Thinking Cinema – serie
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25 produkter
25 produkter
2 142 kr
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Winner of the Limina Award 2021This groundbreaking volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismäki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context. His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.
2 000 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.
1 884 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
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.
548 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Winner of the Limina Award 2021This groundbreaking volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismäki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context. His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.
1 295 kr
Skickas
For Elena del Río, extreme cinema is not only qualitatively different from the representations of violence we encounter in popular, mainstream cinema; it also constitutes a critique of the socio-moral system that produces (in every sense of the word) such violence. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze’s ethics of immanence, Spinoza’s ethology of passions and Nietzsche’s typology of forces, The Grace of Destruction examines the affective extremities common in much of global, contemporary cinema from the affirmative perspective of vital forces and situations—extremities such as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, the pain involved in gender relations, the event of death and planetary extinction. Her analysis diverges from the current literature on extreme cinema through its selection of films, which include key international examples, and through its foregrounding of relational, affective politics over representations of sexuality and graphic violence. Detailed formal and philosophical analyses of films like The White Ribbon, Dogville, Code Unknown, Battle in Heaven, Sonatine, Fireworks, Dolls, Takeshis’, Inland Empire and Melancholia are meant to move us away from the moral appraisal of violence and destruction, and to compose an ethological philosophy of cinema based on Deleuze’s idea that, “when truth and judgment crumble, there remain bodies, which are… nothing but forces.”
562 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.
562 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
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.
1 884 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude provides an original film-philosophy through which to understand low budget digital filmmaking from around the globe. It draws upon a wide range of western and non-western philosophers, physicists, theorists of ‘Third Cinema,’ and contemporary film theorists and film-philosophers in order to argue that the future of cinema lies at the margins, in the extreme, the overlooked and the under-funded – the sort that distributors, exhibitors and audiences would not consider to be cinema at all, hence "non-cinema." Analysing numerous films, William Brown argues that contemporary low-budget digital cinema is also through its digital form a political cinema that suggests that we are not detached observers of the world, but entangled participants therewith. Non-Cinema constructs this argument by looking at work by established filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Michael Winterbottom, as well as lesser known work from places as diverse as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Africa.
1 858 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Maghreb and the Middle East to examine how Maghrebi(-French) people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and classes have been represented corporeally in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via detailed textual and phenomenological analyses of films such as Red Satin (Amari 2002), Exiles (Gatlif 2004), Couscous (Kechiche 2007) and Salvation Army (Taïa 2014), Kaya Hayon Davies conveys the pivotal role that corporeality plays in articulating identity and the emotions in these films.
490 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
For Elena del Río, extreme cinema is not only qualitatively different from the representations of violence we encounter in popular, mainstream cinema; it also constitutes a critique of the socio-moral system that produces (in every sense of the word) such violence. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze’s ethics of immanence, Spinoza’s ethology of passions and Nietzsche’s typology of forces, The Grace of Destruction examines the affective extremities common in much of global, contemporary cinema from the affirmative perspective of vital forces and situations—extremities such as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, the pain involved in gender relations, the event of death and planetary extinction. Her analysis diverges from the current literature on extreme cinema through its selection of films, which include key international examples, and through its foregrounding of relational, affective politics over representations of sexuality and graphic violence. Detailed formal and philosophical analyses of films like The White Ribbon, Dogville, Code Unknown, Battle in Heaven, Sonatine, Fireworks, Dolls, Takeshis’, Inland Empire and Melancholia are meant to move us away from the moral appraisal of violence and destruction, and to compose an ethological philosophy of cinema based on Deleuze’s idea that, “when truth and judgment crumble, there remain bodies, which are… nothing but forces.”
1 348 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure – the ‘intervallic’ noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn’t There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People to Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of ‘beatitude’ that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.
1 348 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
WINNER of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Best First Book Award 2023Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such ‘limit cinema’ has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley’s psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild’s eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.
1 348 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.
463 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude provides an original film-philosophy through which to understand low budget digital filmmaking from around the globe. It draws upon a wide range of western and non-western philosophers, physicists, theorists of ‘Third Cinema,’ and contemporary film theorists and film-philosophers in order to argue that the future of cinema lies at the margins, in the extreme, the overlooked and the under-funded – the sort that distributors, exhibitors and audiences would not consider to be cinema at all, hence "non-cinema." Analysing numerous films, William Brown argues that contemporary low-budget digital cinema is also through its digital form a political cinema that suggests that we are not detached observers of the world, but entangled participants therewith. Non-Cinema constructs this argument by looking at work by established filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Michael Winterbottom, as well as lesser known work from places as diverse as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Africa.
491 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Maghreb and the Middle East to examine how Maghrebi(-French) people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and classes have been represented corporeally in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via detailed textual and phenomenological analyses of films such as Red Satin (Amari 2002), Exiles (Gatlif 2004), Couscous (Kechiche 2007) and Salvation Army (Taïa 2014), Kaya Hayon Davies conveys the pivotal role that corporeality plays in articulating identity and the emotions in these films.
409 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.
409 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
WINNER of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Best First Book Award 2023Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such ‘limit cinema’ has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley’s psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild’s eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.
434 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure – the ‘intervallic’ noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn’t There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People to Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of ‘beatitude’ that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.
2 018 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries: in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the Thinking Cinema series draws on feminist theorists and critics from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities.Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency,and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can 'do justice' to female subjectivity: Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, and thereby reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to cast a new veil over such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank; and includes a timeline ofdevelopments in women's film-making and feminist film theory from 1970 to 2011.
490 kr
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Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2018Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.
434 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema.
2 142 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema.
1 281 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood’s disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations.Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the book’s explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity – forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities – it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planet’s present juncture.
396 kr
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Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood’s disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations.Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the book’s explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity – forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities – it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planet’s present juncture.
Screening Technology, Theorizing Posthumanism
Humanness and Embodiment in Science Fiction Film and Television
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
1 488 kr
Kommande
Screening Technology, Theorizing Posthumanism examines how different embodiments of technological life come to be inscribed with qualities of humanness across mainstream film and television, so as to understand the ways in which posthumanism emerges onscreen.Now more than ever, we are being told that technologies capable of performing as though they were human are being developed at an unprecedented rate. In order to make sense of the wide-ranging social, ethical and philosophical ramifications of such technologies, cultural commentators, researchers and philosophers are turning to science fiction for answers. Rather than dismiss those who do so, this book builds upon this critical impulse to consider how film and television respond to the question: what does it mean to be human in an age of technological crisis?Liam Rogers makes the case for a film-and-television-philosophy approach to examine what mainstream science fiction can offer posthumanism in its technoscientific visions of the future. Through close readings of popular films such as Her (2013), WALL-E (2008) and CHAPPiE (2015), as well as series like Black Mirror (2011-present) and My Holo Love (2020), it considers what it might mean to theorize posthumanism onscreen, what screening technology looks like, and, more importantly, why it matters. In doing so, this book casts posthumanism’s relationship to screened media in new light. Locating the posthumanist potential within voice-, touch- and movement-based humanness, this book demonstrates the audio-visual ways in which films and television series navigate us through the current technoscientific landscape by offering us distinctly paradoxical theorizations of what it means to be human. It is this paradoxicality that ultimately complicates, challenges and advances posthumanism as a philosophy.