The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory

Description

A unique survey of the new horizons of film and media theory.

The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory offers a unique and progressive survey of screen theory and how it can be applied to a range of moving-image texts and sociocultural contexts. Focusing on the “handbook” angle, the book includes only original essays from established authors in the field and new scholars on the cutting edge of helping screen theory evolve for the twenty-first-century vistas of new media, social shifts and geopolitical change. This method guarantees a strong foundation and clarity for the canon of film theory, while also situating it as part of a larger genealogy of art theories and critical thought, and reveals the relevance and utility of film theories and concepts to a wide array of expressive practices and specified arguments. The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory is at once inclusive, applicable and a chance for writers to innovate and really play with where they think the field is, can and should be heading.

List of Figures; Preface, Hunter Vaughan; Acknowledgments; Introduction Post- , Grand, Classical or “So- Called”: What Is, and Was, Film Theory?, Francesco Casetti; Part I What We Are; Chapter One The Brain’s Labor: On Marxism and the Movies, Pasi Väliaho; Chapter Two Racial Being, Aff ect and Media Cultures, Camilla Fojas; Chapter Three Thinking Sex, Doing Gender, Watching Film, Theresa L. Geller; Chapter Four “Complicated Negotiations”: Reception and Audience Studies into the Digital Age, Brendan Kredell; Chapter Five World Cinema and Its Worlds, James Tweedie; Chapter Six Screen Theory Beyond the Human: Toward an Ecomaterialism of the Moving Image, Hunter Vaughan; Chapter Seven “We Will Exchange Your Likeness and Recreate You in What You Will Not Know”: Transcultural Process Philosophy and the Moving Image, Laura U. Marks; Part II What Screen Culture Is; Chapter Eight Apparatus Theory, Plain and Simple, Tom Conley; Chapter Nine Properties of Film Authorship, Codruţa Morari; Chapter Ten “Deepest Ecstasy” Meets Cinema’s Social Subjects: Theorizing the Screen Star, Mary R. Desjardins; Chapter Eleven Rethinking Genre Memory: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Its Revision, Elisabeth Bronfen; Chapter Twelve Digital Technologies and the End(s) of Film Theory, Trond Lundemo; Chapter Thirteen How John the Baptist Kept His Head: My Life in Film Philosophy, William Rothman; Part III How We Understand Screen Texts; Chapter Fourteen The Expressive Sign: Cinesemiotics, Enunciation and Screen Art, Daniel Yacavone; Chapter Fifteen Narratology in Motion: Causality, Puzzles and Narrative Twists, Warren Buckland; Chapter Sixteen He(u)retical Film Theory: When Cognitivism Meets Theory, William Brown; Chapter Seventeen Philosophy Encounters the Moving Image: From Film Philosophy to Cinematic Thinking, Robert Sinnerbrink; Chapter Eighteen Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the Formalist/ Realist Divide, Nadine Boljkovac; Postface, Tom Conley; Notes on Contributors; Filmography; Index.

