Expresiones audiovisuales

Beyond Blaxploitation, the first book-length anthology of scholarly work on blaxploitation film, sustains the momentum that blaxploitation scholarship has recently gained, giving the films an even more prominent place in cinema history. This volume is made up of eleven essays employing historical and theoretical methodologies in the examination of spectatorship, marketing, melodrama, the transition of novel to screenplay, and racial politics and identity, among other significant topics. In doing so, the book fills a substantial gap that exists in the black cinematic narrative and, more broadly, in film history.

Beyond Blaxploitation is divided into three sections that feature original essays on a variety of canonical blaxploitation films and others that either influenced the movement or in some form represent a significant extension of it. The first section titled, "From Pioneer to Precursor to Blaxploitation," centers on three films—Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—that ignited the African American film cycle. The second section, "The Canon and the Not so Canon," is dedicated to forging alternative considerations of some of the most highly regarded blaxploitation films, while also bringing attention to lesser-known films in the movement. The final section, "Was, Is, or Isn’t Blaxploitation," includes four essays that offer significant insights on films that are generally associated with blaxploitation but contest traditional definitions of the movement. Moreover, this section features chapters that address industrial factors that led to the creation of blaxploitation cinema and highlight the limitations of the term itself.

Beyond Blaxploitation is a much-needed pedagogical tool, informing film scholars, critics, and fans alike, about blaxploitation’s richness and complexity.

With contributors from ten different countries and backgrounds in a range of academic disciplines – including anthropology, media studies and visual culture – this collection takes a uniquely broad perspective on photography by situating the image-making process in wider discussions on the materiality and visuality of photographic practices and explores these through empirical case studies.

By focusing on material visual practices, the book presents a comprehensive overview of some of the main challenges digital photography is bringing to everyday life. It explores how the digitization of photography has a wide-reaching impact on the use of the medium, as well as on the kinds of images that can be produced and the ways in which camera technology is developed. The exploration goes beyond mere images to think about cameras, mediations and technologies as key elements in the development of visual digital cultures.

Digital Photography and Everyday Life will be of great interest to students and scholars of Photography, Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Media Studies, as well as those studying Communication, Cultural Anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies.

​Seit einigen Jahren sind Arbeitswelt und Ökonomie als ergiebige Sujets kultureller und künstlerischer Auseinandersetzungen wiederentdeckt worden. Dabei knüpfen Gegenwartsfilme, -kunst und -literatur an Motive an, die bereits in den weitreichenden Umbrüchen der Arbeitswelten der 1921er Jahre virulent waren und zum Thema gemacht wurden: Mechanisierung, Selbstentfremdung, soziale Ungerechtigkeit, hohe Arbeitslosigkeit und Finanzkrise. Während in Literatur, Film und Fotografie der 20er und frühen 30er Jahre die Situation der Angestellten, Sekretärinnen, Working Girls und Fabrikarbeiter in den Blick rückt, werden in aktuellen Texten und Filmen komplexe Vorgänge wie die Globalisierung mit ihren Ausbeutungsverhältnissen, durch neue Technologien verursachte Veränderungen in der Arbeitswelt sowie die Phänomene Prekariat und ‚Ich-AG‘ kritisch ausgeleuchtet. Neben der IT-, Werbe- und Finanzbranche mit ihren neuen Führungs- und Kommunikations-strukturen sowie den Krisen und Chancen der Arbeitslosigkeit widmen sich einige Werke auch den ‚unsichtbaren‘ Arbeitskräften und -prozessen hinter den schillernden Fassaden.​

Capturing a rapidly transforming urban world, this collection investigates the emerging dynamics between filmmaking and urban change on a global scale. It surveys film, media and screen cultures in Buenos Aires, Beijing, Berlin, Cairo, Copenhagen, Delhi, Kolkata, Lagos, Los Angeles, Malm , Manila, Paris, Rome, and Shanghai. Drawing on work in film and urban studies, the volume innovatively rethinks the "cinematic city" and argues for its ongoing relevance. Film festivals, transnational production, public screens, media ecologies, nostalgia, cinephilia, infrastructure, and informal economies illuminate the juxtaposition of cinema and urban space. Works covered include The Bourne Legacy (2112), Her (2013), Medianeras (2011), Last Flight to Abuja (2012), Maach, Mishti, and More (2013), The Future of the Past (2012), Good Morning Aman (2009), Couscous (2007), the transnational television production The Bridge, and Chinese video art.

