Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

A multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. In exchange for studying what each fraudulent cell looks like under a merciless commercial and commodified lens, viewers enable late-capitalism to run more smoothly by calling in with their votes, as is the case with Reality TV. From the inside, secrecy appears eradicated, as though secrets or coded transparencies comprise the totality of injustice, rather than just one part. Justice is reduced to a vantage point. We see and we see and we see ad infinitum. -from Picture Cycle With her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters (2007), Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melded film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn's multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten-year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and offscreen, predigital and postdigital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life's biographies through images.

A generously illustrated look at the intricate narrative threads of three of the artist's earliest works, and their continued resonance today Celebrated for works blending performance, video, and sculpture, Matthew Barney has created complex narratives that emerge across series since his earliest exhibitions. Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy is the first book to trace the progression of three significant early projects-Facility of INCLINE, Facility of DECLINE, and OTTOshaft- and to reveal the narrative system that links them. Titled after former football player Jim Otto, the series explores the training, discipline, and physical limits of the body alongside questions of sexual difference and desire. Featuring an illuminating introduction by Nancy Spector; an essay by Maggie Nelson on the works' exploration of psychology, bodies, image-making, narrative, and abstraction; and a new text by the artist, this generously illustrated volume includes previously unpublished artist's sketches, behind-the-scenes photographs, research material, and video stills. It is the definitive publication on this important series, and offers a key to understanding many of the themes that thread throughout Barney's oeuvre. Distributed for the Gladstone Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Gladstone Gallery, New York (09/08/16-10/22/16)

UDON Entertainment is back with an all-new classy compilation of the creative studio's Capcom artwork! This prestigous 300-page hardcover volume gathers UDON's artists' renditions of the casts of Street Fighter, Mega Man, Darkstalkers, and other classic Capcom franchises. Included are comic covers, video game endings, promotional art, costume designs, tribute art, and much more!

While cinema is a medium with a unique ability to "watch life" and "write movement," it is equally singular in its portrayal of death. The first study to unpack American cinema's long history of representing death, this book considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera and connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth century.

C. Scott Combs analyzes films that stretch from cinema's origins to the end of the twentieth century, looking at attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voiceover or images of medical technology. Through films such as Thomas Edison's "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903), D. W. Griffith's "The Country Doctor" (1909), John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" (1941), Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), Stanley Kubrick's " 2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), and Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" (2004), Combs argues that the end of dying occurs more than once, in more than one place. Working against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life because it cannot stop moving forward, that it cannot induce the photographic fixity of the death instant, this book argues that the place of death in cinema is persistently in flux, wedged between technological precision and embodied perception. Along the way, Combs consolidates and reconceptualizes old and new debates in film theory.

The color films of French film director Robert Bresson (1901-99) have largely been neglected, despite the fact that Bresson himself considered them to be more fully realized reflections of his aspirations for the cinema. This study presents a revised and revitalized Bresson, comparing his late style to painterly innovations in color, light, and iconography from the Middle Ages to the present, to abstract painting in France after World War II, and to affinities with the avant-garde movements of Surrealism, Constructivism, and Minimalism. Drawing on media archeology, this study views Bresson's work through such allied visual arts practices as painting, photography, sculpture, theater, and dance.

"Cinematic Appeals" follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen cinema promised to draw the viewer into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. This technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with the viewer's physical response and more with information flow, awe, and the reevaluation of spatiality and embodiment. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time.

Darksiders: Genesis is an action/adventure game that tears its way through hordes of demons, angels, and everything in-between on its way to Hell and back with guns blazing and swords swinging. Showcasing the introduction of the Horseman Strife and the return of his brother War, Genesis gives players their first look at the world of Darksiders before the events of the Apocalypse. The Art of Darksiders Genesis gathers the epic artwork behind this unique new installment in the franchise, and includes character designs, rough concepts, environments, storyboards, and more. Darksiders Genesis also heralds the return of series creator Joe Madureira (Battle Chasers, Uncanny X-men) alongside his development studio, Airship Syndicate.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today's interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting 'old' or even 'dead' media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding 'new' media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.