This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol’s durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs’s durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz’ durational sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson’s unblinking studies of African-American working people.

"It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the theoretical discussion of cinema, and ideology in general." -- Semiotica ..". Heath is an antidote to the Cinema 101 worldview." -- Voice Literary Supplement Heath's study of film draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, presenting film as a signifying practice and the cinema as a social institution of meanings.

Focused on a body of films bound together through a cinematic aesthetic of slowness, this book is a pioneering effort to situate, theorise and map out slow cinema within contemporary global film production and across world cinema history.

Focused on a body of films bound together through a cinematic aesthetic of slowness, this book is a pioneering effort to situate, theorise and map out slow cinema within contemporary global film production and across world cinema history.

This book discusses slow cinema, a contemporary global production trend that has recently gained momentum in film theory and criticism. Slow films dispense with narrative progression in favour of a contemplative mood, which is stretched out to the extreme in order to impel viewers to confront cinematic temporality in all its undivided glory. Despite its critical reputation as an oblique mode of film practice, slow cinema continues to attract, challenge and provoke audiences. Focusing on filmmakers Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this book identifies nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom as intrinsic dimensions of slow cinema and explores the ways in which these directors negotiate local filmmaking conventions with the demands of a global cinephile niche. As the first study to treat slow cinema both as an aesthetic style and as an institutional discourse, Poetics of Slow Cinema offers an illuminating perspective on the tradition’s historical genealogy and envisions it with a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies—lamenting at once the passing of difficult, ambiguous modernist film and capitalizing on the yearning for its absence.

Deleuze's two Cinema books explore film through the creation of a series of philosophical concepts. Not only bewildering in number, Deleuze's writing procedures mean his exegesis is both complex and elusive. Three questions emerge: What are the underlying principles of the taxonomy? How many concepts are there, and what do they describe? How might each be used in engaging with a film? David Deamer's book is the first to fully respond to these three questions, unearthing the philosophies inspiring Deleuze's classifications, exploring every concept and reading a film for each. Clearly and concisely mapping the Cinema books for newcomers to Deleuzian film studies, Deamer also opens up new areas of enquiry for expert readers.

The book proposes a new perspective on avant-garde cinema, utilising approaches from intermediality to explore how the spirit of experimentation, a hallmark of historical avant-garde and post-war artistic movements, is still present in contemporary filmmaking today. The volume explores how contemporary avant-garde filmmakers have brought innovation to modern cinema. Filmmakers, such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov and their contemporary works will be analyzed, reflecting on their experimentation with cinematic techniques and the mixing of the film medium with other media, such as literature, theatre, and painting. Important research questions considered throughout the book include: How do intermedial experiments convey meaning in films? What is the impact on the spectator of the mixing of various media forms in cinema? And how are the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov innovative and experimental? The book is devoted to all these themes and provides a thorough analysis of contemporary films examined through an intermedial perspective. Providing a comprehensive analysis of contemporary avant-garde filmmaking from an intermedial perspective, this book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars working in intermedial studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.