Browse

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from The Tempest to The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (such as Cook and Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Hurricane and King Kong), tracing how islands have offered vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the poetic energies of words and images and the material energies of the physical world. Its chapters focus on America’s island gateways (e.g. Roanoke and Ellis Island), tropical islands (e.g. Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the Pacific Northwest, and mutable islands (e.g. the volcanic and coral islands in Wells’s fiction). The book argues that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual challenges to spatial experience, and that these challenges were negotiated via the poetic engagement with islands. Postcolonial theorists maintain that islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story: the experience of islands in the age of discovery also went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of global space. Rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space suggests that the modern encounters with islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a diversification of spatial experience, and explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by non-fictional and fictional responses.

The Age of New Waves examines the origins of the concept of the “new wave” in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in world cinema over the past three decades. The book suggests that youth, cities, and the construction of a global market have been the catalysts for the cinematic new waves of the past half century. It begins by describing the enthusiastic engagement between French nouvelle vague filmmakers and American culture during the modernization of France after World War II. It then charts the growing and ultimately explosive disenchantment with the aftermath of that massive social, economic, and spatial transformation in the late 1960s. Subsequent chapters focus on films from Taiwan and mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s, and they link the propagation of new waves on the international film festival circuit to the “economic miracles” and consumer revolutions accompanying the process of globalization. While it travels from France to East Asia, the book follows the transnational movement of a particular model of cinema organized around mise en scène—or the interaction of bodies, objects, and spaces within the frame—rather than montage or narrative. The “master shot” style has become a key strategy for representing the changing relationship between people and the material world during the rise of a global market. The final chapter considers the interchange between two of the most global phenomena in recent film history—the transnational art cinema and Hollywood—and it searches for traces of an American new wave.

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a “noir tradition” that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present. All of noir’s evolutions have taken place as responses to consumer culture; in the postwar era this consumer culture has become conflated with American citizenship, and the noir tradition presents itself as an “authentic” alternative to this republic of consumption. In order to see how noir and its descendants stage the confrontation between consumer culture and authenticity, my analysis is concentrated on how the texts that I write about represent various kinds of American commercial spaces. This analysis has a three-part structure, organized around the three key moments in the development of the noir tradition that I identify: (1) the postwar moment, as represented by classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction; (2) the sixties era, during which noir film and fiction are transformed and take the new form of the conspiracy narrative; and (3) the post-eighties period of dominant postmodernism, in which noir themes and aesthetics are revived, with a difference, to facilitate ways of responding to the phenomenon of global capitalism.

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”

The best way to understand Bazin’s film theory is to pay attention to art, science, and religion, since spectatorship depends on perception, cognition, and hallucination. By arguing that this dissident Catholic’s worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that cinema recapitulates the history of evolution and technology inside our consciousness, so that we may better understand how we overlap with, but also differ from, animals, plants, objects, and machines. Whereas in “Art,” the author explains the difference between painting as a static object and the moving image as an event unfolding in time, in “Science,” she discusses Bazin’s dislike of classical geometry and Platonic algebra, his fascination with biology and modern calculus to underline his holistic Darwinism, and his anti-Euclidean mathematics of motion and contingency. Comparable to a religious practice, Bazin’s cinema is the only collective ritual of the twentieth century capable of fostering an emotional community by calling on critical self-interrogation and ethical awareness. Especially keen on Italian neorealism, Bazin argues that this sensibility thrives on beings and things displacing themselves in such a way as to turn the Other into a Neighbor. Bazin’s film theory acknowledges the equalizing impact of the camera lens, which is analogous to, but also different from, the human eye. In the cinema, two different kinds of eyes coexist: one is mechanical and objective, the other is human and subjective. By refusing to reshape the world according to an a priori thesis, Bazin’s idea of an anti-anthropocentric cinema seeks surprise, dialogue, risk, and experiment.

Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Anecdotes are ecocritical because they focus on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. Bringing ecological criticism to bear on case studies of popular culture in the twenty-first century, Anecdotal Evidence argues that the humanities have a vital role to play in rethinking politics today. Treating contemporary Hollywood movies, streaming video media, and mass image databases as anecdotes about waste, debt, and obligation reveals the deep intertwining of history and ecology in culture. An original take on Anthropocene anxieties and technological paranoia, the book proposes that the digital humanities still need the traditional skills of close reading to understand our contemporary condition. Only because the environment has a history is it possible to intervene environmentally. Because we continually misrecognise the historical production of environments, the first task of ecocritique is to bring our formative concept of ecology into crisis. Its final task will be to achieve the good life for everything connected by the historical implication of humans in ecology, and ecology in humans. No politics can be undertaken in our times except through media: ecocritical humanities have a key role in rethinking ecopolitics in the twenty-first century.

