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.

"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.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong's work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors-from Freud to Proust, George Melies to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol-to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III is the third volume in a series examining the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart. Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue-collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. The results are staged and artificial, yet at the same time intimate and deeply human. Her newest museum installations also incorporate artworks and utilitarian objects made by others, expanding upon earlier forms of institutional critique. This book includes essays by curators and scholars who provide an international perspective on the artist's evolving series. Stunningly illustrated, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III serves as a reminder of the power and beauty of Lockhart's art.

In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil's early film culture helped to project a new image of the country.

Over the course of his career Werner Herzog, known for such visionary masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." Ferocious Reality is the first book to ask how this conviction, so hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world's most provocative documentarians. Herzog, whose Cave of Forgotten Dreams was perhaps the most celebrated documentary of 2010, may be the most influential filmmaker missing from major studies and histories of documentary. Examining such notable films as Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Grizzly Man (2005), Eric Ames shows how Herzog dismisses documentary as a mode of filmmaking in order to creatively intervene and participate in it. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog's career, Ames makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so. Thus his book expands the field of cinema studies even as it offers an invaluable new perspective on a little studied but integral part of Werner Herzog's extraordinary oeuvre.

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.

The new edition of an introduction to computer programming within the context of the visual arts, using the open-source programming language Processing; thoroughly updated throughout. The visual arts are rapidly changing as media moves into the web, mobile devices, and architecture. When designers and artists learn the basics of writing software, they develop a new form of literacy that enables them to create new media for the present, and to imagine future media that are beyond the capacities of current software tools. This book introduces this new literacy by teaching computer programming within the context of the visual arts. It offers a comprehensive reference and text for Processing (www.processing.org), an open-source programming language that can be used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and anyone who wants to program images, animation, and interactivity. Written by Processing's cofounders, the book offers a definitive reference for students and professionals. Tutorial chapters make up the bulk of the book; advanced professional projects from such domains as animation, performance, and installation are discussed in interviews with their creators. This second edition has been thoroughly updated. It is the first book to offer in-depth coverage of Processing 2.0 and 3.0, and all examples have been updated for the new syntax. Every chapter has been revised, and new chapters introduce new ways to work with data and geometry. New "synthesis" chapters offer discussion and worked examples of such topics as sketching with code, modularity, and algorithms. New interviews have been added that cover a wider range of projects. "Extension" chapters are now offered online so they can be updated to keep pace with technological developments in such fields as computer vision and electronics. Interviews SUE.C, Larry Cuba, Mark Hansen, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jurg Lehni, LettError, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Benjamin Maus, Manfred Mohr, Ash Nehru, Josh On, Bob Sabiston, Jennifer Steinkamp, Jared Tarbell, Steph Thirion, Robert Winter

This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for Suzanne Buchan's engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays' art-and into the art of independent puppet animation.
Buchan's aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers' artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design and illustration. She also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films' literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate out of their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.
At once a biography of the Quays' artistic trajectory and a detailed examination of one of their best-known films, "Street of Crocodiles," this book goes further and provides interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for the analysis of animation.

Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings - a video artist herself - reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, "pictures of nothing," but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.