Cinema Interval

"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer." --Trinh T. Minh-ha Vietnamese filmmaker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of word to image. Cinema-Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, life and theory, with Homi Bhabha, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist's ideas. Extensively illustrated in color and black and white, Cinema-Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning "the space between"--between viewer and film, image and text, interviewer and interviewee, lover and beloved. As an added bonus, the complete scripts of Trinh's films Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love are also included in the volume. Cinema-Interval will be an essential work for readers interested in contemporary film art, feminist thought, and postcolonial studies.

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.

"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer." --Trinh T. Minh-ha Vietnamese filmmaker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of word to image. Cinema-Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, life and theory, with Homi Bhabha, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist's ideas. Extensively illustrated in color and black and white, Cinema-Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning "the space between"--between viewer and film, image and text, interviewer and interviewee, lover and beloved. As an added bonus, the complete scripts of Trinh's films Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love are also included in the volume. Cinema-Interval will be an essential work for readers interested in contemporary film art, feminist thought, and postcolonial studies.

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature's images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre's dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it. In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.

This ground breaking collection of essays is the first to examine the phenomenon of how, in the twenty-first century, Shakespeare has been experienced as a 'live' or 'as-live' theatre broadcast by audiences around the world. Shakespeare and the 'Live' Theatre Broadcast Experience explores the precursors of this phenomenon and its role in Shakespeare's continuing globalization. It considers some of the most important companies that have produced such broadcasts since 2009, including NT Live, Globe on Screen, RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, Stratford Festival HD, Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company Live, and Cheek by Jowl, and examines the impact these broadcasts have had on branding, ideology, style and access to Shakespeare for international audiences. Contributors from around the world reflect on how broadcasts impact on actors' performances, changing viewing practices, local and international Shakespearean fan cultures and the use of social media by audience members for whom “liveness” is increasingly tied up in the experience economy. The book tackles vexing questions regarding the 'presentness' and 'liveness' of performance in the 21st century, the reception of Shakespeare in a globally-connected environment, the challenges of sustaining an audience for stage Shakespeare, and the ideological implications of consuming theatre on screen. It will be crucial reading for scholars of the 'live' theatre broadcast, and enormously helpful for scholars of Shakespeare on screen and in performance more broadly.

The notion of film consciousness is one that has played around various film and philosophical discourses without ever really surfacing as a cogent theory. Representing the first major expression of film consciousness as a tangible concept, this critical study revisits notions of memory, retentional consciousness, narrative expectation, and spatio-temporal perception while also analyzing several major films. The first half of the book focuses on understanding the elements of the film experience--and its associated consciousness--through the descriptive tools of phenomenology. The second part develops the idea of film consciousness as a unique vision of the world and as a large element in the human understanding of reality. Throughout the work, the author combines the ideas of philosophers and film theorists from phenomenology--such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bazin, and Kracauer--with the postmodernist work of Deleuze and transitional theorists Bergson and Benjamin.

Popular culture encompasses and draws on a rich history of works by musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and performers who question the contours of traditional sexual and gender identities, including but not limited to members of LGBTQIA* communities. When encountered on the stage or screen, for instance, in the guise of drag performances, forms of sexual ambiguity often spark fascination. Yet in everyday life in various socio-cultural contexts, sexual and bodily difference in all its forms is still met with hostility, rendering vulnerable those human beings that deviate from the white, male, straight, able-bodied norm. Queer artists today respond to social stigma in multiple creative ways, for example, by transforming negative affect, fostering a politics of care, and rewriting history. This volume considers how feminist, queer, and trans* musicians, filmmakers, curators, and performance artists contribute to popular culture. It explores the many ways of relating to difference, however this is conceived, that their contributions enable. What affects do their works engender? How do they rouse their audience, and to what ends? How do they fabricate and circulate provocative messages about new forms of gender, race, class, and desire? What other visions do they inspire?

From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 explores the important interconnections involving questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on world screens by examining a range of films, videos, and digital works associated with global Chinese culture. The ways in which the world has imagined China and the images the Chinese have used to depict themselves have changed dramatically since 1989. The media spotlight placed on Beijing during the spring of 1989 created repercussions that continue to affect how China is seen globally, how it sees itself, and how the Chinese outside the People's Republic see themselves. The films and other texts included in this book represent a range of work by media artists working within China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and on transnational co-productions involving those places. The book also features media from other positions within the Chinese diaspora (including Chinese America) and work produced on China by non-Chinese. Highlighting questions of the circulation of images, people, and commodities, the book explores the important interconnections involving questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on global screens. Beginning and ending with Tian'anmen and world image culture, a portrait emerges of momentous change and persistent challenges facing media artists and filmmakers working within "Greater China."

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the historical fever of the 1980s and 1990s-the rise of the heritage industry, a global museum-building boom, and a cinematic fascination with costume dramas and literary adaptations-it explores the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. Author James Tweedie retraces the "archaeomodern turn" in films and theory that framed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative experiments. He examines late twentieth-century filmmakers who were inspired by old media, especially painting, and often viewed those art forms as portals to the modern past. In detailed discussions of Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Agnès Varda, and other key directors, the book concentrates on films that fill the screen with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes. It also considers three key figures-Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney-who grappled with the late twentieth century's characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes their theoretical work on film as a mourning play for past revolutions and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Looking at cinema and the century in the rear-view mirror, the book highlights the unrealized potential visible in the history of film, as well as the cinematic phantoms that remain in the digital age.