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Post-cinema designates a new way of making films. It is time to ask
whether this novelty is complete or relative and to evaluate to
what extent it represents a unitary or diversified current. The
book proposes to integrate the post-cinema question within the
post-art question in order to study the new ways of making filmic
images. The issue will be considered at three levels: the
impression of post-art on "regular" films; the "relocation"
(Casetti) of the same films that can be seen using devices of all
kinds in conditions more or less removed from the dispositif of the
theater; the integration of cinema into contemporary art in all
kinds of forms of creation and exhibition, parallel to the
integration of contemporary art in "regular" cinema.
An essential guide to an essential book, this first anthology on
Camera Lucida offers critical perspectives on Barthes's influential
text. Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucida is perhaps the most
influential book ever published on photography. The terms studium
and punctum, coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding
to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of
photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the
relationship he forges between photography and death have been
invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current
interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective,
even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe
something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero, the first anthology
of writings on Camera Lucida, goes beyond the usual critical
orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important
book. Photography Degree Zero (the title links Barthes's first
book, Writing Degree Zero, to his last, Camera Lucida) includes
essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more
recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The
contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay
drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that
compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of
revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on
photography and an account of Camera Lucida and its reception; two
views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay
by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of
perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero, and the focus on
Camera Lucida in the context of photography rather than literature
or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's
influential work.
Most books about cinema, whether popular or academic, concentrate
on what we might call the "inside" of the film: from star
performances to narrative structures. The relatively few books
about the "outside" of films speak mainly of such aspects of
production and reception as the organization of the film industry
and the sociology of audiences: the Hollywood studio system, for
example, or fan clubs. "The Remembered Film" is unique in
addressing a previously overlooked aspect of cinema: the isolated
fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross
our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life.
Victor Burgin examines a kaleidoscope of film fragments drawn from
a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy. Among these
are sequences of such brevity they might almost be stills. Such
"sequence-images," as Burgin calls them, are neither strictly
"image" nor "image sequence" and have not been considered before by
either film or photography theory. He also considers some typical
individual experiences "sampled" from mainstream cinema. He
reflects on such disparate occurrences as the association in memory
of fragments from otherwise unrelated films, of the relation of a
recollected film image to an architectural setting, or of a feeling
"marked" by an image remembered from a film.
"The Remembered Film" provides a radical new way of thinking about
film outside conventional cinema, and in relation to our everyday
lives. It will appeal to a wide audience interested in film and
media.
Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on
issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries
that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an
original critical strategy. He understands images less in
traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them,
such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more
as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the
heterogeneous sources that together constitute the 'media'. Through
deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian
cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane
Sembene, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andre Breton, and
Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture
of images and spectacle. "In/Different Spaces" explores the
construction of identities in the psychical space between
perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories
to describe the constitution and maintenance of 'self' and 'us' -
in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to 'other' and 'them' -
through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is
never a transparent representation of the world but rather a
principal player on the stage of history.
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