In From Grain to Pixel, Giovanna Fossati analyzes the transition from analog to digital film and its profound effects on filmmaking and film archiving. Reflecting on the theoretical conceptualization of the medium itself, Fossati poses significant questions about the status of physical film and the practice of its archival preservation, restoration, and presentation. From Grain to Pixel attempts to bridge the fields of film archiving and academic research by addressing the discourse on film's ontology and analyzing how different interpretations of what film is affect the role and practices of film archives. By proposing a novel theorization of film archival practice, Fossati aims to stimulate a renewed dialogue between film scholars and film archivists. Almost a decade after its first publication, this revised edition covers the latest developments in the field. Besides a new general introduction, a new conclusion, and extensive updates to each chapter, a novel theoretical framework and an additional case study have been included.

The disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde films of Jesus "Jess" Franco, director of such films as Vampyros Lesbos and Lilian the Perverted Virgin. Jesus "Jess" Franco is an iconic figure in world cinema. His sexually charged, fearlessly personal style of filmmaking has never been in vogue with mainstream critics, but for lovers of the strange and sado-erotic he is a magician, spinning his unique and disturbing dream worlds from the cheapest of budgets. In the world of Jess Franco freedom was the key, and he pushed at the boundaries of taste and censorship repeatedly, throughout an astonishingly varied career spanning sixty years. The director of more than 180 films, at his most prolific he worked in a supercharged frenzy that yielded as many as twelve titles per year, making him one of the most generative auteurs of all time. Franco's taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade, and his roving hand-held camera style launched a whole new strain of erotic cinema. Disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde, films such as Necronomicon, Vampyros Lesbos, Virgin Among the Living Dead, and Venus in Furs are among the jewels of European horror, while a plethora of multiple versions, re-edits and echoes of earlier works turn the Franco experience into a dizzying hall of mirrors, further entrancing the viewer who dares enter Franco's domain. Stephen Thrower has devoted five years to examining each and every Franco film. This book-the second in a two-volume set-delves into the latter half of Franco's career, covering titles including Shining Sex, Barbed Wire Dolls, Swedish Nympho Slaves, and Lilian the Perverted Virgin. Assisted by the esteemed critic and researcher Julian Grainger, Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews, and production histories. Unparalleled in scope and ambition, Flowers of Perversion brings Franco's career into focus with a landmark study that aims to provide the definitive assessment of Jess Franco's labyrinthine film universe.

Fiona Tan is one of the most distinctive contemporary artists working in film and video. Her work moves between documentation and fiction, biography and fantasy. In using historical and ethnographic film material, Tan shows portraits of individuals and groups from different cultural backgrounds and social strata. "Mirror Maker" includes important works dating from the last eight years.

Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art's historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.

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.