The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies

by Kolker, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780195175967
• ISBN10: 0195175964
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This handbook examines film and new media in the light of their convergence. It draws on leading scholars in the field to discuss traditional areas of history and theory of film and digital media. Its focus, however, is on the cycle of technologically driven arts. Film was born of a number ofexperiments in reproducing motion, all of which culminated in the nineteenth-century projection of short films. The creation of digital media resulted from experiments in alternative forms of representation in the early 1960s. John Whitney began creating avant-garde films from digital graphicsaround 1960 (and some of his ideas and methods were incorporated by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). By the early 1990s, commercial filmmakers began to employ digital effects in their work. By the late nineties, digital arts had come fully into their own, both in the form of stand-alone orinteractive artworks and films created with and for the computer. At the same time, digital effects had completely overtaken optical printing and matte painting in film. From special effects to creating "realistic" backgrounds and crowds, the digital is infiltrating all aspects of filmmaking. Theinfiltration is about to become a takeover, as celluloid is replaced by high definition digital recording and projection processes. Many aspects of film will change as this latest convergence takes place. Already, cultural response to film has changed as viewers begin to teach themselves about filmthrough supplementary material on DVDs and to make their own films on home computers. But this handbook is not a technical history or manual. Quite the contrary, it is a scholarly work discussing the aesthetics, economics, and cultural results of these changes and convergences. The book balancestraditional scholarship and analysis with essays addressing technological change and the concurrent changes in cultural responses to these changes, responses already acknowledged by the profession.

Author Biography

Robert Kolker has been teaching film for almost 40 years. He received his PhD in 18th Century English Literature from Columbia University, but moved quickly from literary to film criticism, beginning with a career interview with the documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles published in the British Film journal Sight and Sound) and has continued publishing in film and media to the present day. He has just published an introductory textbook in Media Studies and is currently writing a book on postwar American film, The Extraordinary Image. It will be a prequel to A Cinema of Loneliness.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Jay David Bolter, Digital Media and the Future of Filmic Narrative 2. Brian Price, The Last Laocoon 3. Devin Orgeron, Visual Media and the Tyranny of the Real 4. Francis Guerin, Radical Aspirations Historicized: The European Commitment to Political Documentary 5. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, Loss of Light: The Long Shadow of Photography in the Digital Age 6. Marsha Orgeron, Media Celebrity in the Age of the Image 7. Paul Young, Film Genre Theory and Contemporary Media: Description, Interpretation, Intermediality 8. Toby Miller and Mariana Johnson, The Who, What, When, Where, And How-Gilda Says Textual Analysis Needs To Learn From Political Economy And Ethnography 9. William Uricchio, Television's First 75 Years: The Interpretive Flexibility Of A Medium In Transition 10. Tara McPherson, "The end of TV as we know it": Convergence, Anxiety, Generic Innovation, and the Case of 24 11. John Caldwell, Screen Practice and Conglomeration: How Reflexivity and Conglomeration Fuel Each Other 12. Evans Chan, The Chinese Action Image and Postmodernity 13. Joseph Schaub, When Cute Becomes Scary: The Young Female in Japanese Horror Cinema 14. Gina Marchetti, Asian Film and Digital Culture 15. Manjunath Pendakur, Popular Cinema and "New" Media in India 16. Cristina Venegas, Dreaming With Open Eyes: Latin American Media in the Digital Age 17. Andrew Flibbert, The Globalization of Filmmaking in Latin America and the Middle East 18. David Golumbia, Computers and Cultural Studies 19. Warren Buckland, Film and Media Studies Pedagogy 20. Peter Jaszi, Copyright, Fair Use, and Motion Pictures Appendix I. Tom Bernard, Evolution of Modern Day Independent Film Making Appendix II. Lee Berger & Richard Hollander, The Digital Revolution