BiblioVault - Books about Film & Video

Images of Dutchness

Popular Visual Culture, Early Cinema and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914

Sarah Dellmann

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

Why do early films present the Netherlands as a country full of canals and windmills, where people wear traditional costumes and wooden shoes, while industries and modern urban life are all but absent? Images of Dutchness investigates the roots of this visual repertoire from diverse sources, ranging from magazines to tourist brochures, from anthropological treatises to advertising trade cards, stereoscopic photographs, picture postcards, magic lantern slide sets and films of early cinema.This richly illustrated book provides an in-depth study of the fascinating corpus of popular visual media and their written comments that are studied for the first time. Through the combined analysis of words and images, the author identifies not only what has been considered Ÿtypically DutchŒ in the long nineteenth century, but also provides new insights into the logic and emergence of national clichés in the Western world.

[more]

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Isolina Ballesteros

Intellect Books, 2015

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first-generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe. Whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who use the resources and means of production of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments, these films, Isolina Ballesteros shows, are unmappable—a condition resulting from immigration cinema’s recombination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. In an age of globalization and increased migration, this book theorizes immigration cinema in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism, and translation.

[more]

Improvising Cinema

Gilles Mouëllic

Amsterdam University Press, 2014

This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression. Improvising Cinema reflects both on the permanence of attempting improvisation and the relationship between technology and aesthetics. Mouëllic concludes preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the creative act exists only within the brief time span of the performance.

[more]

Inclusion in New Danish Cinema

Sexuality and Transnational Belonging

Meryl Shriver-Rice

Intellect Books, 2015

Often recognized as one of the happiest countries in the world, Denmark, like its Scandinavian neighbors, is known for its progressive culture, which is also reflected in its national cinema. It is not surprising, then, that Danish film boasts as many successful women film directors as men, uses scripts that are often cowritten by the director and the screenwriter, and produces one of the largest numbers of queer films directed by and starring women. Despite all this, Danish film is not widely written about, especially in English. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema brings this vibrant culture to English-language audiences. Meryl Shriver-Rice argues that Denmark has demonstrated that film can reinforce cultural ethics and political values while also navigating the ongoing and mounting forces of digital communication and globalization.

[more]

Indie Cinema Online

Sarah E.S. Sinwell

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Indie Cinema Online investigates the changing nature of contemporary American independent cinema in an era of media convergence. Focusing on the ways in which modes of production, distribution, and exhibition are shifting with the advent of online streaming, simultaneous release strategies, and web series, this book analyzes sites such as SundanceTV, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and other online spaces as a means of redefining independent cinema in a digital era. Analyzing the intersections among cinema studies, cultural studies, and new media studies within contemporary convergence culture, author Sarah E.S. Sinwell looks at sites of media convergence that are often ignored within most studies of digital media. Emphasizing the ways in which the forms and technologies of media culture have changed during the age of convergence, this book analyzes contemporary production, distribution, and exhibition practices as a means of examining the changing meanings of independent cinema within digital culture.

[more]

Indiscreet Fantasies

Iberian Queer Cinema

Andrés Lema-Hincapié

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Pedro Almodóvar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are multitudes of LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation. Indiscreet Fantasies is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films produced in the region over the past fifty years, each by a different director, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1969) to João Pedro Rodrigues’s O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Contributors examine how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical trauma—from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime—and explore how these films demonstrate a fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. The result will give readers a new appreciation for the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its thought-provoking queer cinema.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

[more]

Infinity Net

The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, artist Yayoi Kusama left Japan for New York City to become a star. By the time she returned to her home country in 1973, she had established herself as a leader of New York’s avant-garde movement, known for creating happenings and public orgies to protest the Vietnam War and for the polka dots that had become a trademark of her work. Her sculptures, videos, paintings, and installations are to this day included in major international exhibitions.

Available for the first time in English, Infinity Net paints a multilayered portrait of this fascinating artist. Taking us from her oppressive childhood in postwar Japan to her present life in the psychiatric hospital where she voluntarily stays—and is still productive—Kusama’s autobiography offers insight into the persona of mental illness that has informed her work. While she vibrantly describes the hallucinatory episodes she experiences, her tale is punctuated by stories of her pluck and drive in making her artistic voice heard. Conveying the breadth and ambition of her own work, Kusama also offers a dazzling snapshot of 1960s and 1970s New York City and her encounters with its artists—she collaborates with Andy Warhol, shares an apartment with Donald Judd, and becomes romantically entangled with Joseph Cornell. Replete with the sense of the sheer necessity within an artist to create, Infinity Net is an energetic and juicy page-turner that offers a glimpse into Kusama’s exhilarating world.

[more]

Interactive Cinema

The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation

Marina Hassapopoulou

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Connecting interactive cinema to media ethics and global citizenship

Interactive Cinema explores various cinematic practices that work to transform what is often seen as a primarily receptive activity into a participatory, multimedia experience. Surveying a multitude of unorthodox approaches throughout the history of motion pictures, Marina Hassapopoulou offers insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production.