Since the beginning of broadcasting, radio and television producers have pushed their shows to audiences in controlled environments that end in a discrete and quantifiable site to be transformed into advertising rates. Today's viewers program their DVR's to create their own viewing schedules, wait to watch entire seasons in marathon DVD viewing sessions and stream shows to their mobile devices. The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the traditional television industry. While audiences clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their new viewing habits undermine the dominant economic structures that fund quality episodic series. Television on Demand examines how we have reached this present moment; and considers the viable future(s) of this crucial culture industry. This leads to an understanding of an empowered audience that realizes its means of control of how it consumes media, as well as a new way of looking at the industry we have traditionally and currently call 'television.'

In The Interface Envelope, James Ash develops a series of concepts to understand how digital interfaces work to shape the spatial and temporal perception of players. Drawing upon examples from videogame design and work from post-phenomenology, speculative realism, new materialism and media theory, Ash argues that interfaces create envelopes, or localised foldings of space time, around which bodily and perceptual capacities are organised for the explicit production of economic profit. Modifying and developing Bernard Stiegler's account of psychopower and Warren Neidich's account of neuropower, Ash argues the aim of interface designers and publishers is the production of envelope power. Envelope power refers to the ways that interfaces in games are designed to increase users perceptual and habitual capacities to sense difference. Examining a range of examples from specific videogames, Ash identities a series of logics that are key to producing envelope power and shows how these logics have intensified over the last thirty years. In turn, Ash suggests that the logics of interface envelopes in videogames are spreading to other types of interface. In doing so life becomes enveloped as the environments people inhabit becoming increasingly loaded with digital interfaces. Rather than simply negative, Ash develops a series of responses to the potential problematics of interface envelopes and envelope power and emphasizes their pharmacological nature.

Cult Film as a Guide to Life investigates the world and experience of cult films, from well-loved classics to the worst movies ever made. Including comprehensive studies of cult phenomena such as trash films, exploitation versions, cult adaptations, and case studies of movies as different as Showgirls, Room 237 and The Lord of the G-Strings, this lively, provocative and original book shows why cult films may just be the perfect guide to making sense of the contemporary world. Using his expertise in two fields, I.Q. Hunter also explores the important overlap between cult film and adaptation studies. He argues that adaptation studies could learn a great deal from cult and fan studies about the importance of audiences' emotional investment not only in texts but also in the relationships between them, and how such bonds of caring are structured over time. The book's emergent theme is cult film as lived experience. With reference mostly to American cinema, Hunter explores how cultists, with their powerful emotional investment in films, care for them over time and across numerous intertexts in relationships of memory, nostalgia and anticipation.

Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured y new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as "worldbuilding," "virtual reality," and "transmedia" introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Fast Forward answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end. From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca M ndez's projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.

Fashion and Film explores the complex relationships between costume, fashion and popular film. Examining the ways in which costume and fashion are used to construct narrative and identity in contemporary film, this interdisciplinary study also explores how meanings flow on and off screen. What is the impact of celebrity and stardom on the audience's consumption of film? How does film costume interact with other media forms? Sarah Gilligan addresses these key questions using a cross-media analysis of film, advertising and digital media.

Based around exciting case studies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Shakespeare in Love, Great Gatsby, Save the Last Dance, The Matrix trilogy and Hunger Games: Catching Fire, together with stars such as Daniel Craig, Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Watson, this book explores a broad range of film genres and fashion garments, from corsets to flowing coats, cosplay to mobile phones. Using close textual analysis, complex issues of eroticism, fabric fetishism and haptic pleasure, and key themes of gender, celebrity and sexuality, are clearly mapped onto cinematic clothing and the body. Fashion and Film will be essential reading for students of fashion, film and media, cultural and gender studies.

This groundbreaking inaugural volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismaki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context. His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.