To undertake a scholarly project on the Wonderful World of Disney, in particular one focused on the historical, cultural and artistic significance of its celebrated cel-animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), is an endeavour that often feels like jumping headlong ‘into burning coals’. Over eighty years after its ini…
This book is about f ilms and f ilmmakers committed to reality. For them, the world is not a mere construct or discourse, but made of people, animals, plants and objects that physically exist, thrive, suffer and die. They feel part of, and responsible for, this material world and want to change it for the better. ‘Realism’, this book argues, is what def ines these f ilms’ mode of producti…
For some time now, in newspapers and books, a series of words keep ap-pearing that begin with the pref ix “post-.” As for these new words, the key to understanding seems to be a semantics of ambiguity. Post does not indicate something absolutely different but something in-between: postcapital-ism would be a new phase of capitalism; postmodernism, a new f igure of modernism; and post-history…
Struggles over naming our epoch of climate change – Anthropocene? Capitalocene? – are symptomatic of the growing recognition that ecology and economy can no longer be separated: that indeed, they have always been impli-cated in one another. For flm studies, this recognition necessitates adding to early ecocritical concerns with what flm does, a renewed inquiry into how …
This book was originally published in 2009 as an attempt to lay the foundations for a new approach to film archival theory and practice. While addressing the ques-tions “what is film?” and, by analogy, “what is film heritage?” in the technological and cultural shift to digital, I moved away from the unproductive opposition analog versus digital and proposed to …
M -? -? (?–??), was called Georges Méliès, was the most accomplished filmmaker of cinema’s first decade, and one of its most prolific. (Hereafter, I refer to him by his surname only, unlike other members of the Méliès family.) When I set out to write a book about Méliès, I imagined it as a comprehensive study of the entirety of Méliès…
The 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam included among its programs a specially commissioned work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul that resists ready classification. SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, presented by the festival organizers as an “immersive one-off filmproject,” cannot be described simply as a film or straight-forwardly as an installation, despite having the char…
These listings provided the now vanished cinematic geography of prewar Paris. One could chart how movies moved through neighborhoods, the de-velopment (and closure) of cinemas, and the relative importance of movies to diferent parts of town (typically around eighteen cinemas in the periph-eral, working-class twentieth arrondissement and none in the firs…
he travel buddies nevertheless make it to Chile, where they need to resort to some tricks to cope with financial problems. They pose as famous ‘leper experts’ for a local newspaper, winning the esteem (and help) of the locals, and they develop an ‘anniversary routine’ to convince others to pay them a free lunch on the occasion of their supposed one-year anniversary of touring. They also…
Four minutes into Gillian Armstrong’s last major fi lm, Women He’s Undressed (2015), costume designer Orry-Kelly delivers an unin-terrupted monologue describing the early days in his friendship with Archie Leach/Cary Grant in the years when they fi rst arrived in New York City, before either became famous. Kelly delivers the monologue while seated in a red rowboat on the …