Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion challenge the prognosis that cinema is dying, arguing that cinema has always been more an "evolving patchwork of federated cultural series" than a static form with a fixed identity. In a discussion ranging from early cinema, of which today's media landscape a century later is an eerie reflection, to opera films in local movie theatres to the "return of cinema's repressed" - animation, and now performance capture - The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems lays out a roadmap for negotiating the issues that will confront cinema in the years ahead as it increasingly mingles with other media. In the process the authors coin another neologism in their extensive repertoire, the "kinematic," or the shift from the medium cinema to a convergence of moving image media, one that will engender a major "turn" in study of the field. This expanded second edition includes a lengthy interview with the authors on the developments in their thinking since this volume was first published.

Nice monograph intended to serve the practical needs of graduate students and researchers. Detail and coverage in good balance; in seven chapters treats relativistic fundamentals, the kinematics of two-particle and three-particle decays, multiple hadron production (including statistical, thermodynamics and hydrodynamic models) and related topics. For the price (which will keep the book out of the hands of many of those to whom it is addressed) one might have expected professionally-drawn figures and mathematical typography a bit easier on the eye. (NW) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR