Dominant in mid-century, the auteur theory of cinema elevated the director of a film to a position of artistic eminence. The theory was eroded by theoretical attacks and by the rise of big-budget computer-driven action films. This chapter explores the further decline in the auteur theory wrought by the contemporary rise of the television mini-series. Various twenty-first-century mini-series have been critically acclaimed, but in most cases, these mini-series have multiple directors. There remains an aesthetic problem: (...) can there be an integrated work of art when there is no integrating artist? (shrink)

How do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean (...) Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cáel Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The figure of the auteur continues to haunt the study of film, resisting both the poststructuralist charges that pointed to its absence and the histories of production demonstrating its pitfalls. In an era defined by the instability of identities and the recycling of works, Performing Authorship offers a refreshingly new take on the cinematic auteur, proposing that the challenges that once accelerated this figure's critical demise should instead pump new life into it. Performing Authorship is an illuminating analysis (...) of films by Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Agnes Varda, Orson Welles, Jean Rouch, Eduardo Coutinho and Sarah Turner that shows directors shifting between opposite movements towards authorial assertion and divestiture, palpability and disappearance, exposure and masking. In making this journey, Cecilia Sayad argues, the film author is not necessarily at the work's origin, nor does it constitute the end product. What the new concept of performing authorship describes is the making and unmaking of a subject"--Publisher website. (shrink)

Introduction -- An improbable alliance : Peter Wollen's "The auteur theory" -- Visual stylometry : Barry Salt's "Statistical style analysis of motion pictures" -- Between Shakespeare and Sirk : Thomas Elsaesser's "Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama" -- From iconicity to semiotic articulation : Christian Metz's "cinema: language or language system?" and language and cinema -- Film as a specific signifying practice : Stephen Heath's "On screen, in frame: film and ideology" -- (...) Against theories of reflection : Laura Mulvey's "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" -- Early cinema spectatorship : Tom Gunning's "The cinema of attraction(s): early film, its spectator, and the avant-garde" -- Another Lacan : "the universal: suture revisited" -- The death of the camera : Edward Branigan's "What is a camera?" -- Conclusion: teaching theory. (shrink)

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focussing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects (...) the major European ÒwavesÓ and figures ; Latin American Third Cinemas ; radical art and the avant-garde ; and world cinemas. It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bolla’n, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, PainlevŽ, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture. (shrink)

This book attempts to answer the questions, posed by T.J. Demos (in Against the Anthropocene, 2107): how do we find a way address the planetary harm and the issues it raises within the field of Film Studies? How do we construct a theoretical model that allows us to visualize the ecological transgressions brought about by the growth-model of capitalism which is heavily endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema? By turning to the Regenerative model set out in Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics (...) (2017) and adapting its fundamental principles to a study of narrative cinema, Film Ecology proposes to show how, by using this model, we can usefully plot and investigate films according to criteria that are not genre/star/auteur-led, nor indeed embedded in anthropocentric theoretical models, but principles which are ecologically based. The hope is that this approach will inspire film practitioners, film theorists, critics and analysts, film students and film lovers alike to consider how they might integrate this Doughnut model into their thinking or work as part of their process. (shrink)

The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their deployment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch"--Provided by publisher.

Preface: The target of film theory -- Camera searching in the world -- Is a camera essential? -- Cahiers axiom -- Tracing Bazin's trace -- Images contested today -- Editor's discovery of form -- Bazin's forerunners -- Documentaries in the cauldron of history -- Cahiers line -- Pursuing cinema in the twenty-first century -- Projector as spectator's searchlight -- Power of projection -- Opening the screen's dimensions -- Frame as threshold -- Writing out of the frame -- Evolution of (...) the subjects of cinema -- Modern film: Between classic and avant-garde -- Ontogeny of cinema -- Credits and auteurs: An ecology of adaptation -- Fidelity: The economy of adaptation. (shrink)

Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films closely examines a wide variety of major filmic texts that have established permanent, iconic shifts in modern and postmodern US culture and filmic practices. These films and their often visionary, trend-setting auteurs each introduced new manners of seeing that were imitated by later directors and ultimately, absorbed by popular culture itself. The primary rationale for writing this collection was quite simple: it is new and different. No anthology exists that examines the concept of the (...) cutting edge film across such a remarkably wide variety of genres and with such a diversity of theoretical approaches and subject matter. Equally important, all the contributors bring a unique voice and multi-disciplinary perspective to their respective chapters. This anthology will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film studies, historical studies, and gender and genre studies. As far as possible, contributors have minimized a great deal of typical theoretical terminology so that lay readers who possess some familiarity with basic film analysis and theory can understand the text. It can be used as a classroom text in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate film classes. Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films is an anthology that instructors of film theory and history can use for many years to come. Indeed, we feel that this remarkable collection of essays will itself become an indispensable, cutting edge text of film scholarship. (shrink)

Partant du débat qui oppose les orientations sémiologique et esthétique, l'auteur propose une troisième voie qui, comme les deux autres, vise à rendre compte de la perception esthétique du film, mais, au lieu de s'enfermer dans l'antinomie discours-figure, ou représentation-visibilité, problématise le fait de " l'impossible à représenter " dans sa confrontation avec le langage et le visible. Ce projet peut être considéré, selon l'auteur, comme une poétique, en un sens plus radical que la notion traditionnelle ou son (...) prolongement chez les formalistes russes, étant donné le thème de " l'articulation des signifiants à l'impossible " - une poétique qui procède de la crise de la représentation dans certains films (Duras) et trouve ses principaux instruments dans la psychanalyse. La première partie du livre explore deux propositions majeures de poétique, comme étude du discours et comme approche du sensible, puis les met à l'épreuve du cinéma de Duras, avant d'utiliser les conclusions de cette partie pour instaurer un débat épistémologique autour de la théorie psychanalytique du sujet divisé, laquelle permet d'accéder à la problématique centrale du livre : la rencontre avec le réel comme impossible. Cette perspective renvoie aux travaux de Jacques Lacan sur lesquels l'auteur se fonde pour introduire sa contribution la plus personnelle : le projet d'une nouvelle poétique du cinéma. (shrink)

Sont ici rassemblés dix-sept textes qui reflètent un travail délibérément orienté sur plusieurs champs du savoir. Celui de la philosophie, ses œuvres et ses auteurs, antiques et modernes, comme Augustin, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant ou Derrida. Celui de la littérature, et sa critique, comme Blanchot, Duras ou Deguy. Celui du religieux, comme l'exorcisme avec le Malleus maleficarum, la cruentation avec Ranchin, le miracle avec Augustin, ou la Bible et langue hébraïque avec Spinoza. Enfin celui du cinéma, avec les voix fantômes de (...) Duras, les spectres de Farocki, la question des genres d'Akerman, les utopies de Kluge, et la fin du monde de Bela Tarr. Tous ces textes sont philosophiques, dans leur effort de pensée, dans le but de faire l'expérience d'une écriture de la pensée, d'une invention d'un langage de la pensée ou du regard. Ils cherchent à penser le travail de la lettre, dans un livre, une croyance religieuse, un événement surnaturel, une pratique déviante, une voix narrative, la description d'un personnage, un plan-séquence, etc. Chacun d'eux se concentre sur un détail qui aurait pu passer inaperçu. En somme, ces textes proposent des argumentations précises, analysent des récrits et décryptent des séquences, dans le désir d'en poursuivre l'écriture par le seul jeu de la pensée."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)