At a time when traditional film theory privileged the purely visual, Film Hieroglyphs introduced a new way of watching film—examining the ways in which writing bears on cinema. Author Tom Conley gives special consideration to the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds with one another. Conley hypothesizes that major directors—Renoir, Lang, Walsh, Rossellini—tend unconsciously to meld history and ideology. Graphic elements are seen as simultaneously foreign and integral to the field of the image. From these contradictions hieroglyphs emerge that mark a design attesting to a hidden rhetoric and to configurations of meaning that cinema cannot always control. Tom Conley is Lowell Professor of romance languages and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Among his books is The Self-Made Map (1996), as well as translations of The Fold (1992) by Gilles Deleuze and In the Metro (2002) by Marc Augé, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Film and Cinema Spectatorship provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to different debates and traditions of viewing cinema. In this new book, Jan Campbell offers a comprehensive account of the different theoretical perspectives on film and cinema spectatorship, situating these in their cultural and historical contexts. Among the perspectives covered are those of feminism, modernism and cultural studies, with chapters dedicated to important topics such as early film, stars and film aesthetics. Campbell also provides accessible explorations of the importance of key themes to film and cinema spectatorship, such as mimesis, melodrama, performance and time. The timely and comprehensive text will be essential reading for anyone interested in debates on film theory, psychoanalysis and film, and the history of cinema. This book will be of special interest to students of film studies, media studies and cultural studies.

Explores the transformative reign of the Catholic King James VII and the revolution that brought about his fall

Plotinus and the Moving Image offers the first philosophical discussion on Plotinus' philosophy and film. It discusses Plotinian concepts like "the One" in a cinematic context and relates Plotinus' theory of time as a transitory intelligible movement of the soul to Bergson’s and Deleuze’s time-image. Film is a unique medium for a rapprochement of our modern consciousness with the thought of Plotinus. The Neoplatonic vestige is particularly worth exploring in the context of the newly emerging “Cinema of Contemplation.” Plotinus' search for the "intelligible" that can be grasped neither by sense perception nor by merely logical abstractions leads to a fluent way of seeing. Parallels that had so far never been discussed are made plausible. This book is a milestone in the philosophy of film. Contributors are: Cameron Barrows, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Michelle Phillips Buchberger, Steve Choe, Stephen Clark, Vincenzo Lomuscio, Tony Partridge, Daniel Regnier, Giannis Stamatellos, Enrico Terrone, Sebastian F. Moro Tornese and Panayiota Vassilopoulou.

Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in film's relation to its rival arts, Brigitte Peucker analyzes central issues involved in generic boundary crossing as they pertain to film and situates them in a theoretical framework. The figure of the human body takes center stage in Peucker's innovative study, for it is through this figure that the conjunction of literary and painterly discourses persistently articulates itself. It is through the human body, too, that film's consciousness of itself as a hybrid text and as a "machine for simulation" makes itself deeply felt. In films ranging from Weimar cinema through Griffith, Hitchcock, and Greenaway, Peucker probes issues in aesthetics problematized by Diderot and Kleist, among others. She argues that the introduction of movement into visual representation occasioned by film brings with it an underlying tension suggestive of castration and death. Peucker goes on to demonstrate how the encounter between narrative and image is both gendered and sexualized, rendering film a "monstrous" hybrid. In a final section, she explores in specific cinematic texts the permeable boundary between the real and representation, suggesting how effects such as tableau vivant and trompe l'oeil figure sexuality and death. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

New communication and information technologies remain challenging for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, both within China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from alternative theoretical perspectives, this volume pinpoints the phenomena binding languages, scripts, and medial expressions to cultural and national identity. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a new critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing.

"The end of the Second World War saw the emergence in Italy of the neorealism movement, which produced a number of films characterized by stories set among the poor and working class, often shot on location using non-professional actors. In this study Christopher Wagstaff provides an in-depth analysis of neorealist film, focusing on three films that have had a major impact on filmmakers and audiences around the world: Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette. Indeed, these films are still, more than half a century after they were made, among the most highly regarded works in the history of cinema. In this insightful and carefully researched work, Wagstaff suggests that the importance of these films is largely due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled sounds and images rather than, as commonly thought, their particular representations of historical reality.The author begins by situating neorealist cinema in its historical, industrial, commercial, and cultural context. He goes on to provide a theoretical discussion of realism and the merits of neorealist films, individually and collectively, as aesthetic artefacts. He follows with a detailed analysis of the three films, focusing on technical and production aspects as well as on the significance of the films as cinematic works of art.While providing a wealth of information and analysis previously unavailable to an English-speaking audience, Italian Neorealist Cinema offers a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it."