Search

The study of early cinema beyond Europe and North America is still sufficiently underdeveloped to make Rielle Navitski’s Public Spectacles of Violence a welcome addition. But it should also be of w...

Gunning argued that ‘tricks’ largely disappeared from cinema between 1907–13 as narrativisation became dominant. But if we trace the use of ‘sensation’ devices, with their roots in many popular nineteenth-century narrative modes, then two crucial new film genres of the 1910s made extensive use of trick-based effects: the fantastic crime thriller and the ancient-world spectacle. While ‘effects’, as they were now known, remained crucial to many genres, the status of their expert practitioners declined as effects became invisible.

Book synopsis: In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media? This collection sets out to answer these questions by focusing on the relationships between cinema and other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment. Cinematicity in Media History highlights the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing and thinking both before and after the ‘birth’ of cinema. It examines the interrelations between cinema, literature, photography and other modes of representation not only to each other, but amid a host of other minor and major media - the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone and the computer - and provides crucial insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics.

Why an AHRB-funded Centre for British Film and Television Studies? And why a ‘centre’ that is, in fact, spread across eight widely separated institutions? To answer these basic questions involves reflecting on what might be termed the institutional bias against British cinema that marked the growth of film studies in Britain. Few of the discipline’s pioneers in Britain had any interest in the native product or its history, except to contrast these unfavourably with Hollywood and Europe. When British films and filmmakers did reach the academic agenda, they were all too often the familiar ‘good objects’ of Griersonian documentarists, World War II’s patriotic cinema or the Sixties New Wave; or they were the ‘exceptions’ of maverick auteurs and despised genres. By the time such attitudes began to give way to a spirit of inquiry and discovery, research on British cinema and television was starting from an even smaller base than the media studies field as a whole. Much of the foundational work had in fact been done entirely outside the academy by figures such as Rachael Low, John Barnes and Dennis Gifford, and the amateur tradition was still strong. How then could this sub-set of a small academic field make up for lost time? The launch of the AHRB’s research centres scheme at the end of the 1990s offered an opportunity to stake a claim for an alliance between early cinema enthusiasts, interested in the visual culture of the Edwardian period, historians of artists’ film and of television, students of media policy, and advocates of regional as distinct from national approaches to the audiovisual. All of these might be considered peripheral to the central traditions of British cinema, but together they offered a wider, more complete perspective on British film and television than the celebration of canonic filmmakers. The Centre that emerged in 2000 amalgamated two separate bids

Manchevski's film belongs to a tradition of 'landscape cinema', represented recently by Angelopoulos and the Taviani brothers, and originally by Rossellini and Neo-realism. What these and other related films mean, it is suggested, can best be understood by reference to art historical and critical theory accounts of landscape as a signifying practice, theorized by Clarke and Gombrich around 1950, then by Wiliams and Mitchell from an ideological standpoint. Lefebvre's distinction between 'absolute' and 'abstract' space is used to characterize the three parts of the film, moving from Macedonia to London and back; and the authenticity of the locations is assessed in economic and aesthetic terms. The film is identified as an allegory of spatial relations in the modern world of civil wars; and also as part of a tradition of elegiac landscape studies which lament the loss of arcadian innocence.

In this paper I want to reflect on some reasons for the ambivalence, or indeed hostility, that has often been detected towards empirical film studies.

Book synopsis: This text ranges widely over key films and moments from stages of Luis Bunuel's career. It locates and re-appraises Bunuel's films with particular emphasis on the national cinemas and varied cultures with which he was identified.

This volume provides a comprehensive documentary history of Russian and Soviet cinema. It provokes a major reassessment of conventional Western understanding of Soviet cinema. Based on extensive research and in original translation, the documents selected illustrate both the aesthetic and political development of Russian and Soviet cinema, from its beginnings as a fairground novelty in 1896 to its emergence as a mass medium of entertainment and propaganda on the eve of World War II.