This book is about the story behind the motions in movies. It is an epic adventure from silent, still, Black and White films to the colorful movies of today. That is our cue. Let’s get started. Ready the light sensitive silver, set the cameras and of course go with lots of ACTION

Human action analysis and recognition is a relatively mature field, yet one which is often not well understood by students and researchers. The large number of possible variations in human motion and appearance, camera viewpoint, and environment, present considerable challenges. Some important and common problems remain unsolved by the computer vision community. However, many valuable approaches have been proposed over the past decade, including the motion history image (MHI) method. This method has received significant attention, as it offers greater robustness and performance than other techniques. This work presents a comprehensive review of these state-of-the-art approaches and their applications, with a particular focus on the MHI method and its variants.

"Emanating from a colloquium in pre-Columbian art and archaeology held at the University of Chile in Santiago, cosponsored by Dumbarton Oaks, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (as a Cotsen Advanced Seminar), and the State University of New York at Binghamton, Images in Action presents interpretations of a large corpus of art and iconography from the Southern and South-Central Andes, bringing together some of the most esteemed scholars in the field. Thirty authors, all with extensive experience in the Southern Andes, examine artifacts, artworks, textiles, archaeology and architecture to develop creative new insights on the cultural interactions between people in prehistoric western South America. The volume's nearly 700 images are archived in an online database with metadata, fully referenced in the text, and searchable."--

Deleuze's two Cinema books explore film through the creation of a series of philosophical concepts. Not only bewildering in number, Deleuze's writing procedures mean his exegesis is both complex and elusive. Three questions emerge: What are the underlying principles of the taxonomy? How many concepts are there, and what do they describe? How might each be used in engaging with a film?David Deamer's book is the first to fully respond to these three questions, unearthing the philosophies inspiring Deleuze's classifications, exploring every concept and reading a film for each. Clearly and concisely mapping the Cinema books for newcomers to Deleuzian film studies, Deamer also opens up new areas of enquiry for expert readers.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

In Deleuze and Art Anne Sauvagnargues, one of the world's most renowned Deleuze scholars, offers a unique insight into the constitutive role played by art in the formation of Deleuze's thought. By reproducing Deleuze's social and intellectual references, Sauvagnargues is able to construct a precise map of the totality of Deleuze's work, pinpointing where key Deleuzian concepts first emerge and eventually disappear. This innovative methodology, which Sauvagnargues calls "periodization", provides a systematic historiography of Deleuze's philosophy that remains faithful to his affirmation of the principle of exteriority. By analyzing the external relations between Deleuze's self-proclaimed three philosophical periods, Sauvagnargues gives the reader an inside look into the conceptual and artistic landscape that surrounded Deleuze and the creation of his philosophy. With extreme clarity and precision, Sauvagnargues provides an important glimpse into Deleuze's philosophy by reconstructing the social and intellectual contexts that contributed to the trajectory of his thought. This book is the product of insightful and careful research, which has not been made available to English readers of Deleuze before now.

In recent years numerous films, television series, comic books, graphic novels and video games have featured time travel narratives, with characters jumping backward, forward and laterally through time. No rules govern time travel in these stories. Some characters move by machine, some by magic, others by unexplained means. Sometime travelers can alter the timeline, while others are prevented from causing temporal aberrations. The fluid forms of imagined time travel have fascinated audiences and prompted debate since at least the 19th century. What is behind our fascination with time travel? What does it mean to be out of one's own era? How do different media tell these stories and what does this reveal about the media's relationship to time? This collection of new essays--the first to address time travel across a range of media--answers these questions by locating time travel narratives within their cultural, historical and philosophical contexts. Texts discussed include Doctor Who, The Terminator, The Georgian House, Save the Date, Back to the Future, Inception, Source Code and others.

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.