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We hope you find the following titles of interest.
Surveillance Cinema
Catherine Zimmer
"Surveillance Cinema presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of cinema studies in its reconceptualization of the centrality of surveillance to film narratives, subject formations, and temporalities. Smartly pushing beyond the critical models that have long been associated with surveillance in and outside of cinema, Zimmer makes a persuasive case for examining surveillance within historical and political contexts. An excellent book, both far-reaching and convincing in its claims, Surveillance Cinema is sure to become one of the central works in the emerging field of surveillance studies."-Aviva Briefel, co-editor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror
In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema.
Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.
New York University Press
April 2015 288pp 9781479836673 Paperback £18.99 now only £15.19* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order.
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/surveillance-cinema
French Cinema-A Critical Filmography
Volume 1, 1929-1939
Colin Crisp
This invaluable resource by one of the world's leading experts in French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th century and its place and function in French society. Each filmography includes 101 films listed chronologically (Volume 1: 1929-1939 and Volume 2: 1940-1958) and provides accessible points of entry into the remarkable world of 20th-century French cinema. All entries contain a list of cast members and characters, production details, an overview of the film's cultural and historical significance, and a critical summary of the film's plot and narrative structure. Each volume includes an appendix listing rewards earned and an extensive reference list for further reading and research. A third volume, covering the period 1958-1974, is forthcoming.
Colin Crisp is a leading scholar in French film history and author of The Classic French Cinema, 1930-1960 (IUP, 1993) and Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929-1939 (IUP, 2002).
Indiana University Press
June 2015 342pp 9780253016966 Paperback £23.99 now only £19.19* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/french-cinema-a-critical-filmography
Orienting Hollywood
A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay
Nitin Govil
"Impressively researched and astutely argued, Orienting Hollywood will no doubt change the way we think about and research transnationalism in film and media. Govil brilliantly integrates notions of aspirational practice, affective labor, contact tropes, industrial mirroring, and cultural echoing in a compelling and original analysis. Orienting Hollywood stands as an exemplary model of exactly the kind of integration between 'cultural' and 'political economic' research that many have called for, but few have realized. This book will be widely recognized and embraced as a key, innovative text in our field."-John T. Caldwell,author of Production Culture
With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India's transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.
Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.
New York University Press
March 2015 272pp 9780814789346 Paperback £18.99 now only £15.19* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order.
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/orienting-hollywood
Orphans of the East
Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject
Constantin Parvulescu
"A stunning, brilliant, and very rich book!" -Robert A. Rosenstone, author of History of Film/Film on History
"This groundbreaking study figures the orphan as a key cinematic trope for interrogating socialist representations in feature films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland. The author's comparative, transnational perspective in chapters devoted to close textual analyses of each narrative demonstrates the value of reading film as a primary source for understanding the relationships among state power, intergenerational trauma, and revolutionary subjectivity. Parvulescu's highly original portrayal of a landscape of parentless children evokes the trauma of war and the specificity of the socialist experiment in the former Eastern Bloc." -Catherine Portuges, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid or the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under Soviet rule. By exploring films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, Parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-World War II subject and the "new man" of Soviet-style communism. In these films, the orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent critic of the system's shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state.
Constantin Parvulescu is Senior Lecturer at West University of Timisoara, Romania. He is editor (with Robert A. Rosenstone) of A Companion to the Historical Film.
Indiana University Press
June 2015 198pp 16 b&w illus. 9780253016850 Paperback £18.99 now only £15.19* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order.
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/orphans-of-the-east
African Appropriations
Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media
Matthias Krings
"Matthias Krings has brilliantly fused together vignettes of contemporary African visual mediascapes that cause us to revise our perceptions of eddies and translocations of transnational mediated popular culture to Africa and within Africa." -Adballa Uba Adamu, Bayero University, Kano
"An original, stimulating, and convincing discussion of mimetic behaviors in the fields of cultural production and artistic expression." -Peter Probst, Tufts University
Why would a Hollywood film become a Nigerian video remake, a Tanzanian comic book, or a Congolese music video? Matthias Krings explores the myriad ways Africans respond to the relentless onslaught of global culture. He seeks out places where they have adapted pervasive cultural forms to their own purposes as photo novels, comic books, songs, posters, and even scam letters. These African appropriations reveal the broad scope of cultural mediation that is characteristic of our hyperlinked age. Krings argues that there is no longer an "original" or "faithful copy," but only endless transformations that thrive in the fertile ground of African popular culture.
Matthias Krings is Professor of Anthropology and African Popular Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He is editor (with Onookome Okome) of Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry (IUP, 2013).
Indiana University Press
July 2015 328pp 33 b&w illus. 9780253016294 Paperback £20.99 now only £16.79* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order.
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/african-appropriations
Cultural Techniques
Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real
Bernhard Siegert
Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
"An excellent collection of essays from one of the most widely known and respected scholars of media, media theory, and cultural techniques working in Germany. The scholarship is erudite, sophisticated, and impressively wide-ranging."-Michael Wutz, Weber State University
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium's individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as "in-betweens," shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l'oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.
Bernhard Siegert is Gerd Bucerius Professsor of the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus Universitat Weimar and Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy at Weimar. Together with Friedrich Kittler, Norbert Bolz, and Wolfgang Coy, he is one of the pioneers of German media theory. He is the author of Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Fordham University Press
May 2015 288pp 9780823263769 Paperback £18.99 now only £15.19* when you quote CSF715FILM when you order.
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/cultural-techniques
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