"Disintegration in Frames" foregrounds the politics and aesthetics of Balkan cinema for both an academic audience and a more general readership. Levi's impressive command of contemporary cultural studies--its reading practices and theoretical perspectives--at once deepens and amplifies the work of other contemporary film scholars of Balkan cinema, providing a fresh perspective grounded in historiography."--Catherine Portuges, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"Although the post-Yugoslav war is today half-forgotten, it was never really accounted for: its murderous violence continues to haunt us all. Levi's analysis is one of the few serious attempts at understanding its ideological roots and investments. He does not approach the catastrophe directly, but through its echoes in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema. However, far from using cinema just as an external illustration, Levi provides an immanent analysis at the highest theoretical level, detecting ideological dimensions in stylistic shifts and formal procedures. The results are breathtaking. The complicity and involvement of many Yugoslav cineasts celebrated in the West, Emir Kusturica the first among them, is fully demonstrated. In this book, contemporary cinema has definitely lost its political innocence. A book not only for all those interested in today's cinema, but, perhaps even more, for all who want to understand explosions of ethnic violence--and our co-responsibility for it. There are no innocent bystanders in Levi's book!"--Slavoj Zizek

Cinema by Other Means explores an extraordinary history, stretching from the 1910s to the present: it is a study of various avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the tools, the materials, the technology, and the techniques, which either modify or are entirely different from those associated with the standard film apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde-Dada, Surrealism, Letterism, "structural-materialist" film, and more-the book tells the tale of the multiple conditions of cinema; of a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed, the "movies"-with or without directly grounding their work in the materials of film. Throughout, Levi considers works by filmmakers, artists, and theorists from all over Europe-France, Italy, Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary-with a special emphasis on the Yugoslav avant-garde. This is the first study to offer the English-language reader a thorough explication of an assortment of distinctly Yugoslav artistic phenomena, such as the Zenithist cine-writings of the 1920s, the proto-structural Antifilm movement of the early 1960s, and the "ortho-dialectical" film-poetry of the 1970s.

Jolted Images brings together a large cast of mainstream and avant-garde cineastes, artists, photographers, comics creators, poets, and more, to reflect on a wide range of phenomena from the realms of cinema and visual culture in the Yugoslav region, broader Europe, and North America. Far from a staid monograph, the book takes a cue from filmmaker Du?an Makavejev, who once wrote that there are times when it is necessary "to jolt art, no matter what the outcome"; to that end, the book infuses its analysis with playful, creative transfiguration of the material at hand.