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The introduction to Part II discusses how knowledge of the brain’s processing of information provides crucial insight into central phenomena in visual aesthetics, especially in film aesthetics, and provides a general theory of film aesthetics. Central is the description of what the author calls the PECMA flow, an abbreviation for perception, emotion, cognition, and motor action, which describes the normal flow of information in real life and when watching film. The chapter analyzes how different types of film input may focus the film experience on different steps/brain regions: abstract film is focused on visual cortex processes, lyrical films on processes in the temporal and parietal cortices, and narrative films on frontal parts of the brain. The chapter analyses how and why these different foci provide different aesthetic experiences. The chapter also discusses how cultural and individual factors may influence and modify the innate biological factors.

This chapter charts the topography of the British film industry in the 1920s, when Anthony Asquith began his film career. Asquith entered the film industry in the mid-1920s, towards the end of the troubled silent period when the production industry in Britain was in decline in the face of competition from the American film. The industry struggled to find a position in the market and seemed to many on the brink of extinction. The 1928 Cinematograph Films Act effectively laid the foundations for a British production industry by, among other provisions, requiring exhibitors to screen a number of British films as part of their annual schedules. It was also a period marked by ‘a lively engagement with issues of film criticism and aesthetics’, which was stimulated in part by the new adventurous films from Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, and the Soviet Union. Tell England (1931), the much-delayed project about the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War, was to be Asquith's first sound film proper, though, as with Shooting Stars, he was to work in collaboration with another experienced figure. British Instructional had proved to be a congenial context for the start of a career in film making; the next phase of Asquith's career was to prove somewhat more problematic.

Taking up the discussion of current aesthetic theories and political philosophy, the chapter proposes an approach in which film as a poetic practice can be related to the question of (re)configuring political communities, whereby reality is tested by the poetic and political medium of audiovisual images. The chapter draws on Rorty's pragmatism and Rancière's poetics to extend their terms into a more Deleuzean schema that stresses the audiovisual modalities of cinematic experience. The relationship between cinema and politics is hereby explored as a respective historical figuration connected to and/or diverging from the utopia of art. Whether the poetological formations mentioned emphasize the mobilization of a new, collective subjectivity, or the crisis of a sense of commonality, they have a common denominator in the idea of aesthetics, articulating the possibility of politics as an insistent problem.

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.

This chapter considers Guy Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade, 1952). Hurlements is a sound film without images: when someone speaks, the screen is white and filled with light; when no one speaks, the screen remains dark. Of its total running time—seventy-five minutes—only twenty minutes contain light and speech. Hurlements's original script demonstrates its indebtedness to a Lettrist film aesthetic. The mixing of original shots with pre-existing footage, as well as the painted filmstrip and sequences of pure color, explicitly recall the visual aspects of Isou's and Lemaître's films. The film's sound track traces a poetic of refusal from the Dadaists to the Surrealists and was interspersed with Lettrist sounds.

This chapter seeks to further determine Tarantino’s place in the history of film aesthetics, and his relationship to classical, contemporary and art cinema. It analyzes how the films relate to the extrinsic norms of the film genres they rework, how they produce their own intrinsic norms and how they ultimately play with the two. It foregrounds the various functions of these devices, that can be dramatic, narrative and/or metafictional. It progresses from a general overview of the Tarantino style by focusing on the body of his work, before studying a certain number of signature devices, and finally some of the specific color schemes and devices utilized in each film.

The Killer is a salient example of cross-cultural influence in Hong Kong filmmaking. This is true in generic, thematic, and stylistic or structural terms. The film provides clear glimpses of the join between Western and Asian cultures in its marriage of the hitman/wuxia form; of the Western and Asian chivalric traditions; of Western cinematic technique and Chinese art and film aesthetics; and of specific influence from Western and Asian models. Because the film is self-consciously “artistic”, it is an enlightening exhibit in the study of the fusion of Western and Asian film cultures. One of the most important points of contact to be found in the film is the widely known stylistic feature of film noir. Woo's techniques like the jump cutting and the “edited zoom”are integrated into the theme and context of the narrative and serves as strong punctuation.

As the first chapter of this book demonstrates, moviegoers mainly knew Geraldine Chaplin in the 1960s as the daughter of cinema’s most famous silent clown. Nevertheless, the expansive, transnational character of her career is already in evidence in the international assortment of films she made during that decade (in Italy, Britain, and France.). The transnational quality of her persona is also important to an understanding to the work discussed in this chapter, the films she made with Spanish auteur Carlos Saura between 1967 and 1979. In these films with Saura, who was also Chaplin’s partner during this period, Chaplin creatively intervenes in the politics and cinema of Spain during the final years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose repressive cruelties are dealt with both explicitly and implicitly in Saura’s films. Chaplin’s performances in Saura’s films, the chapter argues, creatively intervene in traditional understandings of womanhood in Franco’s Spain, all the while demonstrating a fervent commitment to use performance as a vehicle for liberation.