Corporate consulting, a one-time seemingly marvelous mixture of bare-knuckle rationalization, esoterica, and visionary futurism, is invariably deployed when business structures threaten to lose their equilibrium. What it actually means to be consulted, the part played by media in consulting, and how the branch of corporate consulting became a system of knowledge with such a socially important role is the object of this book. For the first time, it explores the ways in which the latest media technology, avant-garde aesthetics, economic pressures, and holistic philosophy together constituted the form of consulting dominant today, and which consequences arise from this. Thus it follows the work of early corporate consultants like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and H. L. Gantt, while analyzing and describing their visual consulting models. The book develops a new, innovative, interdisciplinary approach, situated between media and business history, media archeology, and social theory, and thereby charts the genesis of modern consulting knowledge. It reveals that corporate consulting must be conceptualized in close relation to the visual culture that prevailed during this time, one which drew from nineteenth-century visualization methods and, more particularly, the new medium of film. Consulting is a cultural technique that is markedly characterized by media processes, in which the boundaries of economic logic and legitimacy emerge, and which, at the same time, considerably shapes and stabilizes this modus operandi up to the present day.

Before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded the movies of the 1950s, there was already a significant body of animated science fiction, produced by such studios as Disney, the Fleischers, and Terrytoons. That work has largely been overlooked or forgotten, despite the fact that the same pre-World War II era that produced this group of short films also saw the more prominent development and flourishing of SF as a literary genre. This book surveys that neglected body of work to show how it helped contribute to the burgeoning SF imagination that was manifested in pulp literature, serials, feature films, and even World’s Fairs of the era. It argues that prewar cartoons helped to create a familiarity with the scientific and technological developments that were spurring that SF imagination and build an audience for this new genre. Demonstrating the same modernist spirit as SF literature and feature films, these cartoons adopted many of the genre’s most important motifs (rockets and space travel, robots, alien worlds and their inhabitants, and fantastic inventions and inventors), offered comic visions of the era’s growing fascination with science and technology, and framed that matter in a nonthreatening fashion. Popular animation thereby not only added another dimension to the SF imagination, but also helped prepare postwar audiences to embrace SF’s vision of the future and of inevitable change.

This volume of essays focuses on the meanings of the spirited and its navigation in the diverse, dynamic, and polarized creative environment of the 21^st century. The animation medium and its related subjects including fine art, comics, children literature, folklore, religion, and philosophy lead inter-disciplinary discussions, ranging from theory to practice, within the framework of an ever-changing media landscape and social-cultural-political environment. Working on different continents and coming from varying cultural backgrounds, the contributors are like-minded scholars, artists, curators, and educators demonstrating the insights of the spirited and how the spirited-oriented sub-themes, journeys and transformations are exemplified, examined, and interpreted in the context of visual representations. The publication also aims to appeal to a broader reading public interested in the ever expanding dimensions of mental health, culture, and related expressions of human living and interactions. In 2017, the theme of World Health Day (April 7) was mental health, and the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the year-long campaign slogan as “let’s talk”. As humans, getting back in touch with our spirited and spiritual sides is a craving many are unable to express or voice. The essays discussed in this collection speak to, and provoke a desired connection with something more meaningful beyond our material world. While the book recognizes and acknowledges the particularities of the spirited across cultures, it also highlights its universality, demonstrating how it is being studied, researched, comprehended, expressed, and consumed in various parts of the world in both similar and at once unique ways.

This book is about one of the most famous and least understood authors of the Latin Middle Ages. We know him by the pseudonym of Archpoet. Setting his world and his works in their historical contexts, the book argues that they provide insight into a brilliant counter-culture of medieval Germany. Its subtlest exponent did not indulge in literary play but refashioned the political, social, and religious roles available to a twelfth-century thinker in order to create, for himself and his patron, an identity alternative to the norms of clerical conformity prevalent elsewhere in Europe. At a time when Germans were being decried as backward barbarians, he produced a manifesto of intellectual heterodoxy which wittily challenged the truth-claims made by humourless moralists. The Archpoet and Medieval Culture reconsiders the categories in which the literature of the Middle Ages is interpreted and suggests a less literal mode of reading the sources to historians.

Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of a “pure cinema” has continued to fascinate and perplex film audiences, critics, and theorists alike. The concept first emerged loosely in the 1920s, as European avant-garde artists and intellectuals grappled with the essence of the moving image as an aesthetic form. But what, precisely, was pure cinema as an artistic philosophy and style? How did it evolve within Hitchcock’s body of work, and how was a pure cinema artistic style then developed by the filmmakers who came after Hitchcock, such as Dario Argento and Brian De Palma? The Art of Pure Cinema connects film history and philosophies of image and sound to better understand the legacy of this aesthetic tradition.

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or “White Negroes,” who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. This book claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. The book analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past failures to establish cross-racial empathy, the book focuses on examples that show avenues for future progress and change. Its study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how engagement with African American culture and pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a book that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.

