In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson trial, what is to count as history, and how can it be recounted? The Persistence of History is an anthology of essays from major film scholars and historians which focuses on a radical contemporary challenge to historical representation in film. This challenge is brought about by what the collection terms "the modernist event" - novel historical occurrences unthinkable before the 20th century and raised to visibility, if not intelligibility, through the mass mediations of film and television. Contributors: Robert Burgoyne, Thomas Elsaesser, Sumiko Higashi, Bill Nichols, Patrice Petro, Dana Polan, Shawn Rosenheim, Robert Rosenstone, Janet Staiger, Frank Tomasulo, Hayden White, Denise Youngblood.

Two thousand years ago, Ovid asked his readers to imagine metamorphoses in which men and women became flowers and beasts. Today, before our cinema-savvy eyes, people melt and re-form as altogether new creatures: they "morph." This volume explores what digital morphing means -- both as a cultural practice specific to our times and as a link to a much broader history of images of human transformation.

Meta-Morphing ranges over topics that include turn-of-the-century "quick-change" artists, Mesoamerican shamanic transformation, and cosmetic surgery; recent works such as Terminator 2, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Heavenly Creatures, and Forrest Gump; and the transformations imagined by Kafka, Proust, and Burroughs. The contributors look not only at the technical wizardry behind digital morphing, but also at the history and cultural concerns it expresses.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

This text attempts to shape definitions of the American science fiction film, studying the connection between the films and social preconceptions. It covers many classic films and discusses their import, seeking to rescue the genre from the neglect of film theorists. The book should appeal to both film buff and fans of science fiction.

Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle. But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, Robert Miklitsch curates a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes. Contributors analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women's pulp fiction, and investigate topics as disparate as Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers' collective reconsideration shows the impact of race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality on the genre. As bracing as a stiff drink, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands writes the future of noir scholarship in lipstick and chalk lines for film fans and scholars alike. Contributors: Krin Gabbard, Philippa Gates, Julie Grossman, Robert Miklitsch, Robert Murphy, Mark Osteen, Vivian Sobchack, Andrew Spicer, J. P. Telotte, and Neil Verma.

New Chinese Cinemas analyzes the changing forms and significance of filmmaking in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong since the end of the Cultural Revolution, with a particular emphasis on how film comments on the profound social changes that have occurred in East Asia over the past two decades. Considering in detail both conservative and progressive stances on economic modernization, it also demonstrates how film has been an important formal structure and social document in the interpretation of these changes. The essays collected here, which were specially commissioned for this volume, also offer extended analyses of the important trends, styles, and work that define Chinese filmmaking in the 1980s.