of the time-image; • Concise engagements with each of the cinematic signs to assist reading Deleuze’s Cinema books, as well as commentaries and monographs that draw upon them;• 44 film readings – one for each cinematic sign – to clarify their application.

David Deamer establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema.Each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. The author provides a series of tables to clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text, establishing a unique addition to Deleuze and cinema studies.