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In the first book-length study of Tarot cards on the silver screen, Emily E. Auger contextualizes cartomancy—the practice of fortune telling via playing cards—and dives deep into its invention and promulgation in film. After providing an introduction to divination and cartomancy, Auger offers detailed descriptions and analyses of the roles that cartomancy and Tarot cards play in films. The book features an abbreviated filmography—including nearly 200 films—detailing their relationships to cartomancy. As Tarot communities continue to grow worldwide, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film will be of interest to scholars of esoteric studies, film, folklore, playing cards, popular culture, and religion, as well as diviners the world over.

Chroma: A Book of Color is a meditation on the color spectrum by Britain’s most controversial filmmaker. From the explosions of image and color in Edward II, The Last of England, The Garden, and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Derek Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classic theory, anecdote and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams.

Over the past decade, Ethiopian films have come to dominate the screening schedules of the many cinemas in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, as well as other urban centers. Despite undergoing an unprecedented surge in production and popularity in Ethiopia and in the diaspora, this phenomenon has been broadly overlooked by African film and media scholars and Ethiopianists alike. This collection of essays and interviews on cinema in Ethiopia represents the first work of its kind and establishes a broad foundation for furthering research on this topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and bringing together contributions from both Ethiopian and international scholars, the collection offers new and alternative narratives for the development of screen media in Africa. The book’s relevance reaches far beyond its specific locale of Ethiopia as contributions focus on a broad range of topics—such as commercial and genre films, diaspora filmmaking, and the role of women in the film industry—while simultaneously discussing multiple forms of screen media, from satellite TV to “video films.” Bringing both historical and contemporary moments of cinema in Ethiopia into the critical frame offers alternative considerations for the already radically changing critical paradigm surrounding the understandings of African cinema.
 

In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as “lifelike” but best understood as “approaching reality.” What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan’s reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened.

Fan suggests that the phrase “approaching reality” can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists—from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze—into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.

Imagine attending a fascinating film forum among a distinguished and varied panel of cinema legends. An afternoon or evening where contemporary filmmakers from around the world--Kazakhstan, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Cameroon, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, the People's Republic of China, Mexico, Poland, the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France--gather together to discuss how they arrive at the creative choices that bring their film projects to life.

Can't spare the time from work or class? Travel expense too great? What? You can't even find such a collaborative event?

Then imagine curling up with a good book, maybe a shot of espresso in hand, and becoming engrossed in the exciting and informative conversation that Elena Oumano has ingeniously crafted from her personal and individual interviews with these artists. Straying far from the usual choppy question-and-answer format, Cinema Today saves you from plowing through another tedious read, in which the same topics and issues are directed to each subject, over and over-an experience that is like being trapped in a revolving door.

Oumano stops that revolving door by following a lively symposium-in-print format, with the filmmakers' words and thoughts grouped together under various key cinema topics. It is as though these experts are speaking to each other and you are their audience--collectively they reflect on and explore issues and concerns of modern filmmaking, from the practical to the aesthetic, including the process, cinematic rhythm and structure, and the many aspects of the media: business, the viewer, and cinema's place in society. Whether you are a movie lover, a serious student of cinema, or simply interested in how we communicate in today's global village through films that so profoundly affect the world, Cinema Today is for you.

Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere. 

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. 

Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema’s perceptual, rather than representational, power.

Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. 

Updated collections of recent interviews with filmmakers whose works represent trends in the film industries of Central Asia and the Middle East, these two new geospecific editions expand upon the earlier volume Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia.

 

Following an introduction delineating the histories of the film industries of the countries that make up the Middle East and Central Asia—including Iran, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—both books contain interviews stretching over a decade, which position the filmmakers and their creative concerns within the social or political context of their respective countries. The striking variety of approaches toward each interview creates a rich diversity of tone and opens the door to a better understanding of images of “otherness” in film. In addition to transcripts of the interviews, each chapter also includes stills from important films discussed, biographical information about the filmmakers, and filmographies of their works.

 

Gönül Dönmez-Colin offers in these expanded editions a carefully researched and richly detailed firsthand account of the developments and trends in these regional film industries that is sure to be appreciated by film scholars and researchers of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.

Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.

Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

Péter Forgács, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. Cinema’s Alchemist offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which Forgács reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.

Contributors: Whitney Davis, U of California, Berkeley; László F. Földényi, U of Theatre, Film and Television, Budapest; Marsha Kinder, U of Southern California; Tamás Korányi; Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Roger Odin, U of Paris III Sorbonne–Nouvelle; Catherine Portuges, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan U; Kaja Silverman, U of Pennsylvania; Ernst van Alphen, Leiden U, the Netherlands; Malin Wahlberg, Stockholm U.

The recent uproar over NSA dataveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been part of our lives for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power—and potential for abuse.

In Closed Circuits, Garrett Stewart analyzes a broad spectrum of films, from M and Rear Window through The Conversation to Déjà Vu, Source Code, and The Bourne Legacy, in which cinema has articulated—and performed—the drama of inspection’s unreturned look. While mainstays of the thriller, both the act and the technology of surveillance, Stewart argues, speak to something more foundational in the very work of cinema. The shared axis of montage and espionage—with editing designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the narrative camera—extends to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic. To such a global technopticon, one telltale response is a proliferating mode of digitally enhanced “surveillancinema.”

