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Dreaming of Cinema

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Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many w...
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  • 11 November 2014
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Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, André Breton, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.
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Price: $34.00
Pages: 280
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Film and Culture Series
Publication Date: 11 November 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231166577
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, ART / Film & Video, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Direction & Production, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, ART / Digital, ART / History / 20th & 21st Century

Lowenstein turns technological teleology on its head, arguing that new media studies urgently needs a theory of cinema—both what it was and what it continues to be.
Adam Lowenstein is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cinema as Digital Dream Machine
1. Enlarged Spectatorship: From Realism to Surrealism: Bazin, Barthes, and The (Digital) Sweet Hereafter
2. Interactive Spectatorship: Gaming, Mimicry, and Art Cinema: Between Un chien andalou and eXistenZ
3. Globalized Spectatorship: Ring Around the Superflat Global Village: J-Horror Between Japan and America
4. Posthuman Spectatorship: The Animal in You(Tube): From Los olvidados to "Christian the Lion"
5. Collaborative Spectatorship: The Surrealism of the Stars: From Rose Hobart to Mrs. Rock Hudson
Afterword: Marking Cinematic Time
Notes
Bibliography
Index