BiblioVault - Books about Moving Image

Death 24x a Second

Stillness and the Moving Image

Laura Mulvey

Reaktion Books, 2006

Death 24x a Second is a fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film. Addressing some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship, and narrative, Laura Mulvey here argues that such technologies, including home DVD players, have fundamentally altered our relationship to the movies.

According to Mulvey, new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed by anyone who hits pause. Easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze-frame, Mulvey argues, may shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in film.

By exploring how technology can give new life to old cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original reevaluation of film’s history and its historical usefulness.

[more]

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists

Anthony Cocciolo

American Library Association, 2018

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists

Anthony Cocciolo

Society of American Archivists, 2017

Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists by Anthony Cocciolo is for every archivist (or archivist in training) who has unearthed some carrier of moving image and sound and wondered what to do. Combining best practices with guidance for specific media formats, Cocciolo applies concepts of appraisal, description, and accessioning to audiovisual collections, providing a solid grounding for archivists in environments where resources for description, digitization, and storage are scarce.

[more]

Neurofilmology of the Moving Image

Gravity and Vertigo in Contemporary Cinema

Adriano D'Aloia

Amsterdam University Press, 2021

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

[more]

The Projectionists

Eadweard Muybridge and the Future Projections of the Moving Image

Stephen Barber

Diaphanes, 2020

Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world’s visual form. Projectionists examines mostly unknown aspects of Muybridge’s work: his period as a touring projectionist who enthralled audiences with unprecedented moving-images and his creation of a moving-image auditorium—long before cinemas—in which to project his work at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. That auditorium was both a catastrophe and a vital precursor for the following century’s manias for projection. Based on new research into his travels, audiences, auditoria, and projectors, Projectionists explores Muybridge’s initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps his driving inspiration for subsequent filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further World’s Exposition events and cinemas’ overheated projection-boxes.

[more]

The Sensible Stage

Staging and the Moving Image

Edited by Bridget Crone

Intellect Books, 2017

Exploring the use of live performance and the moving image in contemporary art practice, The Sensible Stage brings together essays that examine how elements from theater and cinema are integrated into art, often in order to question the boundaries and mediations between the body and the image. Opening with a discussion between prominent philosopher Alain Badiou and Elie During, this book offers a unique mixture of theoretical, creative, and discursive reflections on the meeting of stage and screen.

This revised and expanded edition includes two new chapters that offer an updated look at how these ideas continue to develop in contemporary art practice.

[more]

Taking Place

Location and the Moving Image

John David Rhodes

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place. Through its unprecedented—and at times even obsessive— attention to actual places, this volume traces the tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, that inhere in contemporary debates on global cinema, television, art, and media.

Contributors: Rosalind Galt, U of Sussex; Frances Guerin, U of Kent; Ji-hoon Kim; Hugh S. Manon, Clark U; Ara Osterweil, McGill U; Brian Price, U of Toronto; Linda Robinson, U of Wisconsin–Whitewater; Michael Siegel; Noa Steimatsky, U of Chicago; Meghan Sutherland, U of Toronto; Mark W. Turner, Kings College London; Aurora Wallace, New York U; Charles Wolfe, U of California, Santa Barbara.

[more]

Urban Cinematics

Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image

Edited by François Penz and Andong Lu

Intellect Books, 2011

Urban Cinematics surveys the mechanisms by which cinema contributes to our understanding of cities to address two key issues: How do filmmakers make use of urban spaces, and how do urban spaces make use of cinema? Merging the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning with film studies, this book explores the potential of cinema as a tool to investigate the communal narratives of cities. A series of dialogues with filmmakers rounds out this insightful and methodologically innovative volume.

[more]