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Overview

Cinematicity in Media History by Jeffrey Geiger

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474402774
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 05/01/2015
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Geiger is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, where he founded the Centre for Film Studies in 2001. Books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011), the co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (expanded edition 2013), and Cinematicity in Media History. His essays have appeared in many books, and journals such as Film International, Third Text, African American Review, Cinema Journal, and PMLA.

Karin Littau is Director of Research in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She is the author of Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (2006; reprinted 2008), The Routledge Concise History of Literature and Film, and co-editor of two issues of Comparative Critical Studies: Inventions: Literature and Science (2005) and Cinematicity (2009). Recent publications include an article on cross-media for Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2011) and on media philosophy in New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2011).

Table of 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

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