Since the mid-eighties, more audiences have been watching Hollywood movies at home than at movie theaters, yet little is known about just how viewers experience film outside of the multiplex. This is the first full-length study of how contemporary entertainment technologies and media—from cable television and VHS to DVD and the Internet—shape our encounters with the movies and affect the aesthetic, cultural, and ideological definitions of cinema. Barbara Klinger explores topics such as home theater, film collecting, classic Hollywood movie reruns, repeat viewings, and Internet film parodies, providing a multifaceted view of the presentation and reception of films in U.S. households. Balancing industry history with theoretical and cultural analysis, she finds that today cinema's powerful social presence cannot be fully grasped without considering its prolific recycling in post-theatrical venues—especially the home.

Francois Albera is professor of film and cinema studies at UniversitT de Lausanne in Switzerland. Maria Tortajada is professor in the Department of History and Aesthetics of Film at the same university. --Book Jacket.

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

Francois Albera is professor of film and cinema studies at UniversitT de Lausanne in Switzerland. Maria Tortajada is professor in the Department of History and Aesthetics of Film at the same university. --Book Jacket.

Since digital surround sound technology first appeared in cinemas 20 years ago, it has spread from theaters to homes and from movies to television, music, and video games. Yet even as 5.1 has become the standard for audiovisual media, its impact has gone unexamined. Drawing on works from the past two decades, as well as dozens of interviews with sound designers, mixers, and editors, Mark Kerins uncovers how 5.1 surround has affected not just sound design, but cinematography and editing as well. Beyond Dolby (Stereo) includes detailed analyses of Fight Club, The Matrix, Hairspray, Disturbia, The Rock, Saving Private Ryan, and Joy Ride, among other films, to illustrate the value of a truly audiovisual approach to cinema studies.

Wherever we go, we are surrounded by moving images. In art as in daily life, they have long since developed a life "beyond the cinema," scuttling the conventions of dark auditoriums for images projected onto walls, staged in specially-designed environments, and aggregated in multiples. "Beyond Cinema" centers around approximately 25 important film and video works, primarily the major installations of the 1990s, including the ravishing projections of Pipilotti Rist, the existentialist image of the body put forward by Bruce Nauman, the psychologically charged filmic spaces of Eija-Liisa Ahtila and the highly conceptual installations of Rodney Graham. Each elaborates on notions of the projected image that were developed in the 1960s, and groundbreaking works from Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham and Valie Export are presented to contextualize investigations of identity and body image, film cooperatives, representations of time and other topics.

Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice purges the obstructive line between the making of and the theorising on film, uniting theory and practice in order to move beyond the commercial confines of Hollywood. Opening with an introduction by Bill Nichols, one of the world's leading writers on nonfiction film, this volume features contributions by such prominent authors as Noel Burch, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Brian Winston and Patrick Fuery. Seminal filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis also contribute to the debate, making this book a critical text for students, academics, and independent filmmakers as well as for any reader interested in new perspectives on culture and film.

'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.

Beyond Blaxploitation is a much-needed pedagogical tool, informing film scholars, critics, and fans alike, about blaxploitation's richness and complexity.

"Alain Bergala's The cinema hypothesis is a seminal text on the potentials, possibilities, and problems of bringing film to schools and other educational contexts. It is also the passionate confirmation of a love for cinema and an effort to think of education differently. This book stages a dialogue between larger concepts of cinema and a hands-on approach to teaching cinema. Its detailed insights derive from the author's own experiences as a teacher, critic, filmmaker and advisor to the French Minister of Education. Bergala, who also served as chief editor of Cahiers du cinéma, promotes an understanding of film as an autonomous art form that has to be taught accordingly. Confronting young people with cinema can create friction with established norms and serve as a productive rupture for both institution and pupil: perhaps more than any other art form, the cinema enables a lived, intimate experience of otherness"--Back cover.