Books in the Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality series

This book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics and politics in a variety of visual media forms, ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explores how different ethical questions, political implications and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in distinct visual media. Investigating themes such as the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects both conceal and reveal truth, the new ethical challenges arising from interactive media and the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, this is a groundbreaking work about the interrelations of aesthetic, ethical and political values in visual media. Marguerite La Caze is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland. Ted Nannicelli is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

An inquiry into the convergences of avant-garde film, trans-cultural media arts, experimental ethnography and curatorial practice in contemporary Mexico

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.

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation.aExamining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola to highlight their use of cinematic time as a mode of philosophical thought, this book brings new and exciting perspectives to American independent cinema.

This book investigates the sensuous qualities of narration in the feature-length fiction film. Sensuous narration takes place when details of visual (or aural) texture are foregrounded for storytelling purposes. For example, the image becomes 'soft' in order to signal the representation of a character's memory; a 'scratchy' version of a song plays on the soundtrack in order to shape the viewer's understanding of the images it accompanies. In these cases, image and sound are associated with tactile properties (softness and scratchiness).The book provides a comprehensive account of existing work on film narration and offers an overview of the sensuous aspects of cinematic storytelling, as demonstrated through a broad selection of films. The films used as case studies in the book are particularly 'multi-layered', in that they all make extensive use of materials with sensuously contrasting visual and/or aural properties: for example, films whose images are a combination of colour and monochrome (e.g. The Wizard of Oz); whose soundtracks feature multiple voiceover narrators (e.g. All About Eve) or which feature multiple performers portraying the same character (e.g. the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There).

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.

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.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc.

Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts.

The first monograph to trace the Pacific islands as represented through the lens of British fiction and non-fiction across the long nineteenth century.

Exploring the archetypal representation of the straight girl with the queer guy in film and television culture from 1948 to the present day, Straight Girls and Queer Guys considers the process of the 'hetero media gaze' and the way it contextualizes sexual diversity and gender identity. Offering both an historical foundation and a rigorous conceptual framework, Christopher Pullen draws on a range of case studies, including the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the performances of Kenneth Williams, televisions shows such as Glee, Sex and the City and Will and Grace, the work of Derek Jarman, and the role of the gay best friend in Hollywood film. Critiquing the representation of the straight girl and the queer guy for its relation to both power and otherness, this is a provocative study that frames a theoretical model which can be applied across diverse media forms.

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.

This edited collection proposes new directions for understanding cinematic intermediality, mapping out innovative approaches to film's relationship with some of its most influential artistic predecessors in the fields of performance, sculpture, painting, photography and dance.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole. Ágnes Pethő is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Film, Photography and Media of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca (Romania).