Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, author Seung-hoon Jong here examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame sheds light on films' reflections of global phenomena related to two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems, and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. The antagonism between these two brings crucial challenges to the notions of subjectivity and community. Throughout Global Cinema, Jeong explores a vast net of contemporary films circulating globally in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit since the 1990s. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform new universal aspects of subjectivity and community by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, Global Cinema deftly investigates critical discourses through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies on the issues of multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia.

Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, Seung-hoon Jong examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical 'abjection' and ethical 'agency.' In this frame, the book explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues--including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia--through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.

For well over a century, going to the movies has been a favorite pastime for billions across the globe. But is film actually good for anything? This volume brings together thirty-six scholars, critics, and filmmakers in search of an answer. Their responses range from the most personal to the most theoretical--and, together, recast current debates about film ethics. Movie watching here emerges as a wellspring of value, able to sustain countless visions of "the good life." Films, these authors affirm, make us reflect, connect, adapt; they evoke wonder and beauty; they challenge and transform. In a word, its varieties of value make film invaluable.

Taking at its starting point the idea that Kubrick's cinema has constituted an intellectual, cerebral, and philosophical maze in which many filmmakers (as well as thinkers and a substantial fringe of the general public) have gotten lost at one point or another, this collection looks at the legacy of Kubrick's films in the 21st century. The main avenues investigated are as follows: a look at Kubrick's influence on his most illustrious followers (Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, and Lars von Trier, to name a few); Kubrick in critical reception; Kubrick in stylistic (camera movements, set designs, music), thematic (artificial intelligence, new frontiers- large and small), aesthetic (the question of genre, pastiche, stereoscopy) and political terms (paranoia, democracy and secret societies, conspiracy theories). The contributions coalesce around the concept of a Kubrickian substrate, rich and complex, which permeates our Western cultural landscape very much to this day, informing and sometimes announcing/reflecting it in twisted ways, 21 years after the director's death.

Parasite presents the ethico-biological problem of parasitism in a metaphorical and artistic fashion. In this book, philosophers explore the film using sources such as the ancient satirist Lucian’s De Parasito, Nietzsche’s “the vengeance of the weak,” Dostoyevsky’s “Underground,” or Marxism, among others.

In this book, Seung-hoon Jeong introduces the cinematic interface as a contact surface that mediates between image and subject, proposing that this mediation be understood not simply as transparent and efficient but rather as asymmetrical, ambivalent, immanent, and multidirectional. Jeong enlists the new media term "interface" to bring to film theory a synthetic notion of interfaciality as underlying the multifaceted nature of both the image and subjectivity. Drawing on a range of films, Jeong examines cinematic interfaces seen on screen and the spectator’s experience of them, including: the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, the character’s bodily contact with such a medium-interface, the object’s surface and the subject’s face as "quasi-interface," and the image itself. Each of these case studies serves as a platform for remapping and revamping major concepts in film studies such as suture, embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality. Looking to such theories as the ontology of the image and the phenomenology of the body, this original theorization of the cinematic interface not only offers a conceptual framework for rethinking and re-linking film and media studies, but also suggests a general theory of the interface.