With this lucid translation of Du litteraire au filmique, André Gaudreault's highly influential and original study of film narratology is now accessible to English-language audiences for the first time. Building a theory of narrative on sources as diverse as Plato, The Arabian Nights,and Proust, From Plato to Lumière challenges narratological orthodoxy by positing that all forms of narrative are mediated by an "underlying narrator" who exists between the author and narrative text. Offering illuminating insights, definitions, and formal distinctions, Gaudreault examines the practices of novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers and applies his theory to the early cinema of the Lumière brothers and more recent films. He also enhances our understanding of how narrative develops visually without language - monstration - by detailing how the evolution of the medium influenced narratives in cinema. From Plato to Lumière includes a translation of Paul Ricoeur's preface to the French-language edition as well as a new preface by Tom Gunning. It is a must-read for cinema and media students and scholars and an essential text on the study of narrative.

An important reexamination of early film history, translated from the French for the first time.

Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape. The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over cinema: the "digitalphobes" who lament the implosion of cinema and the "digitalphiles" who celebrate its new, vital incarnation. Throughout, they remind readers that cinema has never been a static medium but a series of processes and transformations powering a dynamic art. From their perspective, the digital revolution is the eighth major crisis in the history of motion pictures, with more disruptions to come. Brokering a peace among all sides, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the cultural practice of cinema over rigid claims on its identity, moving toward a common conception of cinema to better understand where it is headed next.

The essays in American Cinema 1890-1909 explore and define how the making of motion pictures flowered into an industry that would finally become the central entertainment institution of the world. Beginning with all the early types of pictures that moved, this volume tells the story of the invention and consolidation of the various processes that gave rise to what we now call "cinema."

Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion challenge the prognosis that cinema is dying, arguing that cinema has always been more an "evolving patchwork of federated cultural series" than a static form with a fixed identity. In a discussion ranging from early cinema, of which today's media landscape a century later is an eerie reflection, to opera films in local movie theatres to the "return of cinema's repressed" - animation, and now performance capture - The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems lays out a roadmap for negotiating the issues that will confront cinema in the years ahead as it increasingly mingles with other media. In the process the authors coin another neologism in their extensive repertoire, the "kinematic," or the shift from the medium cinema to a convergence of moving image media, one that will engender a major "turn" in study of the field. This expanded second edition includes a lengthy interview with the authors on the developments in their thinking since this volume was first published.

Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France demonstrates that memory and community interacted constantly in sixteenth-century France, producing conceptual frames that defined the conflicting groups to which individuals belonged, and from which they derived their identities. Focusing on the period’s continuous reformulations of the present as it was related to the past, these essays examine memory as one of the intellectual foundations of the late French Renaissance and its distinct communities.

The first comprehensive introduction in English to books, readers and reading in Byzantium and the wider medieval world surrounding it.