This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. She offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity.

In Black and White Agnieszka Piotrowska presents a unique insight into the contemporary arts scene in Zimbabwe – an area that has received very limited coverage in research and the media. The book combines theory with literature, film, politics and culture and takes a psychosocial and psychoanalytic perspective to achieve a truly interdisciplinary analysis. Piotrowska focuses in particular on the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as well as the cinema, featuring the work of Rumbi Katedza and Joe Njagu. Her personal experience of time spent in Harare, working in collaborative relationships with Zimbabwean artists and filmmakers, informs the book throughout. It features examples of their creative work on the ground and examines the impact it has had on the community and the local media. Piotrowska uses her experiences to analyse concepts of trauma and post-colonialism in Zimbabwe and interrogates her position as a stranger there, questioning patriarchal notions of belonging and authority. Black and White also presents a different perspective on convergences in the work of Doris Lessing and iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and how it might be relevant to contemporary race relations. Black and White will be intriguing reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically engaged scholars, film makers, academics and students of post-colonial studies, film studies, cultural studies, psychosocial studies and applied philosophy.

Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured by new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as "worldbuilding," "virtual reality," and "transmedia" introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Fast Forward answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end. From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca Méndez's projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.

Burns (history, Clemson U.) examines the relationship between cinema and society in colonial Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial settler state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He discusses several aspects including production, distribution, censorship, and audience reception. He analyzes seventy years of public discussion regarding the appropriate role of cinema in colonial society, the attempt by the colonial state to use film as an instrument of social and cultural hegemony, and ways in which the state lost its control over the medium. Source material for the study included official and unofficial written documents and scores of films at the National Archives in Harare, as well as interviews with both black and white filmmakers and African audience members. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.