Japanese film is enduringly fascinating, challenging and rewarding. This book provides a cultural, historical and philosophical study of Japanese film, from the silent era to the present, focusing on its expansive consciousness. The author examines masterpieces by Yasujir? Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima and many other directors, discussing their influence on the Japanese culture of esoteric Zen Buddhism and relating them to recent neuroscientific theories of brain trauma.

Are people nothing more than their physical capital - what their bodies can produce and provide? This philosophical treatise examines the idea of mutational bodies as it has appeared in fiction and cinema since the industrial era, theorizing that capitalism and other modern collective systems require transformations both literal and figurative for the individual to survive. Infringements on individualism include both the concept of eternity, which asks that we resign ourselves to life and death as endless waiting, and the Hegelian dialectic itself, which has been reversed by neoconservative thinkers into a new conviction that the rich are oppressed by the poor. In response, the author suggests the inauguration of a post-dialectic ""ethical materialism."" Subjects considered in this book include the films of Charlie Kaufman and Stan Brakhage, the fiction of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, the feminist art criticism of Lucy Lippard, and the meanings of virtuality and the internet.

Nicolas Winding Refn has emerged as a uniquely talented international filmmaker with an eye for visceral, iconic images. A 21st century mythmaker from his cult Pusher trilogy to the award-winning Drive and Only God Forgives, Refn infuses a sophisticated avant-garde sensibility with the grit of exploitation cinema. This book relates Refn's films to the ideas of Nietzsche, Canetti, Blanchot and others, and to aesthetic theory in general. It also asks why the West has become a largely artificial society, unable to generate new communal mythologies.

The early surrealists attempted to create art directly from the unconscious, but the resulting art often reveals the stamp of its age. It is generally accepted that a certain macho sensibility prevailed within the movement, excluding queer sensibilities and reducing women to object status. In startling new readings of Breton, Bataille, Cocteau, Artaud, Crevel and others, Justin Vicari examines the intersections between surrealism and mental illness, deploying an interdisciplinary approach, which includes aesthetic theory, radical politics, and psychoanalysis. Of particular interest is the representation of the ideal woman as not only sexually available but mentally ill, a hysteric muse representing a kind of "authenticity" lost in modern life.

Beloved, controversial, influential, the creator of such fascinating and award-winning films as My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, and Milk, Gus Van Sant stands among the great international directors, equally at home in Hollywood and the avant-garde. Examining his films thematically, this book finds consistency of vision in Van Sant's unique approach to cinema, which deploys postmodernist techniques such as appropriation, nonlinear narrative, and queering--not in the service of the chic but to apply an all-inclusive viewpoint to ageless tales of life, love and death. Van Sant's films are viewed through a multi-genre prism, including the work of Bruce Weber and Derek Jarman, the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, the music of the Velvet Underground and Nirvana, the fiction of Sam D'Allesandro, and especially the ""cut-up""/collage practice of intertextual authorship pioneered by William Burroughs.

A rejection of reductive labels and essentialist sexual identities, bisexuality has become a new frontier of sexual freedom, particularly for males, for whom it often represents transcendence of rigid patriarchal roles. Since 1990, there has been an explosion of international films about male bisexuality. This book addresses over a dozen films and filmmakers in an attempt to address the complexities of portraying male bisexuality on screen. Topics covered include bisexuality as an adaptation to harsh socioeconomic structures, a liberation from traditional relationship structures, and a continuation of the youth rebellion of the 1960's. In all of these films, male bisexuality is treated both as an actual practice and as a metaphor to be explored in myriad ways.]

In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author Fran?ois Emmanuel shows his indebtedness to the great poetic iconoclasts of the French language -- not least Charles Baudelaire, after whose famous poem this book was named.