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Arts
• History of film
• Critical theory
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783088256
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory
The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory
Edited by Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2018 Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-823-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-823-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Preface
Hunter Vaughan
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Post-, Grand, Classical or “So-Called”: What Is, and Was, Film Theory?
Francesco Casetti
Part I WHAT WE ARE
Chapter One
The Brain’s Labor: On Marxism and the Movies
Pasi Väliaho
Chapter Two
Racial Being, Affect and Media Cultures
Camilla Fojas
Chapter Three
Thinking Sex, Doing Gender, Watching Film
Theresa L. Geller
Chapter Four
“Complicated Negotiations”: Reception and Audience Studies into the Digital Age
Brendan Kredell
Chapter Five
World Cinema and Its Worlds
James Tweedie
Chapter Six
Screen Theory Beyond the Human: Toward an Ecomaterialism of the Moving Image
Hunter Vaughan
Chapter Seven
“We Will Exchange Your Likeness and Recreate You in What You Will Not Know”: Transcultural Process Philosophy and the Moving Image
Laura U. Marks
Part II WHAT SCREEN CULTURE IS
Chapter Eight
Apparatus Theory, Plain and Simple
Tom Conley
Chapter Nine
Properties of Film Authorship
Codruţa Morari
Chapter Ten
“Deepest Ecstasy” Meets Cinema’s Social Subjects: Theorizing the Screen Star
Mary R. Desjardins
Chapter Eleven
Rethinking Genre Memory: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Its Revision
Elisabeth Bronfen
Chapter Twelve
Digital Technologies and the End(s) of Film Theory
Trond Lundemo
Chapter Thirteen
How John the Baptist Kept His Head: My Life in Film Philosophy
William Rothman
Part III HOW WE UNDERSTAND SCREEN TEXTS
Chapter Fourteen
The Expressive Sign: Cinesemiotics, Enunciation and Screen Art
Daniel Yacavone
Chapter Fifteen
Narratology in Motion: Causality, Puzzles and Narrative Twists
Warren Buckland
Chapter Sixteen
He(u)retical Film Theory: When Cognitivism Meets Theory
William Brown
Chapter Seventeen
Philosophy Encounters the Moving Image: From Film Philosophy to Cinematic Thinking
Robert Sinnerbrink
Chapter Eighteen
Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the Formalist/Realist Divide
Nadine Boljkovac
Postface
Tom Conley
Notes on Contributors
Filmography
Index
Figures
1.1 Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate cemetery
1.2 William Friese-Greene’s grave at Highgate cemetery
1.3 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory ( La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon , 1895)
1.4 Kinetoscope and phonograph parlor in San Franscisco, 1895
1.5 Publicity poster for Edison’s Vitascope, Metropolitan Print Company, c. 1896
1.6 Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria at the Cour des Capucines in 1797
1.7 L’Atalante
2.1 Rose and Chris
2.2 Rose’s family meet Chris
2.3 Georgina in Get Out
2.4 Chris’s frozen gaze in Get Out
5.1 Gomorrah
5.2 Gomorrah
5.3 Manufactured Landscapes
Preface
Welcome, readers, to The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory ! We cordially invite you to step inside, meander around and explore. Hopefully, as you open this collection, doors will open on both sides of the page, and we will enter into a conversation. We may not always agree, and we may not always even speak the same language, but we are all here because we (1) believe that critical thinking is important; (2) understand the sociocultural importance of screen media in the unfolding of the twenty-first century, and in the formation of the century that preceded it; and (3) are ready to explore new horizons and to carve new folds in the brain that meet the challenge of a world, of media apparatuses, and of social configurations that have changed radically since film theory was canonized some thirty years ago. As you will find central to the concerns of this book, from Francesco Casetti’s Introduction essay to Tom Conley’s Postface, we have entered into a highly mediated digital era that throws notions of the “filmic” and the “cinematic” largely into question, the traditional boundaries of medium specificity blurred by the convergent nature of this new wonderland of wireless signals, mobile screens and virtual windows. An era, simply put, of screens: screens in our town-squares and on our wrists, in our classrooms and on our dashboards, screens in outer space, underwater and in our pockets—a world of screens that problematizes the conventional notions both of the moving image and of the social function of cultural practice. These pages may not solve such debates, but we aim to equip readers to take part in them.
The contemporary film and media student emerges at a unique moment: the proliferation of digital technology is increasingly turning individuals into daily content providers and empowering global populations through communications networks, while also aiding the transnational flow of a borderless mainstream screen culture and, at the same time, prompting the emergence of local, small nation and counter-cinemas. Because of the heightened role that image culture plays in today’s individual lives, community activisms and global economies, and because new technologies such as smart phones have democratized the means of textual production, theory is needed more than ever to nurture our complex understanding—and use —of screen media and to challenge the horizons of our sociopolitical and philosophical engagement of the world.
We live in a cinematic—and increasingly post-cinematic—civilization, in which no one alive today was alive before the birth of moving images . Let us pause to really consider that. Our entire extant species has lived its entire life and will live its entire life in coexistence with a virtual universe that bends time and space and offers human beings a crystalline range of liminal screen experiences, from Nickelodeon theaters to online avatars. And, more than ever, these experiences and lives are linked by networks of fiber-optic cables and satellite signals, a wired planet whose messages and debates unfold in the form of push notifications, graphics interchange formats (GIFs) and echo chambers. In an age of drone strikes and smart thermostats, remote-operated fracking drills and camera-driven interstellar exploration—in a pluralistic screened world where transgender communities have televisual spokespersons and racial violence persists across multimedia outlets via the crowd-sourced content of smart-phone videos, we need more than ever to understand how our screens produce and communicate meaning.
Engaging equally with lofty concepts and popular discourses, The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory asks its contributors and readers to embrace and to be responsive to the activist potential of critical thinking, to bring ideas out of the ivory tower and to render them applicable, clear and—perhaps most of all—relevant. This is the primary goal of this book’s unique approach: abandoning the practice of anthologizing canonical essays, we want a diverse group of active scholars, representing a mixture of established and emerging voices in the field, to bring critical thinking and cultural studies into the present. While we genuinely hope the reader will pursue the primary writings of Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Laura Mulvey, Lev Manovich, bell hooks and others, and while the essays here will be freckled with references to and summaries of the names and works that have shaped our intellectual history, we believe these original icons are already readily available. In order to move beyond the types of anthology already on offer, we aim here to bridge intellectual histories with contemporary practices, so that each entry here explains the background and exemplifies the pertinence of specific theoretical fields, while also thinking innovatively about how these theories can adapt to the changing landscape of contemporary screen media, global politics and philosophical thinking.
Screen theory has been equally informed by the technological developments and aesthetic innovations of screen culture as by the social upheaval and geopolitical chaos of its times. As such, it is necessary to view it in both “diachronic” and “