Scott Curtis draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern spectatorship. Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, he follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fascinating, at times fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film. Staging a...

Scott Curtis draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern spectatorship. Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, he follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fascinating, at times fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film. Staging a...

Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In the 1970s, he used Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to explain the popularity of cinema. In this final book, Metz uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs, offering critical direction for theorists who struggle with the phenomena of new media.

If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Consulting a range of...

Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In the 1970s, he used Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to explain the popularity of cinema. In this final book, Metz uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs, offering critical direction for theorists who struggle with the phenomena of new media.

If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Consulting a range of...

In his Village Voice "Movie Journal" columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking's next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive...

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life.

Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to...

Nora M. Alter argues that the essay film is a hybrid genre that fuses three major categories of film: feature, art, and documentary. Much like the written essay, its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches, fundamentally altering the shape of cinema. Alter traces the essay film's origins to early silent cinema, charting the genre's evolution with the advent of sound, its emergence as a recognized category of film in the postwar period, and the ways the genre developed in the later twentieth century. In addition to exploring the broader history of the...

Nora M. Alter argues that the essay film is a hybrid genre that fuses three major categories of film: feature, art, and documentary. Much like the written essay, its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches, fundamentally altering the shape of cinema. Alter traces the essay film's origins to early silent cinema, charting the genre's evolution with the advent of sound, its emergence as a recognized category of film in the postwar period, and the ways the genre developed in the later twentieth century. In addition to exploring the broader history of the...

In Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, Maggie Hennefeld examines little-known silent films that, she argues, provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. Hennefeld shows how slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language and experimentation.