First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape. The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over cinema: the "digitalphobes" who lament the implosion of cinema and the "digitalphiles" who celebrate its new, vital incarnation. Throughout, they remind readers that cinema has never been a static medium but a series of processes and transformations powering a dynamic art. From their perspective, the digital revolution is the eighth major crisis in the history of motion pictures, with more disruptions to come. Brokering a peace among all sides, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the cultural practice of cinema over rigid claims on its identity, moving toward a common conception of cinema to better understand where it is headed next.

Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape. The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over cinema: the "digitalphobes" who lament the implosion of cinema and the "digitalphiles" who celebrate its new, vital incarnation. Throughout, they remind readers that cinema has never been a static medium but a series of processes and transformations powering a dynamic art. From their perspective, the digital revolution is the eighth major crisis in the history of motion pictures, with more disruptions to come. Brokering a peace among all sides, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the cultural practice of cinema over rigid claims on its identity, moving toward a common conception of cinema to better understand where it is headed next.

Describing editing as cinema's formal and aesthetic soul because of its ability to represent time, in this wide-ranging essay Jacques Aumont surveys the theory and practice of editing and montage from early cinema to the digital era. Aumont addresses the Soviet filmmaker-theorists of the 1920s, of course - he is a translator of Eisenstein and the author of a book on Eisenstein's montage - but also brings into the discussion contemporary directors such as Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Aleksandr Sokurov, Kathryn Bigelow and Lisandro Alonso, with stops along the way for the ideas of Andre Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This original essay is essential reading by one of the leading film scholars at work in the world today and a rare opportunity for English speakers to enjoy his work. This expanded and revised edition adds a dozen pages to the original volume. "We have entered into a period in which the reign of vision has become contested by that of the image, with the result that editing has changed nature, because its job is no longer to regulate a succession of shots as much as it is to regulate a succession of images. And while the shot has a responsibility towards reality, the image is responsible only to itself." - Jacques Aumont

Originally issued in hardcover in 1996 by Garland Publishing, this important reference work is now available in paperback for a wider audience. A distinguished team of contributors has compiled entries on 140 significant South American feature films from the silent era until 1994. The entries discuss each film's subject matter, critical reception, and social and political contexts, as well as its production, distribution, and exhibition history, including technical credits. The entries are grouped by country and arranged chronologically. Both fiction and documentary films (some no longer in existence) are included, as well as extensive title, name, and subject indexes and glossaries of film and foreign terms.

Establishing a new vision for film history, "Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema" urges readers to consider the importance of complex social and cultural forces in early film. Andre Gaudreault argues that Edison and the Lumieres did not invent cinema; they invented a device. Explaining how this device, the kinematograph, gave rise to cinema is the challenge he sets for himself in this volume. He highlights the forgotten role of the film lecturer and examines film's relationship with other visual spectacles in fin-de-siecle culture, from magic sketches to fairy plays and photography to vaudeville. In reorienting the study of film history, Film and Attraction offers a candid reassessment of Georges Melies' rich oeuvre and includes a new, unabridged translation of Melies' famous 1907 text "Kinematographic Views." A foreword by Rick Altman stresses the relevance of Gaudreault's concerns to Anglophone film scholarship.