Browse Books
Flesh Into Light
The Films of Amy Greenfield
Over her more than four-decade career, New York-based filmmaker, performer, and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross the boundaries of experimental film, video art, and multimedia performance—from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion, to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit in the Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of movement and the resilience of the human spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of cinema.
An innovative exploration of an artist whom Cineaste called “the most important practitioner of experimental film-dance,” Flesh Into Light covers Greenfield’s entire career and draws attention to the more than thirty films, holographic sculptures, and video installations of this important American artist.
Far Field
Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles
Human understanding of the rapidly changing environments of the North and South Poles—and the realities of climate change—has been radically transformed by a host of innovations afforded by the digital technologies. Far Field presents essays from artists and scholars who address the shift in our collective cultural understanding through a selection of the most significant artistic, scientific, technological, and philosophical interpretations of the poles over the past decade. Amply illustrated and including fascinating first person accounts of projects at the poles, this cutting-edge volume will have important implications for contemporary cultural studies and the critical study of climate change.
Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde
A History of the Future
Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York–based arts organization whose mission is to preserve, document and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists – particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. Over more than thirty years, Franklin Furnace has exhibited works by hundreds of avant-garde artists, some of whom – Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jenny Holzer and the Blue Man Group, to name a few – are now established names in contemporary art.
Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive history of this remarkable organization from its conception to the present. Organized around the major art genres that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, this book intersperses first-person narratives with readings by artists and scholars on issues critical to the organization's success as well as Franklin Furnace's many contributions to avant-garde art.
Future of Art in a Digital Age
From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
This work develops the thesis that the transition from pre-modernism to postmodernism in art of the digital age represents a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture.
Semiotic and morphological analysis of art and visual culture demonstrate the contemporary confluence between the deep structure of Hebraic consciousness and new directions in art that arise along the interface between scientific inquiry, digital technologies, and multicultural expressions.
Complementing these two analytic methodologies, alternative methodologies of kabbalah and halakhah provide postmodern methods for extending into digital age art forms. Exemplary artworks are described in the text and illustrated with photographs.
French Costume Drama of the 1950s
Fashioning Politics in Film
When political and civil unrest threatened France’s social order in the 1950s, French cinema provided audiences a unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth century, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon and the Belle Époque. Film critics, however, have routinely dismissed this period of French cinema, overlooking a very important period of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry’s Napoléon (1955), Vernay’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1943), and Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.
Futures of Chinese Cinema
Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures
In recent years, Chinese film has garnered worldwide attention, and this interdisciplinary collection investigates how new technologies, changing production constraints, and shifting viewing practices have shaped perceptions of Chinese screen cultures. For the first time, international scholars from film studies, media studies, history and sociology have come together to examine technology and temporality in Chinese cinema today.
Futures of Chinese Cinema takes an innovative approach, arguing for a broadening of Chinese screen cultures to account for new technologies of screening, from computers and digital video to smaller screens (including mobile phones). It also considers time and technology in both popular blockbusters and independent art films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diasporas. The contributors explore transnational connections, including little-discussed Chinese-Japanese and Sino-Soviet interactions. With an exciting array of essays by established and emerging scholars, Futures of Chinese Cinema represents a fresh contribution to film and cultural studies.
Finding the Right Place on the Map
Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective
Futures Past
Thirty Years of Arts Computing
This unprecedented volume examines the disparities between earlier visions of the future of digital art and its current state, including frank accounts of promising projects that failed to deliver and assessments of more humble projects that have not only survived, but flourished. Futures Past is a look back at the frenetic history of computerized art that points the way toward a promising future.
Frames of Mind
A Post-Jungian Look at Film, Television and Technology
Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain
The Face on the Screen
Death, Recognition & Spectatorship
Frames and Fictions on Television
The Politics of Identity within Drama
Television drama both reflects and contributes to the production of cultural identity. At a time of deep cultural uncertainty, how has this been represented within the programmes that help individuals make sense of their own lives and identities?
This book addresses the question head on: the contributors examine a range of issues of identity in relation to the shifting historical context, while considering social class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and national/diaspora identity. These are debated in relation to current aesthetic and social concerns, and particular attention is paid to the changing identity of British television drama over the last 35 years:
- the fragmentation of the home audience,
- the transnationalisation of media culture,
- the increasingly hybrid nature of programme formats, and
- the growth in popularity of US series within a British viewing context.
