Unbecoming Cinema constitutes a welcome addition to texts that provide a film-philosophical perspective on films that otherwise take on and involve difficult subject matter, including in this case suicide, autistic worldviews, hallucinatory aesthetics and vomit-gore. The book in effect argues successfully and intelligently that even though hard to watch, many of these films can provide for view…
Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas such as curators, festival programme directors or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, …
Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century, peaking in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though ‘going to the pictures’ remained a popular pastime, the transition to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the 1950s increased affluence, the growth of television ownership and the diversification of leisure le…
This book brings together essays by an international group of scholars and artists, focusing on live performance inspired by living in exile, or created by exiled artists. Bringing together a range of perspectives to examine the full impact of political, socio-economic or psychological experiences of exile, Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies presents an inclusive mix of established and emerging v…
The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960-2000 combines digital cartography with close readings of representative films to write a history of twentieth century Hollywood narrative cinema at the intersection of the geographies of narrative location, production, consumption and taste in the post-classical era, before the rise of digital cinema. This text reorients and redraws the boundarie…
Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well a…
This collection is the first to offer a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue, a ten-film cycle of modern tales that touch on the ethical dilemmas of the Ten Commandments. The cycle's deft handling of moral ambiguity and inventive technique established Kieslowski as a major international director. Kieslowski once said, Both the deep believer and the habitual s…
The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. Focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America, "Lesbians on Television" maps the contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media and, from this, extracts a figure of the new 'lesbian normal' that both help…
Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge…
Since the late 1980s visibility has become a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. It also brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, and a hotly contested debate unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of visual culture, whose impact can still be felt today. In this first comparative study Susanne von Falkenhausen reveals th…