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  3. Film Culture in Transition

Film Culture in Transition is committed to a diverse range of approaches and to stimulating cutting-edge debates on the complex interdependence of cinema, other media and screen culture at large. While putting the emphasis on current work in film theory and media history, the series also feature studies on new forms of authorship, image politics and media art. With a strong tradition in European and North American cinema, we are welcoming innovative book projects on the diversity of film cultures in a global perspective.

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8 results in Film Culture in Transition

New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch
  • A Light Touch
  • Edited by Brigitte Peucker, Ido Lewit
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 April 2024
    Print publication:
    01 March 2024
  • This exciting collection of unpublished essays on Ernst Lubitsch addresses multiple gaps in scholarly and critical engagement with the director. His understudied early German films shed light on Jewish culture, on the relation of comedy to gender and the influence of theatre on his filmmaking. The popular historical epics brought Lubitsch an invitation to Hollywood in 1922. There, Lubitsch helped develop the film musical and notably contributed to the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy. The well-known scholars - film historians, archivists, and theorists - whose essays appear in this volume expand our knowledge of the set designers, actors, directors and members of the emigré community who contributed to Lubitsch's vibrant films. An emphasis on the role of material objects opens up a new dimension of critical engagement with the director. Light is shed on neglected films, and the antifascist dimension of his oeuvre brings his political stance clearly to light. As these essays make clear, Lubtisch's cinema is elusive and deserving of our close attention.

Performative Images
  • A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France
  • Edited by Anaïs Nony
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 February 2024
    Print publication:
    16 October 2023
  • Performative Images draws upon the work of video artists and activists in France between the 1970s and the early 2020s and focuses on significant practices with technology. Video art and video activism are analysed together in the book to reevaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. The book engages works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. Performative Images is about art and activists' engagement in video technology - an engagement that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media, as well as the apparently politically neutral dimension of communication technology. In this book, the author explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics.

Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema
  • Owen Lyons
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 February 2024
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • After the First World War, the effects of financial crisis could be felt in all corners of the newly formed Weimar Republic. The newly interconnected world economy was barely understood and yet it was increasingly made visible in the films of the time. The complexities of this system were reflected on screen to both the everyday spectator as well as a new class of financial workers who looked to popular depictions of speculation and crisis to make sense of their own place on the shifting ground of modern life. Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema turns to the many underexamined depictions of finance capital that appear in the films of 1920s Germany. The representation of finance capital in these films is essential to our understanding of the culture of the Weimar Republic - particularly in the relation between finance and ideas of gender, nation and modernity. As visual records, these films reveal the stock exchange as a key space of modernity and coincide with the abstraction of finance as a vast labour of representation in its own right. In so doing, they introduce core visual tropes that have become essential to our understanding of finance and capitalism throughout the twentieth century.

Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts
  • Edited by Teri Higgins, Catherine Fowler
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 June 2023
    Print publication:
    14 February 2023
  • This collection departs from the observation that online forms of communication - the email, blog, text message, tweet - are actually haunted by old epistolary forms: the letter and the diary. By examining the omnipresence of writing across a variety of media, the collection adds the category of Epistolary Screens to genres of self-expression, both literary (letters, diaries, auto-biographies) and screenic (romance dramas, intercultural cinema, essay films, artists' videos and online media). The category Epistolary encapsulates an increasingly paradoxical relation between writing and the self: first, it describes selves that are written in graphic detail via letters, diaries, blogs, texts, emails and tweets; second, it acknowledges that absence complicates communication, bringing people together in an entangled rather than ordered way. The collection concerns itself with the changing visual/textual texture of screen media and examines what is at stake for our understanding of self-expression when it takes Epistolary forms.

Hands on Film
  • Actants, Aesthetics, Affects
  • Barry Monahan
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 November 2022
    Print publication:
    14 July 2022
  • Hands on Film is a comprehensive study of the representations and uses of that human limb from the birth of cinema to contemporary times. It examines how filmmakers have framed the hand for a variety of effects, from stylistic to thematic, and for the development of characterisation and narrative. The book offers insights into how films have created meaning by focusing on that part of the anatomy and, in turn, proposes a variety of ways in which its on-screen appearances might shed light on what it means to be sentient, cultured, and creative beings in the world.

Screening the Art World
  • Edited by Temenuga Trifonova
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 May 2022
    Print publication:
    15 February 2022
  • Unlike most studies of the relationship between cinema and art, which privilege questions of medium or institutional specificity and intermediality, Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject - art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema - by considering films across genres, historical periods and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of ‘art’ and ‘the art world’. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema, cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as ‘truth’ and what this means for cinema’s understanding of itself, the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen, and cinematic representations of the art world’s tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.

Postwar Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960
  • New Faces, New Values
  • Mats Björkin
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 January 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2021
  • During the 1950s, companies aiming for international markets demanded new theories and methods of communication. Ideas regarding cybernetics, systems analysis, new accounting practices, and budgetary principles, as well as theories of information, communication, marketing, public relations, and organization were discussed at conferences, seminars, and courses, and in articles and books. At the same time, new technologies changed corporate communication, from a loose-leaf accounting system to mechanical and electronic business machines, from written texts and oral presentations to slide shows, audio tapes, films, television, and flannelgraphs. By looking at a vast array of objects and relations related to uses of media technologies in Swedish industry from the end of World War II to the breakthrough of television, this book shows what happened in the glitches between mass communication and interaction, and how Swedish postwar industry worked to disrupt established understandings of communication.

Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History
  • Patricia Emison
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    19 October 2021
    Print publication:
    17 August 2021
  • Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas - not least the idea of the power of visual art - across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, 1920s-mid-60s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, narrative and visual composition shifted in both cases toward acknowledging the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates and preoccupations are part of the story told here.