Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphys…
How can people in the spotlight control their self-representations when the whole world seems to be watching? The question is familiar, but not new. Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations. They include the enormous wig that actor Colley Cibber don…
In Dying in Full Detail Jennifer Malkowski explores digital media's impact on one of documentary film's greatest taboos: the recording of death. Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and distribution of death footage, digital media often fail to live up to their promise to reveal the world in greater fidelity. Malkowski analyzes a wide range of death footage, from feat…
This volume proposes the viral as a means of understanding socially engaged and transmedial performance practices since the mid-20th century. It rethinks the Living Theatre’s Artaudian revolution via the lens of affect theory, brings attention to General Idea’s media-savvy performances of the 70s, explores Franco and Eva Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble, and surveys the dramaturgies and pol…
The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where th…
Examining the significance of women’s work in popular film genres, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers sheds light on women’s contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the b…
As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images - once the preserve of studios and agents - have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, posting and sharing texts significantly easier, and by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods a new mode of personality construction has …
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea …
The colonial experience of the early twentieth century shaped Korea’s culture and identity, leaving a troubling past that was subtly reconstructed in South Korean postcolonial cinema. Relating postcolonial discourses to a reading of Manchurian action films, kisaeng and gangster films, and revenge horror films, Parameters of Disavowal shows how filmmakers reworked, recontextualized, and erased…
For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the c…