African and notably sub-Saharan African film’s relative eclipse on the international scene in the early twenty-first century does not transcend the growth within the African genre. This time period has seen African cinema forging a new relationship with the real and implementing new aesthetic strategies, as well as the emergence of a post-colonial popular cinema.
 
Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.
 

These proceedings of the 16th conference of the international society for the study of early cinema Domitor includes 26 studies and numerous rarely seen figures dealing with the often overlooked history of the crafts, trades and techniques of early cinema. By examining material culture and the institutionalization of practices into trades during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this new investigation into the skills and the techniques that defined the cinema in its early decades aims to foster a better understanding of the medium in its varied industrial and professional aspects. The art and gestures of craftspersons—including performers, camera operators, editors, directors, designers, engineers, projectionists, programmers, and critics—, like those of the factory or laboratory workers, are considered for their emerging specificity, as well as in relation to existing cultural, material and technological forms. This book shows how the industrialization of cinema, the professionalization of workers, and the standardization of techniques led to the creation (or at times, subversion) of norms, and consequently legitimized certain skills, crafts and techniques at the expense of others.
 
The intermedial approaches deployed in this collection bring into focus the influence of multiple professional worlds and cultural practices on the nascent film medium, as well as the necessary adaptations and transformations required by the latter. This circulatory dynamic concerns people and practices, studied in a non-diffusionist approach taking into account transcultural interactions. Chapters examine the mechanisms of professionalization and identity-building as they relate to professions such as filmmaker or colorist, as well as to more unexpected occupations such as accountant, censor, or chemical engineer.
 
The notion of technique is broadly defined. Several of the volume’s chapters deal with cameras or special effects, as well as with new historical investigation into mysterious technical devices such as shutters, cue systems or working samples. Going beyond this preoccupation with materiality, the collected studies also approach technique as a human and cultural activity, and thus as a set of gestures, crafts, and expertise. The book more specifically opens up a reflection on the skills of screen performers and on the training that brought the institutionalization of body techniques and film acting. The book further illustrates to an unprecedented extent that the first film workers were frequently women.
 
Several chapters are dedicated to the unconventional careers of specific film workers, with particular attention being given to the diversity and complexity of professional trajectories. Indeed, this book demonstrates that the invention of cinema was deeply enmeshed with the rise of international networks, which resulted in the standardization of technical practices within corporate and national contexts being ultimately shaped by globalization.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.

There are few figures as captivating as the antihero: the character we can’t help but root for, even as we turn away in revulsion from many of the things they do. What is it that draws us to characters like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander even as we decry the trail of destruction they leave in their wake?

Crime Uncovered: Antihero tackles that question and more. Mixing the popular and iconic, contemporary and ancient, the book explores the place and appeal of the antihero. Using figures from books, TV, film, and more, including such up-to-the-minute examples as True Detective’s Rust Cole, the book places the antihero’s actions within the society he or she is rejecting, showing how expectations and social and familial structures create the backdrop against which the antihero’s posture becomes compelling. Featuring interviews with genre masters James Ellroy and Paul Johnston, Crime Uncovered: Antiherois an accessible, engaging analysis of what drives us to embrace those characters who acknowledge—or even flaunt—the dark side we all have somewhere deep inside.

For most of the twentieth century, the private eye dominated crime fiction and film, a lone figure fighting for justice, often in opposition to the official representatives of law and order. More recently, however, the police have begun to take center stage—as exemplified by the runaway success of TV police procedurals like Law and Order. In Crime Uncovered: Detective, Barry Forshaw offers an exploration of some of the most influential and popular fictional police detectives in the history of the genre.

Taking readers into the worlds of such beloved authors as P. D. James, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø, Ian Rankin, and Håkan Nesser, this book zeroes in on the characteristics that define the iconic characters they created, discussing how they relate to their national and social settings, questions of class, and to the criminals they relentlessly pursue. Showing how the role of the authority figure has changed—and how each of these writers creates characters who work both within and against the strictures of official investigations—the book shows how creators cleverly subvert expectations of both police procedure and the crime genre itself.

Written by a leading expert in the field and drawn from interviews with the featured authors, Crime Uncovered: Detectivewill thrill the countless fans of Inspector Rebus, Harry Hole, Adam Dalgliesh, and the other enduring police detectives who define the genre.

The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction. From Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade— the hard-boiled loner trawling the mean streets—to Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings—the genteel companion in greener surrounds—the P. I. has taken on any number of guises. In Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator, editors Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks dive deep into crime literature and culture, challenging many of the assumptions we make about the hardy P. I.

Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, including Stephen Knight and Carolyn Beasley, the book covers characters from the whole world of international noir—Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lambert, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, and many more. Including essays on the genealogy and emergence of the protagonist in nineteenth-century fiction; interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana; and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary icon, Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will redefine what we think we know about the figure of the P. I.

Rolls and Franks have engaged here the tension between the popular and scholarly that is inherent in any critical examination of a literary type, along the way unraveling the mystery of the alluring, enigmatic private investigator. Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will be a handy companion for any crime fiction fan.