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As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping the dual nature of Frank’s career as a photographer-filmmaker in mind, each of the chapters pays particular attention to those instances when ideas and ways of working developed in one media leave their mark on another. By examining Frank’s films in the context of his more widely recognized photographic work, this study stands as a model of cross-media history in which film and photography are viewed not as divergent fields, but as complicit in their search for new forms of visual expression. Awakening the Eye is about the intricate material negotiations that define Frank’s engagement with photography, film and writing; it is also about the artist’s determination to forge a revealing and highly personal connection between the events and circumstances of his life and the material qualities of his work.

Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the divided but pre-Wall 1950s, the political turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the start of the new millennium. This book argues for the importance of moving images and cultural policy in fostering collective urban nostalgia in the face of the city’s renewed function as the all-German capital. Understanding films as complex, intertextual archives of place in audiovisual dialogue with changes in the built city, Berlin Replayed approaches successive ‘New’ Berlins from the vantage point of the postwar, postwall city and its film industry—both enmeshed in coming to terms with the structural damage of the Second World War and the legacy of a politically and physically divided cityscape. Combining medium specific approaches with cultural historical and film analytical ones, this study focuses on four key problems raised by the relationship between film geography, profilmic urban space, film revival culture, and the production of cinematic space: 1. remake: how cities remake films and how films remake cities; 2. generation: how films created generational geographical affiliations that ran counter to official demarcations of space; 3. virtuality: how films and new media differ in their representations of Berlin’s layered past and their solutions to lost urban spaces in time; and 4. orientation: how filmic constructions of cinematic urban space instruct spectators in the perception of the changing built city.

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. This book challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves—should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, this book reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. It traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid.

This book shows how radio played a key role in an emerging form of policing during the turbulent years of the Depression. Until this time popular culture had characterized the gangster as hero, but radio crime dramas worked against this attitude and were ultimately successful in making heroes out of law enforcement officers. Through close analysis of radio programming of the era and the production of true crime docudramas, this book argues that radio was a significant site for overhauling the dismal public image of policing. However, it was not simply the elevation of the perception of police that was at stake. Using radio, reformers sought to control the symbolic terrain through which citizens encountered the police, and it became a medium to promote a positive meaning and purpose for policing. For example, Battles connects the apprehension of criminals by a dragnet with the idea of using the radio network to both publicize this activity and make it popular with citizens.

Focusing on American cinema, The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that “race” has defined and supplemented the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, and especially at times of transition and technological vulnerability. In particular, the book explores how racialized bodies and the rhetoric of race difference became central to the working out of specifically cinematic problems: the problem of the stationary camera, the problem of developing narrative form, the problem of realism, the problem of synchronizing image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the problem of the absent or “immaterial” image—the cinema’s “shadow.” The “shadow” of the title figures both the material reality of the screen image (its status as a two-dimensional projection) and its inescapable history (a history bound up with racist images). Beginning with the earliest motion pictures, the study identifies the tension between performing body and performing image that develops in the new medium’s attempts to capture the “essence of reality.” This tension informs the development of cinematic narrative and is tied, I argue, to the performance of race. The study discusses early “race subjects,” arguing that these films shaped cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to define the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book goes on to examine the ways in which discourses of motion picture technology related to discourses of race, embodiment, and authenticity at particular junctures in the cinema’s development (the development of early narratives, the transition to the feature film, the coming sound, etc.).

In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through the 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as “lifelike” but best understood as “approaching reality.” What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan’s reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened. Fan suggests that the phrase “approaching reality” can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists—from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze—into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.

Péter Forgács, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. This book offers an exploration of the imagination and skill with which Forgács reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.

Before it is a technology for representation, the cinema is a technology for the modulation of its viewers’ perception. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions offers a theory of the cinema as a proprioceptive technology: the cinema makes its art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. Grounded in phenomenology and media theory, the book offers a non-representational approach to the cinema that is in close conversation with theories of media and mediation, experimental film, and broader currents in cultural theory. Disputing against the deeply ingrained modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death (or at least its irrelevance), Cinema’s Bodily Illusions argues that the cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. In a moment when technologies seem to be disappearing from view, the cinema orchestrates an encounter with technology that is simultaneously an encounter with a world onscreen.

This book provides a series of contexts and framings for addressing the contingencies, inequities, and fissures of regional co-production as it constructs an “Asian” film and media geography whose locations are repeatedly reconfigured. It addresses three moments, from the beginning of the Cold War to the new millennium, in which regional co-productions have been significant to transnational East Asian film and media. In so doing, it provides a series of genealogical frames of entry into regional co-production, as it has been repeatedly reconfigured across decades, locations, imaginaries, and scales of production. The insights of this book are based in the author’s training in film and media as well as cultural studies. They are also based in extensive archival research as well as interviews with producers–in both Japanese and Chinese language materials, and across the media capitals of the region–in what one reviewer has called a “truly gargantuan” effort in research.

Over the course of his career Werner Herzog, known for such visionary masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” This book asks how this conviction, so hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world’s most provocative documentarians. Herzog, whose Cave of Forgotten Dreams was perhaps the most celebrated documentary of 2010, may be the most influential filmmaker missing from major studies and histories of documentary. Examining such notable films as Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Grizzly Man (2005), this book shows how Herzog dismisses documentary as a mode of filmmaking in order to creatively intervene and participate in it. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog’s career, the book makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so.

Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups. This book analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, the book argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center). This book provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.

The name of Fritz Lang—the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable films—is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends and his genius as a filmmaker? This book includes the results of many years of research in government and film archives, and investigations of the intriguing life story of Fritz Lang. This biography reconstructs the compelling, flawed human being behind the monster with the monocle.

The Heretical Archive examines digital films and multimedia installations that cite and manipulate film materials, arguing that they contribute to redefining our memory of cinema as well as our understanding of the archive. By interrogating the relationship between memory and creativity, the book proposes a notion of archiving that privileges the reopening of cinema’s perceptual and political textures over their passive preservation and reiteration. What is at stake is not faithfulness to a certain established tradition, but rather the calling into being of future genealogies. Digital works that quote a celluloid precursor do so by responding to their antecedent through its interstices and invisible spaces, through the unsaid or unseen, thus inaugurating a new aesthetic and political future for the specific film in question. The book argues that digital films and installations that directly appropriate film materials can affirm themselves as agents of critical reflection, transforming they way in which we understand both twentieth-century cinema and psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive. It’s the first book to methodically engage with Derrida’s Archive Fever from the viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception; to read digital artworks as realizations of the potential of a psychoanalytic archive that takes Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure; and to offer a groundbreaking conceptualization of montage (editing) as folding rather than cutting.

Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation’s Cinema Scenes of Looking examines the efflorescence of American sexploitation films in the United States in the years between 1960 and 1972. Approximately hundreds, if not close to a thousand of such films were made in the 1960s, yet no scholarly book exists on the subject. Employing nudity but soft-core and melodramatic in tone, sexploitation films were preoccupied with the conditions of looking at exposed female flesh, conditions that they also archive and document. Defined by their low-budgets, crude mise-en-scène, and an unswerving focus on a fantastically unfettered female sexuality, sexploitation films resembled lurid pulp novels and erotic tabloids, setting the stage for the emergence of the hard-core porn film in the early 1970s with their illicit, if comparably chaste views. This book examines how the 1960s sexploitation film reconfigured the sexualized body onscreen by presenting a dialectics of indulgence and circumspection, tease and subterfuge. Gorfinkel draws on archival research and close analysis to explore sexploitation films’ regulation, reception, and strategies of sexual representation. The book reveals how sixties sexploitation films possessed a “circumstantial reflexivity,” thematizing their own conditions of reception, impacted by anxieties surrounding American film spectatorship and erotic consumption in this period.

In The Long Take, Lutz Koepnick posits extended shot durations as a powerful medium for exploring different modes of perception and attention in our fast-paced world of mediated stimulations. This book serves as a critical hallmark of international art cinema in the twenty-first century, inviting viewers to probe the aesthetics of moving images and to recalibrate their sense of time.

The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson’s work in an altogether different context. Rather than a religious—or spiritual—filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics. Situating Bresson in radical and aesthetic political contexts, from surrealism to situationism, this book shows how his early style was a model for social resistance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France—especially as “failure” is understood in relation to Bresson’s chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century.

This book takes as its starting point the emergence of a temporal aesthetic in cinema that arose in response to the digital era. Linking developments in cinema to current debates within philosophy, the book claims that films that change the viewer’s relation to time constitute a new cinematic mode: atemporal cinema. In atemporal cinema, formal distortions of time introduce spectators to an alternative way of experiencing existence in time—or, more exactly, a way of experiencing existence out of time. The book draws on contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly Jacques Lacan, to argue that atemporal cinema unfolds according to the logic of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive rather than that of desire, which has conventionally been the guiding concept of psychoanalytic film studies. Despite their thematic diversity, these films distort chronological time with a shared motivation: to reveal the logic of repetition. Like psychoanalysis, the book contends, the atemporal mode locates enjoyment in the embrace of repetition rather than in the search for the new and different.

The civil rights struggle was convulsing the nation, its violence broadcast into every living room. Against this fraught background, Sidney Poitier emerged as an image of dignity, discipline, and moral authority. Here was the picture-perfect black man, helping German nuns build a chapel in The Lilies of the Field and overcoming the prejudices of recalcitrant students in To Sir with Love, a redneck sheriff in In the Heat of the Night, and a prospective father-in-law in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In his characters’ restrained responses to white people’s ignorance and bad behavior, Poitier represented racial reconciliation and reciprocal respect—the “Poitier effect” that Sharon Willis traces through cinema and television from the civil rights era to our own. The Poitier effect, in Willis’s account, is a function of white wishful thinking about race relations. It represents a dream of achieving racial reconciliation and equality without any substantive change to the white world. This notion of change without change conforms smoothly with a fantasy of colorblindness, a culture in which difference makes no difference. Willis demonstrates how Poitier’s embodiment of such a fantasy figures in the popular cinema of the civil rights era—and reasserts itself in recent melodramas such as The Long Walk Home, Pleasantville, Far from Heaven, and The Help. Willis’s book reveals how the Poitier effect, complicated by contemporary ideas about feminism, sexuality, and privilege, continues to inform our collective memory as well as our visions of a postracial society.

This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for the author’s engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays’ art, and into the art of independent puppet animation. This book’s aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers’ artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design, and illustration. It also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films’ literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate from their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.