Cinematicity in Media History

by Jeffrey Geiger (Editor), Karin Littau (Editor)

Overview

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:	03/02/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Geiger is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Essex, where he was the first director of film studies and established the Centre for Film and Screen Media. His books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011) and the co-edited books Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (2005, expanded edition 2013) and Cinematicity in Media History (2013). His work has appeared in numerous collections and journals such as New Formations, Studies in Documentary Film, Third Text, African American Review, Film International, 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 (forthcoming), 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

Editorial Reviews

A volume that peers deep into the non-linear chronology of cinematic history. It explores the often fluent boundaries between different media and finds patterns and similarities that not many would detect otherwise.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television - Lara Perski

‘An inviting, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the question of what it has meant to interact with moving images in the modern era…Whether one is a specialist in Film/Media Studies, literature, modern cultural history, or the history of media technology, one will find that the themes invite rather than discourage trans-disciplinary participation, and, just as crucially, that the writing is compact and accessible across areas of concentration.’

Apparatus - Andrew Behrendt

Postgraduate students and scholars in Film and Media Studies will certainly appreciate the full extent of the pioneering work that has been accomplished in this collection...The concept of cinematicity developed here is compelling, and surely encourages a redefinition of how cinema ‘makes itself felt’ across media forms (photography and literature for instance) and platforms (such as gaming)'- Guillaume Lecomte, Kelvingrove Review (May 2014)

Kelvingrove Review - Guillaume Lecomte

'Postgraduate students and scholars in Film and Media Studies will certainly appreciate the full extent of the pioneering work that has been accomplished in this collection...The concept of cinematicity developed here is compelling, and surely encourages a redefinition of how cinema 'makes itself felt' across media forms (photography and literature for instance) and platforms (such as gaming)'
- Guillaume Lecomte, Kelvingrove Review (May 2014)

"A volume that peers deep into the non-linear chronology of cinematic history. It explores the often fluent boundaries between different media and finds patterns and similarities that not many would detect otherwise." — Lara Perski, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television

"An inviting, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the question of what it has meant to interact with moving images in the modern era... Whether one is a specialist in Film/Media Studies, literature, modern cultural history, or the history of media technology, one will find that the themes invite rather than discourage trans-disciplinary participation, and, just as crucially, that the writing is compact and accessible across areas of concentration." — Andrew Behrendt, Apparatus

From the Publisher