Books in the Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality series

This introduction to American Independent Cinema offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century to the present and a study of key individual films, filmmakers and film companies.

In a fresh and invigorating look at British cinema that considers film as an art form among other arts, John Orr takes a critical look at the intriguing relationship between romanticism and modernism in British cinema.

In recent years some of the best-known European and American art film directors have made films that place the spectator in a position of intense discomfort: Feel-Bad Films. These films systematically manipulate the spectator: sometimes by withholding information from her, sometimes by shocking her, and sometimes by seducing her in order to further disturb her. As a result, they have been criticized for being amoral, nihilistic, politically irresponsible and anti-humanistic. The Feel-Bad Film raises three questions to this body of work: How is the feel-bad experience created? What do the directors believe they can achieve in this manner? And how should the films be situated in intellectual history? Through close analysis of films by Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Lucille Hadzihalilovic, Brian de Palma, Bruno Dumont and Harmony Korine, the book argues that feel-bad directors invite the spectator to think of art as an experimental activity with ethical norms that are different from the ones we hope to find outside the movie theatre. Only when given the freedom to take advantage of this asymmetry can film realize its ethical potential.

Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films 'animate' artworks by means of cinematic techniques, such as camera movements and editing, or by integrating them into a narrative. He explores how this 'mobilization' of the artwork is brought into play in art documentaries and artist biopics, as well as in feature films containing key scenes situated in museums. The tension between stasis and movement is also discussed in relation to modernist cinema, which often includes tableaux vivants combining pictorial, sculptural and theatrical elements. This tension also marks the aesthetics of the film still, which have inspired prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. Illustrated throughout, Jacobs' study of the presence of art in film, alongside the omnipresence of the filmic image in today's art museums, is an engaging work for students and scholars of film and art alike.

Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames explores the intermedial context of early cinema. It tackles the first European feature films' intricate relationship with its sister arts to reveal that the period referred to by historians as the 'long nineteenth century' was one in which Bourgeois Realism reigned supreme. The nineteenth-century rise of the middle class coincided with realism becoming the dominant artistic mode in both form and content, leading to a revival of genre painting in the art academies, the supremacy of social melodrama on the stage and the advent of Pictorialism in photography. In its quest for artistic legitimacy, European filmmakers sought to win over middle-class audiences with films based on popular works of art - the first 'art films' - by employing similar visual and narrative strategies as its artistic counterparts. Vito Adriaensens is a scholar and filmmaker. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University and a Researcher at the Centre for Research in Cinema and Performing Arts at the Université libre de Bruxelles.