F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y electronic salon <////> The following works have been received and need reviewers. 'Deleuze, Guattari, and the Philosophy of Expression', _Canadian Review of Comparative Literature_ (1997). Warren Buckland, ed., _The Film Spectator_ (1995). Guy Debord, _Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_ (1998). Gilles Deleuze, _Negotiations_ (1995) Harvey Roy Greenberg, _Screen Memories_ (1993). Howard Pearce, _Human Shadows Bright as Glass_ (1997). Heide Schlupmann, _Ein Detektiv des Kinos_ (1998). If you would like to review one of these works then please respond as soon as possible to: [log in to unmask] Do not hit 'reply', or send to this list's address. A brief statement of interest and experience may aid in the selection process. Don't forget your postal address. Length/Deadline for review: 2-5,000 words, 1-2 months after receipt. Reviews are posted to the salon and published on the website. ************* Further details: 'Deleuze, Guattari, and the Philosophy of Expression', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. 24 no. 3, September 1997. Something, perhaps, is stirring in the state of theory. Over the last few years, the names Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have crescendoed in the class-rooms and conference halls, making them the latest in a continuing series of great French names to pivot English-speaking academic discourse. After a long incubation beneath Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault, they have surfaced. But has it sunk in that Deleuze has always unabashedly characterized his thought as a philosophy of expression? 'The world,' he has gone so far as to say, 'does not exist outside of its expressions'. Or that in his final publication Guattari summed up his life's work as advancing 'a new aesthetic paradigm'? This will take some processing. Expression, aesthetics ... perhaps ... but if we think fast maybe we can at least spare ourselves beauty. Velvet paintings are 'beautiful.' What do they have to do with art, or life? [The salon is looking for a reviewer to tease out the importance any of these essays may have for the analysis of Deleuze's philosophy of cinema and other images.] Warren Buckland, ed., _The Film Spectator_ (Amsterdam University Press: 1995). . . . . brings together for the first time in English the work of European film scholars whose aim is, in Christian Metz's famous phrase, 'to understand how film is understood'. The authors represented in this collection approach this aim through a unique combination of cognitive science, pragmatics, and semiotics. _The Film Spectator_ raises once again the most fundamental issues that have confronted film theory over the last thirty years, but which were never adequately answered -- including the role of narrative logic in the comprehension of film, the mental representation of filmic space, the communicative and cognitive bases for the spectator's construction of filmic meaning, the difference between fiction and documentary, the role of enunciation and self-reference in film and television texts, and the linguistic status of the point-of-view shot. Guy Debord, _Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London and New York: Verso, 1998). . . . Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly sliced through the doxa and mystification offered up by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord's _Comments_ convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism Gilles Deleuze, _Negotiations: 1972-1990_, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Including the interviews and articles 'Three Questions on Six Times Two', 'On the Movement-Image', 'On the Time-Image', 'Doubts About the Imaginary', and 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel'. Harvey Roy Greenberg, _Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). . . . begins with an overview of the history and methods of psychoanalytical film criticism. He next focuses upon character, motivation, and conflict in famous examples of detective, war, science fiction, horror, and cult cinema. He also addresses the enduring emotional appeal of these genres to spectators from one generation to the next. Greenberg then fuses psychoanalysis and cultural criticism. He probes a type of big, bad pictures -- 'the McMovie' -- that emerged in Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s, embracing nearly every genre, with particular focus on the hero's pathological narcissism in such films as _Rambo_ and _Top Gun_. Howard Pearce, _Human Shadows Bright as Glass: Drama as Speculation and Transformation_ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997). This book attempts a fresh approach to the dramatic experience. It begins with a consideration of Edmund Husserl's attempt to clarify our understanding of immediate experience and takes into account Martin Heidegger's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's movements from that phenomenology toward the individual's complex interactions and involvements in a world. [Ostensibly about theatre drama the job of any reviewer is to relate the book's ideas to the film experience.] Heide Schlupmann, Ein Detektiv des Kinos: Studien zu Siegfried Kracauers Filmtheorie (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Nexus 38, 1998). Die Moderne hat ihre Chance verpasst, im Zusammenbruch der metaphysischen Theorien ein Sinnesverhaltnis zur physischen Welt zu kultivieren und zu vergesellschaften. Katastropal verstellen die positiven Wissenschaften diese Chance. Sie verstellen noch das offentliche Bewusstsein davon, dass die Gesellschaft im Kino ein einmaliges Instrument besitzt, das Sinneverhaltnis zur Wely zu bilden. [The salon is just looking for a short synopsis and commentary in English.] ************* Film-Philosophy is an email discussion forum and website founded in November 1996. http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files Film-Philosophy has published reviews of Stanley Cavell's Contesting Tears, Joseph Anderson's The Reality of Illusion, Allan Casebier's Film and Phenomenology, Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror, Carl Plantinga's Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, Carroll's Theorizing the Moving Image, the Iris journal's special edition on Deleuze, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinens' Imagologies, William Rothman's Documentary Film Classics, Torben Grodal's Moving Pictures, Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beiken's The Films of Wim Wenders, Timothy Murray's Drama Trauma, Der Film bei Deleuze/le cinema selon Deleuze edited by Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell, William Rothman's The 'I' of the Camera, Amy Lawrence's The Films of Peter Greenaway, Richard Allen's Projecting Illusion, and Jean Louis Schefer's The Enigmatic Body. Currently under review are Andre Bazin's Bazin at Work, Gregory Currie's Image and Mind, the first three Film and Philosophy journal volumes, Heike Klippel's Gedaechtnis und Kino, Philosophy and Film edited by Cynthia Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg, Ian Jarvie's Philosophy of the Film, Murray Smith's Engaging Characters, Scott McQuire's Crossing the Digital Threshold, D. N. Rodowick's Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Sigrid Weigel's Body- and Image-Space, Film Theory and Philosophy edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, the Antithesis journal's special edition on Time and Memory, the journal Vertigo, Peter Bondanella's The Films of Roberto Rossellini, Scott MacDonald's Avant-Garde Film, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills, Patrick McGee's Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture, James Peterson's Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order, Jacques Derrida's Echographies de la television, Fredric Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic, the journal Pix, Paul Virilio's The Vision Machine, Jacques Aumont's The Image, Paul Willemen's Looks and Frictions, Brian Winston's Technologies of Seeing, Noel Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art, the journal Coil, Phil Powrie's French Cinema in the 1980s, the South Atlantic Quarterly journal's special edition on Deleuze, Gilberto Perez's The Material Ghost, Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology , Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) edited by Slavoj Zizek, Paul Virilio's Open Sky, Regis Debray's Media Manifestos, David Bordwell's Making Meaning, Aesthetics and Ethics edited by Jerrold Levinson, Ron Burnett's Cultures of Vision, Howard Caygill's Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, Celia Lury's Prosthetic Culture, Timothy Murray's Like a Film, Cathryn Vasseleu's Textures of Light, and Jean-Clet Martin's L'Image virtuelle. 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