The first comprehensive inquiry into the origin and growth of regional language cinema in India, this book traces the development of Kannada cinema from the 1940s to the new millennium. Focusing on the role regional language cinema plays, the book examines the conflict between the ‘region’ and the ‘nation’ in the regional consciousness. It explores how its origin in a princely state under indirect British rule had an impact on the shaping of Kannada cinema, and inquiries into the effect of the linguistic reorganization of the states in the 1950s upon regional identity. Exploring the influence of national developments—from the ascendancy of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s to economic liberalization in the 1990s—on regional identity, the book provides first-time assessments of the Kannada star Rajkumar as a regional icon and the changing meaning of Bangalore city to the Kannada-speaking public.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages, the book also explores the very different ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. The book forces the vast visual archives generated within the two greatest Nations of the Atlantic slave Diaspora to talk to each other, historically, creatively, and emotionally, for the first time. Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects — including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera — the book celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Much of this text is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden and neglected treasury of visual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance. There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focussed on Angelo Agostini the ‘Brazilian Daumier’), and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, lead by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials is revealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art.

This book examines the phenomenon of ‘yoof’ television programmes such as Network 7, The Word, The Big Breakfast, Snub TV, and Gamesmaster. Between 1987 and 1995 these and other related programmes formed part of a high-profile genre that in terms of both the personnel involved and their visual style continue to be influential in British television today. Examining these programmes the author reflects on the way in which the contemporary youth audience – Generation X – were being addressed. The author identifies an ambivalent viewing sensibility – ‘cynicism and enchantment’ – which encapsulates the attitude expressed by both the programmes and the audience. The distinctive aspect of the book is the way in which the author concentrates on the spatial and visual aspects of television. In particular her concern is to re-evaluate television as a specific experience, and one which has a central importance in young people's formation of identity and their sense of being in the world. Her central thesis also suggests that while television must necessarily be related to other visual media, it should be understood as having distinct aesthetic and phenomenological qualities of its own.

Broadway in the Box shines a television-centric light on the cross-industry presence of a seminal American art form. Over seven chapters, it works to unearth, explore, and analyze pockets of over seventy years of television programming that have embraced, nodded toward, and satirized the American musical in its various forms. This concentrated exploration of the genre across American television allows for an explication of America’s shifting and at times wavering feelings toward the musical, its songs, and its stars. Further, examining these texts alongside constantly changing and at times intersecting entertainment industries uncovers forms of symbiosis and synergy that linked the cultural and economic futures of the musical across platforms. In the end, Mitzi Gaynor titillating America in a revealing and bejeweled Bob Mackie dress was not just the seventies being the seventies, but a single event reflecting a larger confluence of Broadway, film, Vegas, ratings, genre, and programming trends within a specific television model. Perhaps in a style similar to various Broadway and film retrospectives, Broadway in the Box takes individual events and brings them together to craft a larger commentary on American entertainments, economics, and industries. Broadway has always been in the box; someone just needed to plug it in to see what was on.

‘On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents.’ As Henry James surveys London in 1888, he sums up what had fascinated urban observers for a century: the random and even accidental development of this unprecedented form of human settlement, the modern metropolis. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis takes James at his word, arguing that accident was both a powerful metaphor and material context through which the Victorians arrested the paradoxes of metropolitan modernity and reconfigured understandings of form and change. This book shows how the material conditions of urban accidents offer new and compelling modes of analysis for intellectual and literary history. Through extensive archival study and interdisciplinary analysis of urban-industrial accidents, risk management, and civic improvements, By Accident or Design reclaims the metropolis as ground zero for some of the most important thinking about causation in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates the centrality of interdependent concepts of design and accident not only to metropolitan discourse, but also to current critical discourse about the formal and circulatory dynamics of Victorian metropolitan writing. Thus, this book offers a new vocabulary for the dialectics of the modern city and the signature forms of writing about it, including the newspaper, the illustrated periodical, the industrial novel, and urban broadsheets.

Though he was known for saying, “Actors are cattle,” Alfred Hitchcock had highly specific ideas about film acting, which he saw in terms of contrast and counterpoint. Hitchcock was a theorist of acting, which he proved in some of his lesser-known 1930s interviews, and he has not been given his due as a director of actors. He felt that the camera was duplicitous and that it could be made to lie, and so he loved his actors to look one way and to be another, or to do one thing and suggest another. The best Hitchcock actor was one, the Master said, who could “do nothing well,” to which he always added that this was actually difficult to do. This book will analyze actors in Hitchcock films, exploring what acting for Hitchcock entailed and what acting is and can be in the cinema.

This book discusses the impact of mechanical recording on modern art and literature. Recording media, including photography and film, seemed to offer entirely new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, with both the usefulness of writing and the immediacy of sight. In particular, this book traces some of the more utopian projects to arise from this hope, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the transatlantic avant garde is traced through three stages, from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, experienced with particular bitterness by the editors of the early film magazine, Close Up. Subsequent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls spectroscopic gayety — the enjoyable disorientation of the senses by machine perception — turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction, even that commonly celebrated for its hard-nosed realism. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its inevitable limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway.