Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself." "His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed -- in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929." "The book examines the chronology of the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the socio-historical circumstances in which this took place. It examines the principles of visualisation -- camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene -- that film-makers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the allimportant change that occurred in the imaginary placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image, implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909), to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject, completed only with the generalisation of lip-synch sound after 1929. It is the contention of this book that this imaginary centering of a sensorily isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago.

The textbook introduces students to basic geometric concepts, such as metrics, connections and curvature, before examining general relativity in more detail. It shows the observational evidence supporting the theory, and the description general relativity provides of black holes and cosmological spacetimes. --

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of image politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.

Among Asian countries--where until recently documentary filmmaking was largely the domain of central governments--Japan was exceptional for the vigor of its nonfiction film industry. And yet, for all its aesthetic, historical, and political interest, the Japanese documentary remains little known and largely unstudied outside of Japan. This is the first English-language study of the subject, an enlightening close look at the first fifty years of documentary film theory and practice in Japan. Beginning with films made by foreigners in the nineteenth century and concluding with the first two films made after Japan's surrender in 1945, Abe Mark Nornes moves from a "prehistory of the documentary, " through innovations of the proletarian film movement, to the hardening of style and conventions that started with the Manchurian Incident films and continued through the Pacific War. Nornes draws on a wide variety of archival sources--including Japanese studio records, secret police reports, government memos, letters, military tribunal testimonies, and more--to chart shifts in documentary style against developments in the history of modern Japan.

Cosmology: The Science of the Universe is an introduction to past and present cosmological theory. For much of the world's history, cosmological thought was formulated in religious or philosophical language and was thus theological or metaphysical in nature. However, cosmological speculation and theory has now become a science in which the empirical discoveries of the astronomer, theoretical physicist, and biologist are woven into intricate models that attempt to account for the universe as a whole. Professor Harrison draws on the discoveries and speculations of these scientists to provide a comprehensive survey of man's current understanding of the universe and its history. Tracing the rise of the scientific method, the major aim of this book is to provide an elementary understanding of the physical universe of modern times. Thoroughly revised and updated, this second edition extends the much acclaimed first edition taking into account the many developments that have occurred.

This invaluable book presents selected papers of S Chandrasekhar, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 and a scientific giant well known for his prolific and monumental contributions to astrophysics, physics and applied mathematics. The reader will find here most of Chandrasekhar's articles that led to major developments in various areas of physics and astrophysics. There are also articles of a popular and historical nature, as well as some hitherto unpublished material based on Chandrasekhar's talks at conferences. Each section of the book contains annotations by the editor.

A cyborg detective hunts for a malfunctioning sex doll that turns itself into a killing machine. A Heian-era Taoist slays evil spirits with magic spells from yin-yang philosophy. A young mortician carefully prepares bodies for their journey to the afterlife. A teenage girl drinks a cup of life-giving sake, not knowing its irreversible transformative power. These are scenes from the visually enticing, spiritually eclectic media of Japanese movies and anime. The narratives of courageous heroes and heroines and the myths and legends of deities and their abodes are not just recurring motifs of the cinematic fantasy world. They are pop culture’s representations of sacred subtexts in Japan. Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime. Part I introduces film semiotics with plain definitions of terminology. Through familiar cinematic examples, it emphasizes the myth-making nature of modern-day film and argues that semiotics can be used as a theoretical tool for reading film. Part II presents case studies of eight popular Japanese films as models of semiotic analysis. While discussing each film’s use of common mythological motifs such as death and rebirth, its case study also unveils more covert cultural signifiers and folktale motifs, including jizo (a savior of sentient beings) and kori (bewitching foxes and raccoon dogs), hidden in the Japanese filmic text.