In Cinema s Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Cache, Strange Days, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that...

In this age of public confession and reality television, melodrama has become a pervasive cultural mode. This volume covers a wide range of melodramatic expression in contemporary life, from the public staging of personal suffering to the emotionalization and sentimentalization of national politics, in order to address a key question: if melodramatic models have become so culturally pervasive, what is the political potential of melodramatic victimhood and what are its political limitations?
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South Korea is home to one of the most vibrant film industries in the world today, producing movies for a strong domestic market that are also drawing the attention of audiences worldwide. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of some of the most well-known and incendiary South Korean films of the millennial decade from nine major directors. Building his analysis on contemporary film theory and philosophy, as well as interviews and other primary sources, Steve Choe makes a case that these often violent films pose urgent ethical dilemmas central to life in the age of neoliberal...

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the "death of cinema" debate, Film History as Media Archaeology? presents a robust argument for cinema's current status as a new epistemological objectof interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The study is the fruit of twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory, and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of new film historyand media...

Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies including such hits as Run, Lola, Run, 21 Grams, and Memento. This book sets those films, among others, in context with earlier works that tried new narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analyzing film. In light of that, Steffen Hven argues for the deployment of an embodied reconfiguration of the cinematic experience,...

The popular and critical successes of films like The Sixth Sense and The Ring in the late 1990s led to an impressive international explosion of scary films dealing with ghosts. This book takes a close look at a number of those films from different countries, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Great Britain. Making a crucial distinction between these atmospheric films and conventional horror, Michael Walker argues that they are most productively seen as ghost melodramas, which opens them up to a powerful range of analytic tools from the study of...