This collection examines two recent phenomena: the return of realist tendencies and practices in world cinema and television, and the 'rehabilitation' of realism in film and media theory. The contributors investigate these two phenomena in detail, querying their origins, relations, divergences and intersections from a variety of perspectives.

The 2002 theme of 'Northern Lights' is dedicated to the representation of reality in film, TV and new media -- a question of new importance in modern film and media, where a new wave of realism has dominated cinema and reality -- TV became a mass phenomena on both TV and the internet. Eleven articles by Danish, British, and American film and media researchers focus on two sub-themes: 'Film and Realism' deals theoretically with film realism and analyses classic films and modern Danish Dogma films; 'Documentary Forms, Reality TV and New Media' treats new forms of non-fiction film, TV and on the internet in a both theoretical and historical perspective.

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in images" to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.

Highlights the industries, markets, identities, and histories that distinguish cinema beyond the traditional hubs of mainstream Western cinema. From Iceland to Iran, from Singapore to Scotland, a growing intellectual and cultural wave of production is taking cinema beyond the borders of its place of origin--exploring faraway places, interacting with barely known peoples, and making new localities imaginable. In these films, previously entrenched spatial divisions no longer function as firmly fixed grid coordinates, the hierarchical position of place as "center" is subverted, and new forms of representation become possible. In Cinema at the Periphery, editors Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal assemble criticism that explores issues of the periphery, including questions of transnationality, place, space, passage, and migration. Cinema at the Periphery examines the periphery in terms of locations, practices, methods, and themes. It includes geographic case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins, like New Zealand and Scotland, but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian "stateless" cinema, Australian Aboriginal films, and cinema from Quebec. Therefore, the volume is divided into two key areas: industries and markets on the one hand, and identities and histories on the other. Yet as a whole, the contributors illustrate that the concept of "periphery" is not fixed but is always changing according to patterns of industry, ideology, and taste. Cinema at the Periphery highlights the inextricable interrelationship that exists between production modes and circulation channels and the emerging narratives of histories and identities they enable. In the present era of globalization, this timely examination of the periphery will interest teachers and students of film and media studies.

World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to the film medium's material bond with the real. Starting from the premise that world cinema's creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction.

This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of 'world cinema' with the more substantive concept of 'realist cinema'. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: 'non-cinema', or a cinema that aspires to be life itself; 'intermedial passages', or films that incorporate other artforms as a channel to historical and political reality; and 'total cinema', or films moved by a totalising impulse, be it towards the total artwork, total history or universalising landscapes. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, proving that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.

Bespreking van het werk van de Deense filmregisseur (1956- ).

American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.

Over the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective, and the claim “doing philosophy through film” has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the most prominent philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy. Regarding this background, this volume brings together the best papers from the Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film, held in 2014. What they all have in common is the discussion of new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at film’s ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book explores grasp film’s nature philosophically, and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker, as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons.

This collection explores the emergence of new spatialities and subjectivities in Brazilian films produced from the 1990s onwards, a period that became known as the retomada, but especially in the cinema of the new millennium. The chapters take spatiality as a powerful tool that can reveal aesthetic, political, social, and historical meanings of the cinematographic image instead of considering space as just a formal element of a film. From the rich cross-fertilization of different theories and disciplines, this edited collection engages with the connection between space and subjectivity in Brazilian cinema while raising new questions concerning spatiality and subjectivity in cinema and providing new models and tools for film analysis.