Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock's masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called "slow cinema." Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres--such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama--become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman's La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel's Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Creepy, and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.
We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color's force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social. Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with color's allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe's chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers' moods and productivity, from the colonial production of indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard's films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl's Adorno's Grey. Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization--a "chromatics of organizing"--that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery are challenging experiences that impact women's physical, mental, and emotional health in ways that have been historically minimalized, dismissed, or neglected. A mother's body becomes a public body, physically and politically not her own, instead shared by her spouse, her children, and those around her. Her body, therefore, makes the perfect vessel for an invasive presence-or possession. The Sinful Maternal: Motherhood in Possession Films examines the role of mothers and motherhood in ten possession films, including Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Babadook, and Hereditary. Chapters discuss the work of such directors as James Wan, Jennifer Kent, Robert Eggers, and Ari Aster to address how their cinematic approaches to these films produce rich possession narratives that explore different facets of motherhood and women's agency. Working at the intersections of gender studies, architectural theory, trauma studies, and monster theory, with a particular focus on the treatment of (often unruly) female bodies, author Lauren Rocha investigates the ways in which motherhood is a fertile state for possession and how possession acts to influence, destabilize, and reshape identity and the self. Placing the films in chronological order, she closely analyzes the ways in which sociocultural influences create different roles women and mothers are expected to perform. Ultimately, Rocha demonstrates how possession offers a way to challenge performative motherhood to free the self.
A new history of digital art from the 1960s to the present day, with decade-by-decade essays exploring evolving digital art practices, alongside interviews with artists, gallerists, museum curators and collectors. This is the global story of digital art from its earliest beginnings to the innovative work of today, encompassing wide-ranging, experimental practices, from computer-generated works on paper created by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, programmers and artists in the 1960s to interactive installations, virtual reality, net art and videogames. A collaborative, dynamic approach still characterizes the practice of today's digital artists, who employ technology as a tool while examining its social, ethical and political impact. Digital Art: 1960s-Now delves into ideas of artificial intelligence, computer animation, simulation and cybernetics through the historic works of pioneering artists such as Analívia Cordeiro, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar and Frieder Nake, alongside renowned contemporary practitioners including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ibiye Camp, Sarah Friend, Trevor Paglen and Anna Ridler. Decade-by-decade essays by leading authorities explore changing digital art practices. Interviews and discussions with prominent artists, gallerists, museum curators and collectors at the forefront of the discipline offer further insights in this absorbing illustrated study of the evolution of digital art and its future possibilities.
Life 24x a Second highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays particular attention to pedagogical practice and students' reflections on what the study of cinema has given to their lives. This book provides multiple perspectives on cinema that matters for the deepest personal and social reasons-from films that represent psychological healing in the face of individual losses to films that represent humanitarian hope in the face of global crises. Ultimately, Walker shows how cinema that moves us emotionally can move us toward a better world. Life 24x a Second makes the case for cinema as a life force in uplifting and widely relatable ways. Walker zeroes in on films that offer hope in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement (Imitation of Life, 1959, and BlacKkKlansman, 2018); contemporary feminism (Nobody Knows, 2004); rite-of-passage experiences of mortality and mourning (Ikiru, 1952, and A Star Is Born, 2018), and first-love grief (Call Me by Your Name, 2017, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019). Life 24x a Second invites readers to reflect on their own unique film-to-person encounters along with connecting them to others who love cinematic lessons for living well.
'Excellent.' - The New Yorker The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
Riot grrrls, punk feminists best known for their girl power activism and message, used punk ideologies and the literacy practice of zine-ing to create radical feminist sites of resistance. In what ways did zines document feminism and activism of the 1990s? How did riot grrrls use punk ideologies to participate in DIY sites? In Writing a Riot: Riot Grrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics, Buchanan argues that zines are a form of literacy participation used to document personal, social, and political values within punk. She examines zine studies as an academic field, how riot grrrls used zines to promote punk feminism, and the ways riot grrrl zines dealt with social justice issues of rape and race. Writing a Riot is the first full-length book that examines riot grrrl zines and their role in documenting feminist history.
