A classic work that explores the nexus of the cinematic image and the human mind - at last available in English!

The emergence and spread of new images – photography, film, television and audiovisual – have brought about an important epistemological revolution that has encouraged contemporary man to have a new attitude of confidence not only towards the image but also to reality. The modern knowledge that exploded man’s certainties into hundreds of relative truths has been removed. The perfect doubling of reality offered by the new media has quietly eliminated doubt about the faithful restitution of reality into images, and, consequently, into the events of the outside world. Opposing this credulity, this mental breakdown as Joseph Conrad called it, we will need to recover the principles and themes of modern thought that came into existence in the Seventeenth century. This recovery will serve not only to oppose illusions and deceits, but also to understand the nature of the new images better.

As the director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, Terrence Malick has created a remarkable body of work that enables imaginative acts of philosophical interpretation. Steven Rybin's Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film looks closely at the dialogue between Malick's films and our powers of thinking, showing how his work casts the philosophy of thinkers such as Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Andr Bazin, Edgar Morin, and Immanuel Kant in new cinematic light. With a special focus on how the voices of Malick's characters move us to thought, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film offers new readings of his films and places Malick's work in the context of recent debates in the interdisciplinary field of film and philosophy. Rybin also provides a postscript on Malick's recently-released fifth film, The Tree of Life.

In this innovative book, Sarah Cooper revisits the history of film theory in order to bring to the fore the neglected concept of the soul and to trace its changing fortunes. The Soul of Film Theory charts the legacy of this multi-faceted, contested term, from the classical to the contemporary era.

“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”-Michael Foot, Observer Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.

Acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of 20th century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze not only because it recorded many of the centuries most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received.