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Recent emphasis on digital imaging in screen narrative as “post-cinematic” tends to misdirect attention. The real breakpoint comes with the “post-filmic” image: a shift in how motion pictures move their picture elements (now, etymologically, pix-els). This shift in material substrate, with the rearview mirror it provides on film history, offers a marked point of vantage, and of fresh critical leverage, on the media archaeology of screen operation in the move from electrical to electronic process. Each operative medium—originally photochemical, now digital—discloses its own unique, and sometimes overtly showcased, impact on narrative sequence. So-called apparatus theory in the critique of classic Hollywood cinema, with its frequent psychoanalytic emphasis on the passive and gendered gaze, has lost its grip on academic discussion. But only some renewed mode of “apparatus reading” (as proposed here in two senses) can register certain manifest technical facets of the serial image so as to read, with them, the optical ironies and technological reflexes of the motivated—and motorized—screen view. Guided by accounts of projection’s illusory special effect(s) from Jean Epstein through Stanley Cavell and Christian Metz to New Media theory, the aspects of cinemachination called out in this essay range from the mirror effects noted by Weimer film commentary through the optical slapstick of American silent film to the latest pixel-busted image plane of the CGI blockbuster—with discussion always on alert for moments that, in openly channeling the possibilities of their medium, route it back through the coils of narrative inference.

Long before the 2013 NSA scandal about electronic surveillance, narrative cinema had become a weathervane of social phobias in regard to national security, drawing on a long history of surveillance both as theme and as audiovisual machination that saw its first heyday with the Weimar cinema of Fritz Lang. This book’s analytic return to apparatus theory, and especially to suture theory’s contrapuntal logic of seeing unseen, contributes to a new view of digital optics in this regard: one of contemporary cinema’s most urgent cultural as well as technological flashpoints. By comparison with the prose treatment of audiovisual surveillance in George Orwell and John le Carré, this “narratographic” analysis of some three dozen films moves from Lang’s M (1931) to Rear Window (1954) and on to Lang’s own last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), including Peeping Tom from the same year, and from there through The Conversation (1974) to Caché (2005) and beyond to the latest Bourne film (2012). Backed by major cinema theorists from Jean-Pierre Oudart through Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Rancière, investigation probes the medium-deep relation of screen framing to various modes of regulatory supervision and constraint, as climaxed in such post-9/11 fantasies of retroactive time-travel surveillance and its resulting terrorist interception as Deja Vu (2006) and Source Code (2011). The book’s subtitle thus indicates three fields of consideration in media studies that telescope into a single phrase of interlinked and overlapping visualizations whenever cinema locks down on the coterminous framing of e-spionage and screen montage.

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres such as science fiction and horror. This study of what the text names New Bollywood contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films' evolving treatment of romantic relationships. It argues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India's new consumerist and global society. The book takes a look at recent Hindi films and movie trends—the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multiplot—to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living.

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. This book explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, the book shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth.

What is the fate of photography? Displaced as a tool of identification by genetics and biometrics, dematerialized and dispersed as a document into the virtual archives of data centers and social networks, transformed as aesthetic practice into monumental visual fictions, photography in the digital age confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. Notably, in this moment when some of the most heralded contemporary photographers have relinquished a relation to the world and systematically eroded the evidential aspect of their medium, artists, filmmakers and writers have turned toward photography as a powerful emblem of truth and proof. Cited and quoted, dramatized and ventriloquized, photography as both form and logic finds its home in other media at precisely the moment of its own material demise and theoretical contestation. Whether in contemporary film or video, painting or drawing, literature or philosophy, the photograph has asserted itself as a guarantor of identity and a stubbornly material form of evidence. Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects thus looks beyond the material and historical boundaries of the medium and opens photography to a thoroughly interdisciplinary, multi-media study. Why “daguerreotypes”? The daguerreotype not only marks the moment of photography’s origins. It also comes to stand, at the moment of medium’s prophesied end, as an emblem of all that has accrued to the object and idea of the photographic image.

This book draws on literature and a never-before-seen cache of photographs taken by a member of the French Resistance (who is also the author's mother), immediately following the Allied bombing of Berlin and other German cities near the end of World War II. The book explores the representation of catastrophe through the gaze of the camera's lens. It uses the medium and witnessing of photography to question the ethics of targeting civilians during war.

In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed notable levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from game studies and experience in game design, this book argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. It studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, this book imagines ways that games can be experimental—not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced notion of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The book is a contribution to fields that include American studies, media theory, art history, literary criticism, political theory, science studies, and game studies.

Friending the Past asks if today's society, increasingly captivated by up-to-the-minute information media, can have a sense of history. What is the relation between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal or self-aware sense of history—for example, storytelling in prehistorical oral societies, or the great print works of historicism in the nineteenth century—and today's "instant" networked information society? How did the sense of history once balance between the feeling for the present and for the absent, the temporal and the social, the individual and the collective, and the static and the dynamic? And how do digital networks now change the balance? Blending the approaches of intellectual history, media studies, and digital humanities, the book proposes novel ways of thinking about the evolving sense of history. Topics include the relation between high-print historicism and social networking; narratives of "new media encounters" between societies; graphically visualized and conceptualized understandings of history; and "network archaeology" as the variant of media archaeology needed to grasp the networked texture of our contemporary feeling for history. At its close, the book asks the question: is there a sense of history in the digital, networked age? The book concludes with an example of what a digitally networked sense of history can be by examining (in a manner poised between "close reading" and "distant reading") the code of one of today's JavaScript "timelines" and comparing it to the experience of temporality encoded in William Wordsworth's poetry during the era of romanticism.

Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of a new technological cool? This book reflects on these questions as it considers the emergence of new information technologies and their profound influence on the forms and practices of knowledge.

The language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to terrorist organizations. But even as “network” has become an early-twenty-first century keyword, its overuse has also limited its analytic usefulness. Network Aesthetics shows how popular American cultural forms mediate our experience and promise greater insight into the contemporary network imaginary. The first part of the book looks to narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including novels such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, and television series such as David Simon’s The Wire. All of these works experiment with network form in order to open up thought about the maximal, emergent, and realist aspects of networks in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. The second part of the book examines video games and digital media artworks that are interactive, nonlinear, procedural, and dependent on networked audiences. New media, including popular video games such as thatgamecompany’s Journey and emergent transmedia storytelling forms, such as alternate reality games, open up thought about the participatory and improvisational dimensions of networks. The book makes its key contributions to the fields of new media theory, literary criticism, and American studies. It revises the long-standing and still common view of networks as control structures that originated in the computing and cybernetics research of the early Cold War. Attention to cultural productions, from novels to video games, complicates clichés of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. This is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through the book's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. This book shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—the author pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, the author also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.

Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity's capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer's identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality. This book is an interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, the author contends, reveal Pasolini's obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. Exploring the ramifications of Pasolini's homosexuality, the book also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.

Four American film critics of the 1940s—Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—changed the way Hollywood cinema was understood. They also wrote idiosyncratic, multi-flavored prose that constituted a new kind of arts journalism. This book considers their writing styles, their conceptions of film, their intellectual sources, their quarrels, and their impact on later generations of film writers. Ferguson believed that Hollywood cinema had created a new medium of dynamic, engaging storytelling—one that had a power of arousal found in jazz and swing music. Agee saw Hollywood as a source of poetic revelation beyond what literature could create. Manny Farber considered cinema a form of pictorial art that, in an age praising Abstract Expressionism, could revive supposedly outdated concepts like “illusion” and “illustration.” And Tyler brought a surrealist eye to cinema, discovering in “the Hollywood Hallucination” a repository of wild and piquant fantasies. All asked the reader scrutinize what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, these critics had a robust influence on a later generation of film critics, including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert.

Casting light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson, and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, this book is a comprehensive study of European art cinema's postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, it argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, the book begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. It then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, the book provides a history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism's origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, it ultimately lays out new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

Nearly a decade ago, the author of this book cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. This book explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature, and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects the author engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized Paracritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, the book functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies the contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

“Welcome to the European Family!” is the banner under which East European countries joined the European Union following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. This book offers an analysis of the imbrication of the ensuing imagined European kinship with its corollary: the traffic in women. The book revisits Claude Lévi-Strauss concept of kinship, as well as its re-articulation by second-wave feminists, Gayle Rubin most prominently, in order to remind the reader that kinship has been traditionally anchored in the traffic in women. This is not the traffic in women invoked by the media to refer to sex trafficking per se, but a broad anthropological concept that describes the circulation of women between kinship groups, traditionally through marriage. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame the European traffic in women, the book shows that, in today’s Europe, racialized East European migrant women are “exchanged” so they can engage in labor traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Following a pattern of what the book calls Americanization, East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, become responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives. A feminist intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe, the book argues that the critical project of pluralizing post-1989 Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the traffic in East European women.

This book follows recent artists in a vein of second-wave of Conceptual art practice dubbed Conceptualism 2.0—in works shadowed by the digital if not directly employing it: works that negotiate a sensory space between medium specificity, in the high modernist mode, and recent claims for the “convergence” of platforms in the electronic vanishing point of global computerization. In objects and installations increasingly designated as “art research,” divided up here into two Scenes (one of still, one of moving, images), and regularly involving extensive paratextual explanation in catalog copy or on gallery walls, this work specifies an interface between—and operating across (trans)—separate media forms, whose intersection is materialized, and thereby analyzed, in works resistant to the leveling hegemony of the digital. These are transmedial images or structures—their object, art—that insist not on a coherent and fetishized specificity but on a dialectical specification.

In the past two decades, the contemporary art world has exhibited an ever-increasing fascination with the cinema; or better, a certain memory of the history of theatrical cinema. A principle material of contemporary art—and it is a rich and varied one—is the ever-fading memory of cinema: a vast archive of cultural experience, elliptical and discontinuous fragments of memory-images, which become an ever more powerful source of fantasmatic resurrection and recreation because they can no longer be invoked directly. These works challenge both the history of cinema, and our memory of the history of cinema in complex ways. In this book, D. N. Rodowick examines how the moving image in contemporary art, in all its complex varieties, is producing a new kind of virtuality or time-image in terms of how it presents a “naming crisis” around questions of movement, image, time, and history in the works of artists such as Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Ken Jacobs, Robert Morris, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and Ernie Gehr.