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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.

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

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.

Chapter 5: reading one of Michael Haneke’s most infamous long takes so as to show that not all long takes square with the aesthetics of the wondrous as discussed in this book; Haneke’s late modernist strategies of shaming spectators is seen as the mere flipside of what the logic of 24-7 screen interactivity demands from us; asking us to be ever alert, Haneke’s project exemplifies what I call anti-wonder.

Chapter 4: the focus of this chapter is on the video installtions of artists Tacita Dean, Teressa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, and IñigoManglano-Ovalle; discusses various concepts of roaming spectatorship only to show that the work under discussion succeeds quite well to hold the viewer’s attention, redefine the long take as a perceptual rather than representational logic, and in so doing clear perceptual ground for the possibility of wonder