Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
Screens and Illusionism
Alternative Teleologies of Mediation
Edited by Peter Bloom and Dominique Jullien
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Explores the effects of illusionism within media representation and contemporary aesthetics with a focus on the uncanny
• Mediation and illusionism in literature and media
• Pre-cinema and new media devices and entertainments
• The optical uncanny as a site of ambivalence
Screens and Illusionism explores the effects of illusionism as foundational to contemporary acts of perception and aesthetics. Our point of departure is the acknowledgement that our sensory perception is fundamentally subject to mediation, through a class of objects, techniques, and technologies. We emphasize mediation to consider the loss of optical certainty, and explore illusionism within the register of the uncanny.
The volume is divided into three sections: Screens as Perceptual Vehicles (Part I), Mediation and its Avatars (Part II), and Alternative Teleologies of Media (Part III). Overall, the collection resonates with contemporary discussions of screen culture, media materiality and intermediality. It explores an array of pre- and post-cinematic devices and spectacular entertainments, forging links between “old” and “new” media, and across media formats.
About the authors:
Peter J. Bloom is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been focused on film and media studies with a regional focus on West Africa, North Africa and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on Belgian, British and French colonial media, and is currently preparing a monograph under the title, Radio-Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire.
Dominique Jullien is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She publishes on reception and translation studies, East-West dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Her current book project explores technologies of optical mediation, illusionism and secular magic in contemporary fiction.
Press Reviews:
The contributors to this probing and various essay collection explore how optical toys reveal the limits of our sense perceptions, while new techniques of representation continue to augment what we see and how we see it. Yet, as the editors of Screens and Illusionism are keen to emphasise, the effects of new media are not all ominous, but the delightful fruits of human ingenuity, playfulness, and an unimpeachable pursuit of pleasure. This rich collection enhances our ways of seeing; it places within the reader’s grasp powerful new instruments of understanding and perception.– Marina Warner, author of Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media
The film screen has been neglected for decades by film theorists. After all, doesn’t the screen seem to disappear when a movie begins? In this unique and important anthology scholars from a range of backgrounds probe not only the screen, but the conditions of illusion in cinema, uncovering its links to the uncanny.– Tom Gunning, Professor Emeritus University of Chicago
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Deep Mediations (2021)
Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures
Dir. Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible
Subject: Theory
The Prison of Time (2024)
Stanley Kubrick, Adrian Lyne, Michael Bay and Quentin Tarantino
Subject: Theory
Film Theory (2015)
An Introduction through the Senses
by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener
Subject: Theory
Back