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.

Chapter 1: traces the history and theory of the long take in twentieth-century art cinema to make a case who and why twenty-first century moving image practice differs from the past and its concepts; shows how contemporary long take practice absorbs the recalibrates the dual legacies of expanded cinema and art cinema of the 1960s, and how it asks to rethink our concept of art cinema today, and why its study neither belongs to film scholars nor art critics alone today

In many of her American films, Geraldine Chaplin is figured in self-reflexive stories about stardom and self-image, particularly in the films directed by Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph in the 1970s and 1980s: Altman’s Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and A Wedding (1978); and Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. (1976), Remember My Name (1978), and The Moderns (1988). In these films, as discussed in this chapter, Chaplin develops a distinctive presence, tapping into her already established persona from the 1960s but in now frequently ironic and self-reflexive ways. Perhaps the best example of this intriguing development in her persona is Chaplin’s role as Opal in Altman’s Nashville, its massive ensemble cast suggestive of a kind of performative circus. Opal, this chapter argues, is a thoroughly ironic variation of the kind of privileged character Chaplin played in some of her 1960s films.

In the biopic Chaplin (1992), Geraldine Chaplin plays her own grandmother. This is the role that, in owing perhaps to the novelty of a film star playing her own relation, is perhaps the most widely seen of Geraldine Chaplin’s performances. And it reminds us that like her father, Geraldine, although perhaps mostly remembered by film enthusiasts for her work in films by Carlos Saura, Jacques Rivette, and Robert Altman, has spent much of her career negotiating the rather less sympathetic strictures of the commercial film industry. Where much of the book up to this point focuses on Geraldine Chaplin’s presence in various national and transnational art cinemas, this final chapter deepens our sense of her screen persona by looking at several of her most important films made outside of the context of the earlier chapters. Using the motif of the close-up as a point of departure, the film analyses Chaplin’s contemporary performances for numerous directors, including Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Birkin, Guy Maddin, Richard Lester, and more.

A genre of films about Nigerians living overseas has been produced through collaborations between the Nollywood industry and African immigrant communities in Europe, North America, Brazil, China, and elsewhere. The point of view ranges from that of settled expatriates to one grounded at home in Nigeria. An extension of Nollywood film culture, the genre has a typical setting, story arc, moral and psychological themes, and formal features. Under the harsh conditions of undocumented immigration, the protagonists must make contact with an African expatriate community, which normally becomes their principle horizon. Often they are forced into drug dealing or prostitution. Betrayal and the question of what one is willing to do for money are common themes. The genre explores opposing sides of the national character as Nigerians conceive of it, in both harrowing and comic versions.

This chapter, written by Nico Baumbach, focuses on the Lumières’ film Le Repas de Bébé (Baby’s Meal); taking as its starting point Georges Méliès’s observation that it was through this film that he first registered the potential of cinema. It is not the spectacular that Méliès notices, but the incidental detail of moving leaves in the background of the film. Baumbach homes in on this incidental detail to explore the significance it held for filmmakers, including D. W. Griffith. Baumbach addresses film’s power to construct palpable, seemingly concrete visual phenomena, though here he examines the transitory aesthetics of the ‘wind in the trees’. Baumbach enriches the interest in what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault called the ‘cinema of attractions’ by suggesting, via detours into Kant, Benjamin, German Romantic poetry, and Impressionist painting, that the inscription of the incidental could often be as powerful as the spectacular.

Introduction: makes a case for the importance to study the long take today as something that probes our sense of time across different moving image platforms; develops the category of wonder—first time seeing that appeals to our curiosity—as a central category of the book; presents the contemporary long take as a medium to challenge the attentional economy of today’s agitated screen cultures; argues against associating the long take with slow cinema or contemporary cinephelia.

Chapter 3: discussion of the long-take work of Tsai Ming-liang and BelaTarr, the first using relative static, the latter intricately moving camera setups; arguing against schoalrs who see their work as nostalgic, apocalyptic, and deeply cinephilic, the chapter explores the extent to which long takes her function as conduits of sensory self-experimentation and interpretative deferral, at once pulling the viewer into and pushing him out of the image; and how they reckon with viewers deeply accustomed to mutli-screen uses and mobile forms of spectatorship.