Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) by Alain Resnais carried the impact of the Holocaust to the cinema screen and to societies across the world. This volume, which coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the film's release, examines its representation of the Holocaust and documents its reception in different contexts, countries, and societies, as well as its continuing place in the cultural memory of the Holocaust. It comprises a comparative study of the place of the film in the debates around the actuality and the meaning of the Holocaust in France, Germany, Israel, the...

Direct Cinema is the first comprehensive study of the "direct cinema" movement of 1960s America. Through the inquisitiveness of filmmakers such as Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and Frederick Wiseman-and predicated on innovations such as portable cameras and synchronized sound-direct cinema intimately documented presidential campaigns through the revelers of Woodstock and the dispossessed subjects of Wiseman's "reality fictions." This volume recovers these vastly influential yet politically underappreciated films, suggesting they represented a resurgence of America's home-grown...

The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture is a timely interdisciplinary collection of original essays concerning the ethical stakes of the image in our visually-saturated age. It explores the role of the material image in bearing witness to historical events and the visual representation of witnesses to collective trauma. In arguing for the agency of the image, this unique collection debates post-traumatic memory, documentary ethics, embodied vision, and the recycling of images. It discusses works by Chris Marker, Errol Morris, Derek Jarman, Doris Salcedo, Gerhard...

Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema is an indispensable history of underground cinema, an untold story that includes the British independent and French avant-garde cinemas of the 1920s, the counterculture film movements of the 1960s, the microcinema resurgence of the 1990s, and beyond. Dispensing with simplistic "art versus commerce" discourses, Subversion not only discovers the cultural roots of underground filmmaking in bohemian cabarets of nineteenth-century Paris and the fairbooths of medieval London, but situates the underground as a radical and popular...

Whether depicting humans battling aliens or a brave geologist saving lives as a volcano erupts, science-fiction films are an exciting visual and sensuous introduction to the workings of science and technology. These films explore a range of complex topics in vivid and accessible ways, from space travel and laser technology to genetic engineering, global warming, and the consequences of nuclear weaponry. Though actual scientific lab work might not be as exciting, science fiction is an engaging yet powerful way for a wide audience to explore some of the most pressing issues and ideas of our...

Slow Light is a popular treatment of today's astonishing breakthroughs in the science of light. Even though we don't understand light's quantum mysteries, we can slow it to a stop and speed it up beyond its Einsteinian speed limit, 186,000 miles/sec; use it for quantum telecommunications; teleport it; manipulate it to create invisibility; and perhaps generate hydrogen fusion power with it. All this is lucidly presented for non-scientists who wonder about teleportation, Harry Potter invisibility cloaks, and other fantastic outcomes. Slow Light shows how the real science...