Full Description
In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media?
This collection sets out to examine these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment, demarcating their sometimes parallel and sometimes more closely conjoined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing and thinking both before and after the 'birth' of cinema.
The examination of the interrelations between cinema, literature, photography and other modes of representation, not only to each other but amid a host of other minor and major media - the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone and the computer - provides crucial insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics. Cinematicity in Media History is therefore an essential resource for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies.
Contents
List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media, Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau; Part 1 - Cinematicity Before Cinema; 1 Dickensian 'Dissolving Views': The Magic Lantern, Visual Story-Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination, Joss Marsh; 2 'Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria': Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889, Kristian Moen; 3 Moving-Picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously, Ian Christie; Part 2 - Transitions: Early Cinema and Cinematicity; 4 Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of 'The Yellow Wall-paper', Karin Littau; 5 Time and Motion Studies: Joycean Cinematicity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Keith B. Williams; 6 Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema, Nico Baumbach; Part 3 - Cinematicity in the 'Classic' Cinema Age; 7 Cinematicity of Speech and Visibility of Literature: The Poetics of Soviet Film Scripts of the Early Sound Film Era, Anke Hennig; 8 Making America Global: Cinematicity and the Aerial View, Jeffrey Geiger; 9 Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir, Tom Gunning; Part 4 - Digital Cinematicity; 10 Cinema, Video, Game: Astonishing Aesthetics and the Cinematic 'Future' of Computer Graphics' Past, Leon Gurevitch; 11 Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone, Martine Beugnet; 12 Kino-Eye in Reverse: Visualizing Cinema, Lev Manovich; Select Bibliography; Index
