Since the development of film as an artistic medium in the 1890s, there has been an inherent tension between still photographic images and moving cinematic images, from their form and function to the messages they convey and their impact on the beholder and on culture at large. This volume, one of the first book-length works to analyze, critique, and further the international debate about the meaning and use of motion and stillness in film and photography, takes these concepts out of the theoretical arena of cinematic studies and applies them to the wider and ever-changing landscape of images and media. With contributions from such acclaimed international scholars as Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B. N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom, and Christa Blümlinger, these collected essays examine the strategic uses of stillness and motion in art from the mid-nineteenth century to the technologically driven present.

"In The Art of Stillness, Iyer draws on the lives of well-known wanderer-monks like Cohen--as well as from his own experiences as a travel writer who chooses to spend most of his time in rural Japan--to explore why advances in technology are making us more likely to retreat. Iyer reflects that this is perhaps the reason why many people--even those with no religious commitment--seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi. These aren't New Age fads so much as ways to rediscover the wisdom of an earlier age."--Publisher's description.

Stillness in Motion brings together the writing of scholars, theorists, and artists on the uneasy relationship between Italian culture and photography. Highlighting the depth and complexity of the Italian contribution to the technology and practice of photography, this collection offers essays, interviews, and theoretical reflections at the intersection of comparative, visual, and cultural studies. Its chapters, illustrated with more than 130 black and white images and an eight-page colour section, explore how Italian literature, cinema, popular culture, and politics have engaged with the medium of photography over the course of time. The collection includes topics such as Futurism's ambivalent relationship to photography, the influence of American photography on Italian neorealist cinema, and the connection between the photograph and Duchamp's concept of the Readymade. With contributions from writer and theorist Umberto Eco, photographer Franco Vaccari, art historian Robert Valtorta, and cultural historian Robert Lumley, Stillness in Motion engages with crucial historical and cultural moments in Italian history, examining each one through particular photographic practices.

Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that to collect things, however, always entails displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.

An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness. Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning. Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her thirteen-year waitressing job and said “yes,” despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, “I got you.” Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of “I am not enough.” Jen will help readers find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.

This foundation volume presents a unique integration of the wide spectrum of approaches to Cranio-Sacral Therapy, providing practitioners and students with a broad and authoritative understanding of the discipline. The author covers the fundamentals of theory as well as the practical skills and techniques needed to carry out Cranio-Sacral work, and the book also includes detailed instructions for treatments, all of which are clearly explained in extensive case histories, photographs and illustrations. Based upon the syllabus of the College of Cranio-Sacral Therapy in London, UK, this is an unparalleled resource for practitioners of Cranio-Sacral Therapy and Cranial Osteopathy, and an essential reference for students.

As the building blocks of moving pictures, photographs have played an integral role in cinema since the dawn of the medium—a relationship that has grown more complexly connected even as the underlying technologies continue to evolve. Moving Frames explores the use of photographs in German films from Expressionism to the Berlin School, addressing the formal and narrative roles that photographs play as well as the cultural and historical contexts out of which these films emerged. Looking beyond and within the canon, the editors gather stimulating new insights into the politics of surveillance, resistance, representation, and collective memory functioning through photographic rupture and affect in German cinema.

Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiri Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks? Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kríženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic function and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age. The specific clashes between the figurative and material spheres are understood through the concept of a “crack-up.” This term, developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and theoretically reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, allows us to capture the convoluted relationship between figuration and materiality as inherent to the medium of film, containing negativity and productivity, difference and simultaneity, contingency and fate, at the same time, even within the tiniest cinematic units.