The most extensive examination yet of control across disciplines and cultural modes of expression showing that control is the cultural logic of the 21st century

Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique explores cinema in relation to the critical tradition in modern philosophy and its heritage in Romantic aesthetics. Synthesising a variety of discursive fields and traditions - including Early German Romanticism, Frankfurt School critical theory and the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière - Film, Negation and Freedom outlines a radical new approach to film by re-examining the work of Arthur Penn and Lindsay Anderson. A distinction between Light and Dark Romanticism is introduced as a means of interpreting cinema's relationship with capitalism, as well as dualistic concepts such as stillness and motion, passivity and activity, pain and pleasure. Film, Negation and Freedom revitalises our understanding of modern audio-visual media, as well as the aesthetic, philosophical and political conditions of Romantic subjectivity, artistic practice and spectatorship.

Today the media arts not only address the great themes of our times, they inhabit the very media of which they speak. The contemporary is global, but only because of the media that enable globalisation. Those media are almost nowhere apparent in the mainstream practice of art that we see in biennials from Venice to Sao Paolo. The media arts reflect back to us our present condition, and in the archive present us with the ghosts of what we were, and what we failed to become. This book brings the reader into the centre of these strange encounters, introducing us to the rich legacies and futures of the most important arts of the last hundred years. It also looks ahead to the future and asks what happens to the condition of being human within the new constellation into which we are entering?

This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

In this profusely illustrated meditation on the phenomenon of "museum cinema," the screening of films in art museums, Garrett Stewart explores the aesthetic and formal issues raised by the proliferation of screens and films in museums in the digital era. Taking up dozens of screen artifacts over the last six decades, from 16mm loops to CCTV montage, Cinesthesia investigates in exemplary depth an array of landmark innovations from the 1960s down through the latest conceptualist exhibitions. Probing and comparative at once, it is the first study to place individual works under close formal and cultural analysis, and in steady dialogue with each other, not just as intrinsic experimental ventures but as medial challenges: challenges both to their parent forms and genres (theatrical film, broadcast TV) and to the contemplative aesthetic of museum looking. The kinetics of watching are found in this way, repeatedly and often ironically, to reroute or even derange – and ultimately to reform – the apprehending gaze. Cinesthesia includes 44 full-page colour illustrations by nearly 30 artists, including Christian Marclay, Tacita Dean, John Akomfrah, Rodney Graham, Eve Sussman and Matej Kren. "How is it – by what aesthetic criteria – that we, in ticketed public space, go to see film without going to the movies? What happens, that is, when screening times are replaced by the intermittent and elective time of transient viewing in sectored zones of a gallery layout? What new (audio-) visual parameters, in other words, are set in place when moving-image work finds itself welcomed into the environs of the proverbial 'fine' (or plastic) arts?" — Garrett Stewart

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.

Black Screens, White Frames offers a new understanding of blank screens in cinema. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy and pursuing an affirmative approach to non-images through the concept of the filmmaking machine, author Tanya Shilina-Conte shows how absence can be a productive mode that alters the way we study film.

The most extensive examination yet of control across disciplines and cultural modes of expression âe"" showing that control is the cultural logic of the 21st century.

'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological. Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.