Karl Schoonover – författare

Art cinema is a canonical term used in critical histories of postwar world cinema to carve out a space of aesthetic and commercial distinction that is neither mainstream nor avant-garde. For over fifty years, "art cinema" has defined how audiences and critics imagine cinema outside Hollywood, and this book uses art cinema's unique position to explore questions central to contemporary film studies. However, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. The term itself almost began to seem quaint. Despite these conservative connotations, art cinema retains at its core a comparitivist and internationalist impulse central to any understanding of globalized culture. In the last thirty years, art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of Central European, East Asian, and Latin American new waves, as well as northern Europe's Dogme and Iranian realism have contributed a vibrant new body of films that also demonstrates the centrality of art cinema to thinking film as a global phenomenon. This anthology reassesses the field of art cinema in light of recent scholarship on world film culture. The editors, each known for their important work in new approaches to international cinemas, have assembled a stimulating group of essays that cover the major issues in global art cinema, including new theorizations of the film image; revised industrial, legal, and exhibition histories; and the renewed debates about national, postcolonial, and regional cinema cultures. Global Art Cinema thus brings together a diverse group of authors in a timely conversation that reaffirms the category of art cinema as relevant, provocative, and even fundamental to contemporary film studies.

Art cinema is a canonical term used in critical histories of postwar world cinema to carve out a space of aesthetic and commercial distinction that is neither mainstream nor avant-garde. For over fifty years, "art cinema" has defined how audiences and critics imagine cinema outside Hollywood, and this book uses art cinema's unique position to explore questions central to contemporary film studies. However, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. The term itself almost began to seem quaint. Despite these conservative connotations, art cinema retains at its core a comparitivist and internationalist impulse central to any understanding of globalized culture. In the last thirty years, art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of Central European, East Asian, and Latin American new waves, as well as northern Europe's Dogme and Iranian realism have contributed a vibrant new body of films that also demonstrates the centrality of art cinema to thinking film as a global phenomenon.This anthology reassesses the field of art cinema in light of recent scholarship on world film culture. The editors, each known for their important work in new approaches to international cinemas, have assembled a stimulating group of essays that cover the major issues in global art cinema, including new theorizations of the film image; revised industrial, legal, and exhibition histories; and the renewed debates about national, postcolonial, and regional cinema cultures. Global Art Cinema thus brings together a diverse group of authors in a timely conversation that reaffirms the category of art cinema as relevant, provocative, and even fundamental to contemporary film studies.

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films-including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves-should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how-in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom-these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. Brutal Vision interrogates the role of neorealism’s famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieu-ideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.