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In late November 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog received a phone call from Paris delivering some terrible news. German film historian, mentor, and close friend Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and dying. Herzog was determined to prevent this and believed that an act of walking would keep Eisner from death. He took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag of the barest essentials, and wearing a pair of new boots, set off on a three-week pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the deep chill and snowstorms of winter.

Of Walking in Ice is Herzog’s beautifully written, much-admired, yet often-overlooked diary account of that journey. Herzog documents everything he saw and felt on his quest to his friend’s bedside, from poetic descriptions of the frozen landscape and harsh weather conditions to the necessity of finding shelter in vacant or abandoned houses and the intense loneliness of his solo excursion.

Includes, for the first time, Werner Herzog’s 1982 “Tribute to Lotte Eisner” upon her receipt of the Helmut Käutner Prize

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists.

Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

The milestone 100th issue of Camera Obscura recognizes the work and legacy of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015). Arguably the most important figure in feminist film culture, Akerman is central to Camera Obscura's own legacy, and her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was covered in one of the first issues of the journal. The contributors to this special issue return to Akerman's work, illuminating her films, writings, and installations through new criticism and discussion. The issue includes a rich collection of newly published photographs, scholarly essays by leading Akerman scholars, a filmography and installation list, and rare interviews with Akerman's close collaborators.

Contributors. Claire Atherton, Janet Bergstrom, Kelley Conway, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Ute Holl, Heike Klippel, Eva Kuhn, Matias Lavin, Alisa Lebow, Brenda Longfellow, Babette Mangolte, Ivone Margulies, Michael Mazière, Eva Meyer, Sandra Percival, Jane Stein, Cécile Tourneur, Maureen Turim, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Patricia White

In On Stage, Mathilde Roman explores the resonances that fields of theater—stage, décor, space, gaze, and more—have in the practice of video arts. Using these notions of theater both as points of reference and as a prism through which video installation can be approached, Roman is able to concentrate on a number of questions often overlooked by art historians, theorists, and critics, but offering different points of view. These include questions of exhibition architecture, display, viewer experience, temporality, and the importance of the gaze. Each chapter is articulated around analyses of video installations created by artists of different generations, from Michael Snow to Maïder Fortuné, and Dan Graham to Laurent Grasso. With a preface by Mieke Bal, On Stage is an important contribution to the fields of art, history, and film studies.

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction, and biopolitics and community. 

Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology, and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science, and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor, and shape life today.

It was the age of Jim Crow, riddled with racial violence and unrest. But in the world of Our Gang, black and white children happily played and made mischief together. They even had their own black and white version of the KKK, the Cluck Cluck Klams—and the public loved it.

The story of race and Our Gang, or The Little Rascals, is rife with the contradictions and aspirations of the sharply conflicted, changing American society that was its theater. Exposing these connections for the first time, Julia Lee shows us how much this series, from the first silent shorts in 1922 to its television revival in the 1950s, reveals about black and white American culture—on either side of the silver screen. Behind the scenes, we find unconventional men like Hal Roach and his gag writers, whose Rascals tapped into powerful American myths about race and childhood. We meet the four black stars of the series—Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, and Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas—the gang within the Gang, whose personal histories Lee pursues through the passing years and shifting political landscape.

In their checkered lives, and in the tumultuous life of the series, we discover an unexplored story of America, the messy, multiracial nation that found in Our Gang a comic avatar, a slapstick version of democracy itself.

Acclaimed Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s Our Own Image relates the experiences of making his documentaries and his critically acclaimed feature-length film Ngati (1987), widely credited as the first fiction feature by a member of an indigenous community. Barclay details his views on the process of filmmaking within his own Maori community and discusses how his work differed from popular cinema, advocating for indigenous control, participation, and perspectives in media.

Our Own Image gives an in-depth depiction of the changes Barclay’s approach contributed to the field of documentaries, as well as displaying the respect for community Barclay brought to his filming technique. His insistence on letting people speak for themselves demonstrated authenticity to audiences, creating awareness of indigenous cinema in New Zealand and worldwide.

In Out of Time, Todd McGowan takes as his starting point the emergence of a temporal aesthetic in cinema that arose in response to the digital era. Linking developments in cinema to current debates within philosophy, McGowan claims that films that change the viewer’s relation to time constitute a new cinematic mode: atemporal cinema.
 

In atemporal cinema, formal distortions of time introduce spectators to an alternative way of experiencing existence in time—or, more exactly, a way of experiencing existence out of time. McGowan draws on contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly Jacques Lacan, to argue that atemporal cinema unfolds according to the logic of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive rather than that of desire, which has conventionally been the guiding concept of psychoanalytic film studies.
 

Despite their thematic diversity, these films distort chronological time with a shared motivation: to reveal the logic of repetition. Like psychoanalysis, McGowan contends, the atemporal mode locates enjoyment in the embrace of repetition rather than in the search for the new and different.