Analyzing examples of early cinema, Hollywood B movies, museum and gallery installations, virtual-reality experiments, and experimental web-based works, Hassapopoulou travels across numerous platforms, highlighting a diverse array of strategies that attempt to unsettle the allegedly passive spectatorship of traditional cinema. Through an exploration of these radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of sociopolitical crises and periods of historical transition, she works to expand notions of interactivity by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms.

Deliberately revising and expanding Eurocentric scholarship to propose a much broader, transnational scope, the book emphasizes the ethical dimensions of interactive media and their links to larger considerations around community building, citizenship, and democracy. By combining cutting-edge theory with updated conventional film studies methodologies, Interactive Cinema presses at the conceptual limits of cinema and offers an essential road map to the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary media.

[more]

International Horror Film Directors

Global Fear

Edited by Danny Shipka and Ralph Beliveau

Intellect Books, 2016

Horror films have for decades commanded major global audiences, tapping into deep-rooted fears that cross national and cultural boundaries in their ability to spark terror. This book brings together a group of scholars to explore the ways that this fear is utilized and played upon by a wide range of filmmakers. Contributors take up such major figures as Guillermo del Toro, Lars Von Trier, and David Cronenberg, and they also offer introductions to lesser-known talents such as Richard Franklin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Juan López Moctezuma, and Alexandre Aja. Scholars and fans alike dipping into this collection will discover plenty of insight into what chills us.

[more]

Interpretazioni

Italian Language and Culture through Film

Cristina Pausini and Carmen Merolla

Georgetown University Press, 2019

Interpretazioni is an intermediate- to advanced-level Italian textbook that aims to teach language through film, focusing on Italian movies from 2010 to 2017. Teaching language through cinema is a widespread and proven practice that engages all four main language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing), and Interpretazioni utilizes the proven format and pedagogy of Pausini and Antonello Borra's previous book, Italian Through Film (Yale UP, 2003), which is regarded highly among teachers. Films featured in Interpretazioni span genres, address a wide range of themes, and are set in various parts of Italy, encouraging students and teachers to more fully engage with the complexity of Italian cinema. As in Italian through Film, the activities based on the films are divided into three main categories (before, during, and after viewing the film) with a natural progression from warm-up questions to closed and controlled exercises to open-ended and creative tasks–both oral and written–including grammar practice, all within the context of each single film. An instructor's manual with answer keys and suggestions on using apps for teaching is available on the www.press.georgetown.edu website.

[more]

Interpreting and Experiencing Disney

Mediating the Mouse

Edited by Priscilla Hobbs

Intellect Books, 2022

A collection of essays exploring the wide-ranging influence of the Walt Disney Company.

It would be difficult to go through life without ever encountering a Disney product. Since the first Mickey Mouse cartoon premiered in 1928, Disney has played a central role in shaping American popular culture, and it has expanded to the global market. The company positioned itself as a titan of family entertainment, and many of its offerings, from films to consumable products, have become embedded in the minds of children and adults, woven into many of our life experiences. Fans of Disney build connections with their favorite characters and franchises, fueled by Disney’s marketing practices. Others have developed a near-cult-like relationship with the brand, equating its products with religious icons and theme park visits with pilgrimages.

This edited volume looks beyond the movies and merchandise to peer into the very heart of the Disney phenomenon: how the fan response drives the corporation’s massive marketing machine and how the corporate response, in turn, shapes the fan experience.

[more]

Intimations

The Cinema of Wojciech Has

Annette Insdorf

Northwestern University Press, 2017

In this first study in English of a master of Polish cinema, Annette Insdorf explores Has’s thirteen feature films with the same deep insight of her groundbreaking book on Krzysztof Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances (Northwestern, 2013).

Wojciech Has’s films are still less known outside of his native Poland than those of his countrymen Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Yet thanks to his singular vision, many critics rank Has among the masters of world cinema. Some of his movies have developed a cult following, notably The Saragossa Manuscript, the favorite film of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, which has been praised by directors such as Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roman Polanski.

Has’s films reveal the inner lives of his characters, which he portrays by giving free rein to his own wildly creative imagination. In addition toThe Saragossa Manuscript, his diverse and innovative filmography includes The Hourglass Sanatorium, a vividly surreal depiction of Hassidic life in Poland between the world wars; The Noose, a stark poetic drama about a lucid alcoholic who knows he will not be able to kick the habit; and How to Be Loved, in which an actress remembers her wartime past.

Has made disparate but formally striking movies infused with European strains of existentialism and the avant-garde. With many of his films being restored and rereleased, new generations of film lovers are discovering his artistic genius. Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has is the definitive guide in English to his work.

[more]

Inventing Cinema

Machines, Gestures and Media History

Benoît Turquety

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a ‘stable’ moment in media history? *Inventing Cinema* proposes to approach this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines. The archaeology analyses them as archives of users’ gestures, as well as of modes of perception. The epistemology reconstructs the problems that the machines’ designers and users have strived to solve, and the network of concepts they have elaborated to understand these problems. Drawing on the philosophy of technology and anthropology, *Inventing Cinema* argues that networks of gestures, problems, perception and concepts are inscribed in vision machines, from the camera obscura to the stereoscope, the Cinématographe, and digital cinema. The invention of cinema is ultimately seen as an ongoing process irreducible to a single moment in history.

[more]