An exploration of late nineteenth-century American literary posters--a vibrant genre at the vanguard of modern commercial art and graphic design. Spurred by innovations in printing technology, the modern poster emerged in the 1890s as a popular form of visual culture in the United States. Created by some of the best-known illustrators and graphic designers of the period--including Will H. Bradley, Florence Lundborg, Edward Penfield, and Ethel Reed--these advertisements for books and high-tone periodicals such as Harper's and Lippincott's went beyond the realm of commercial art, incorporating bold, stylized imagery and striking typography. This book, based on the renowned Leonard A. Lauder Collection, explores the craze for literary posters, which became sought after collectibles even in their day. It offers new scholarly perspectives that address the aesthetic sophistication and modernity of the literary poster; the impact of early experiments in the field of advertising psychology; the expanded opportunities for women artists, who played an important role in advancing the so-called poster style; and the printmaking techniques that artists employed in this novel art form. A lively survey of a little-known but highly influential period in graphic design, The Art of the Literary Poster is sure to delight enthusiasts of illustration, advertising, and book arts.
A new, revolutionary history of photography from a stellar team of writers and thinkers that challenges all existing narratives by focusing on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject. Led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography, and including texts by over 100 writers, critics and academics, this groundbreaking publication presents a potential history of photography explored through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. With more than 1,000 photographs, it breaks apart photography's 'single creator' tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration - the various relationships, exchanges and interactions that occur between all participants in the making of any photograph. This collaboration takes different forms, including coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, and expresses shared interests as well as competition, rivalry or antagonistic partnership. The conditions of collaboration are explored through 100 photography 'projects', divided into eight thematic chapters including 'The Photographed Subject', 'The Author' and 'Potentializing Violence'. The result of years of research, Collaboration addresses key issues of gender, race and societal hierarchies and divisions and their role in forging identity and conformity. The photographs from each project are presented non-hierarchically alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts by guest contributors. These networks of texts and images offer perspectives on a vast array of photographic themes, from Araki's portraits of women to archival files from the Spanish Civil War. Each chapter is introduced by the editors, who provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of seeing.
A richly illustrated exploration of Black culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious, and politically urgent. A richly illustrated exploration of Black culture at its most wildly imaginative and artistically ambitious, In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora. Embracing the mythic and the speculative, it recycles and reconfigures elements of fable, folklore, science fiction, spiritual traditions, ceremonial pageantry, and the legacies of Afrofuturism. In works that span photography, painting, sculpture, cinema, graphic arts, music and architecture, In the Black Fantastic shows how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender and identity. Standing apart from Western narratives of progress and modernity premised on the historical subjugation of people of color, In the Black Fantastic celebrates the ways that Black artists draw inspiration from African-originated myths, beliefs, and knowledge systems, confounding the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the scientific and the supernatural. Featuring more than 300 color illustrations, this beautifully designed book brings together works by leading artists such as Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, and Ellen Gallagher; explores groundbreaking films like Daughters of the Dust and Get Out; considers the radical politics of pan-Africanism and postcolonialism; and much more.
Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007-2021), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures. of possible futures.of possible futures.of possible futures.
Early dystopian science fiction like George Orwell's 1984 or Thea von Harbou's Metropolis show us bleak worlds where capitalism has no boundaries and has corrupted sovereign powers, exploiting the lower classes and benefiting only a few at the top. Political laws and policies related to human life--or the biopolitical--devalue that life, making humanity little more than expendable "machines" producing for capitalism, and capitalism's focus on progress has made it a central concern in much of science fiction. Covering science fiction from the early 1900s to present, this book examines the portrayal of dystopian capitalism and the biopolitical in works like Brave New World and R.U.R., among many others.
