Exploring gender, race, nation and narration, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives and specific socio-cultural identities in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the pol

A fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film.

Winner of the 2015 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. Examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema. Death and the Moving Image reveals the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation or narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Key Features. Examines the formal, psychological and political exchange between cinema and death Accessible 'before, during, after' structure: of death's presence as narrative promise, physical event and spectatorial reaction. Considers how filmmaking practice or visual medium affect the representation of death and its cultural significance

Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the “rulers of film.” Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios’ collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn’t reign supreme. Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command. Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills, Death of the Moguls is a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study closely explores emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing, with new readings of works by Agnès Varda, Pedro Almodóvar, Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Calle, and many others.

"This collection of essays by leading photographic and film theorists considers the changing relationship between the still and moving image in contemporary culture. The photograph has traditionally been seen as a quintessentially still image. Its ability to freeze and hold a moment in time has been the source of its peculiar fascination and the foundation of much of the theoretical discussion about it. New technological developments in digital media, however, have fundamentally altered the ways in which we think about photography, in particular forcing us to reconsider our assumptions about the still and the moving image and their relationships to differing conceptions of time. Amongst the topics addressed in these essays are: the work of artists who extend the still image in time through the use of video or narrative sequencing; the aesthetic and philosophical analyses of stasis; the place of the pose and tableau in contemporary photography and film; the iconography of photography in cinema; and the notion of the cinematic fragment and cultural memory."--BOOK JACKET.