Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones' song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer.

Post-cinema designates a new way of making films. It is time to ask whether this novelty is complete or relative and to evaluate to what extent this novation represents a unitary current or multiple ways. The book proposes to integrate the post-cinema question within the post-art question in order to study the new way of making filmic images in new conditions more or less remote from the dispositif of the theater and in closer relationship with contemporary art. The issue will be considered at three levels: the impression of post-art on "regular" films; the "relocation" (Cassetti) of the same films that can be seen using devices of all kinds, in conditions more or less remote from the dispositif of the theater; parallel to the integration of contemporary art in "regular" cinema, the integration of cinema into contemporary art in all kinds of forms of creation and exhibition.

During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America's other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply "maintaining its empty frame." Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films--including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men--reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself. Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact "ghost-Westerns," haunted by the earlier form's devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values.

This book approaches the topic of the state of post-cinema from a new direction. The authors explore how film has left the cinema as a fixed site and institution and now appears ubiquitous - in the museum and on the street, on planes and cars and new digital communication platforms of various kinds. The authors investigate how film has become more than cinema, no longer a medium that is based on the photochemical recording and replay of movement. Most often, the state of post-cinema is conceptualized from the "high end" of the most advanced technology; discussions focus on performance capture and digital 3-D, 4-K projection and industrial light & magic. Here, the authors' approach is focused on the "low-end" circulation of filmic images. This includes informal networks of exchange and transaction, such as p2p-networks, video platforms and so called “piracy” with a special focus on the Middle East and North Africa, where political and social transformations make new forms of circulation and presentation particularly visible.

One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.

This work presents a timely theoretical intervention in the analysis of contemporary film language. It has a truly international scope, featuring films and filmmakers from around the world.