Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media

ISBN-13: 9780231166577 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 280 str.

Adam Lowenstein

Opis

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 Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Andre 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.

Recenzje

"This book adds a much needed perspective to the intellectual history of ideas about cinema as a medium. 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." - Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick

O autorze

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.