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July 2018, Week 4

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Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:23:45 +0100
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Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
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William Brown <[log in to unmask]>
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Dear All

Please forgive me for the self-promotion and the cross-posting, which
forgiveness hopefully is possible given that we all seem to be reduced to
such behaviours in these attention-seeking and attention-sucking days.

Here are details about a new book, Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making
and the Multitude, which recently got released by Bloomsbury as part of
their Thinking Cinema series, edited by Sarah Cooper and David
Martin-Jones. As follows:-

About Non-Cinema
Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude provides an
original film-philosophy through which to understand low budget digital
filmmaking from around the globe. It draws upon a wide range of western and
non-western philosophers, physicists, theorists of 'Third Cinema,' and
contemporary film theorists and film-philosophers in order to argue that
the future of cinema lies at the margins, in the extreme, the overlooked
and the under-funded – the sort that distributors, exhibitors and audiences
would not consider to be cinema at all, hence "non-cinema."

Analysing numerous films, William Brown argues that contemporary low-budget
digital cinema is also through its digital form a political cinema that
suggests that we are not detached observers of the world, but entangled
participants therewith. Non-Cinemaconstructs this argument by looking at
work by established filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami,
Jafar Panahi and Michael Winterbottom, as well as lesser known work from
places as diverse as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Africa.

Reviews
“Brown brilliantly introduces the concept of non-cinema as anti-thesis,
remainder and emergent condition of a "post-colonial" world dominated and
impoverished by the logistics of capital-cinema. Non-cinema investigates
zones of invisibility at the margins of spectacle, in the poor image, and
in the poor world, while also providing a powerful survey of global
(non-)cinema, its various attributes and its urgent commitments to socially
transformative modes of relation. The book is a significant theoretical
elaboration and critique of the world-media system, that also collects and
concentrates globally distributed, often liminal, instances of struggle,
inspiration and liberation.” –  Jonathan Beller, Professor and Director,
Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, USA

“Whether we understand it as 'acinema', 'paracinema', or 'post-cinema',
William Brown's extremely important text on all such non-cinemas is deeply
impressive: its breadth of knowledge, both theoretical and geo-cultural,
has clearly demonstrated Brown to be the best thinker of non-standard
cinemas working today.” –  John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film, Kingston
University, UK

“William Brown's Non-Cinema is a brilliant speculative history of cinema
acting out against itself, against every convention and institution of
film. This masterpiece unfolds everywhere else, forming the contours of a
cinema that is not one, but rather a series of interventions that
articulate the deep values that forge a cinema in spite itself, a total
cinema understood as the very limits of cinema, non-cinema.” –  Akira
Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Literature and Film, University of Southern
California, USA

“'Prompted by the digital explosion which allowed for the excluded to come
into the picture, William Brown took on the challenge of navigating through
and making sense of the multitude – that is, the images and sounds of those
who populate the outside of the narrow frame of capitalism. Truly global in
scope and erudition, Non-Cinema takes us on a revelatory journey through
the hidden audiovisual jewels from Afghanistan, Iran, China, the
Philippines, Uruguay, France, the UK, the US, culminating in Nigeria with
the ultimate non-cinematic production of Nollywood. Exemplary in its
intellectual ambition and analytical acumen, this is a must-read book by
one of today's most original audiovisual specialists.'” –  Lúcia Nagib,
Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: What is Non-cinema?

1. Digital Dreams in Afghanistan
2. The Iranian Digital Underground, Multitudinous Cinema and the Diegetic
Spectator
3. Digital Entanglement and the Blurring of Fiction and Documentary in China
4. Digital Darkness in the Philippines
5. Digital acinema from afrance
6. The Cruel, Monstrous Extreme of the Digital
7. A Certain Compatibility: The British Digital Wave
8. Non-cinema in the Heart of Cinema
9. Globalisation, Erasure, Poverty: Digital Non-Cinema in Uruguay
10. Cinema out of Control: These are Not Films
11. Farewell to Cinema; Hello to Africa

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Where you might want to consider buying this: https://www.bloomsbury.c
om/uk/non-cinema-9781501327261/.

As you will note, Bloomsbury are making the incredibly generous offer of a
£22.03 discount if you buy through their website, making the book descend
from a bargain £110.16 per copy to the snip of £88.13.

Meanwhile, if you take a leisurely cruise through the waters of the Amazon
website, then you will notice that there the book goes for the
bargain-basement prices of £76 for the Kindle edition and £80 for the
hardback.

(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Cinema-Digital-Film-making-Mul
titude-Thinking-ebook/dp/B07D9WSGLN/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=
1532419927&sr=8-1&keywords=brown+non-cinema)

The eagle-eyed among you will note, however, that the *used* copies on the
Amazon Marketplace start at £144.17.

That's right: this is a book that gets more expensive the more people read
it owing to the life-changing qualities of its contents.

So really now is the time to buy it, since otherwise this will be the
publishing equivalent of wishing you'd got involved in Bitcoin on the
ground level.

However, if for any reason you don't have that sort of dosh sloshing around
your slush fund, then perhaps this might be one for your libraries to buy,
such that you and those who still go to such institutions might all have a
chance to gander.

Even though I say so myself, I think that the book will be of interest to
scholars of various different hues. So I hope that news of its arrival is
not too much of a burden on the old inbox.

With best wishes to all

William Brown

--
Dr William Brown
Senior Lecturer in Film
Department of Media, Culture and Language
University of Roehampton
London  SW15 5SL
T: (020)8 392 3713
M: 07950 978 708
E1: [log in to unmask]
E2: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://wjrcbrown.wordpress.com/
Website: http://begstealborrowfilms.wordpress.com/

Author: Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013),
Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Forthcoming)
Co-author: Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New
Europe (2010)
Co-editor: Deleuze and Film (2012)
Co-editor: Special Issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal on
Avatar (2012)
Director: En Attendant Godard (2009), Afterimages (2010), Common Ground
(2012), China: A User's Manual (Films) (2012), Selfie (2014), Ur: The End
of Civilization in 90 Tableaux (2015), The New Hope (2015), Circle/Line
(2016), Letters to Ariadne (2016), St Mary Magdalen's Home Movies (2016),
Roehampton Guerrillas (2011-2016) (2017), The Benefit of Doubt
(post-production), #randomaccessmemory (post-production), Sculptures of
London (production), Vlado and William (production), This is Cinema
(pre-production).

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