Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritiqe from Hollywood to the Mass Image

Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Like them, it extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes, demonstrating the significance of ecocriticism for any advanced understanding of cultural forms. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. The anecdote's power to produce events, meanings and history forms a methodological entry to aesthetic politics. Anecdotal Evidence provides an outline of the need for and principles of anecdotal method; a case study of eco-critical themes in Hollywood films shaped by the Global Financial Crisis; and a confrontation with mass image databases of social and streaming media that due to their scale and organisation appear at first immune to anecdotal method. Only because the environment has a history is it possible to intervene environmentally. Because we continually misrecognise the historical production of environments, the first task of ecocritique is to bring our formative concept of ecology into crisis. Its final task will be to achieve the good life for everything connected by the historical implication of humans in ecology, and ecology in humans. No politics can be undertaken in our times except through media: ecocritical humanities have a key role in rethinking ecopolitics in the 21st century.

Humor & Entertainment

Cubitt, Sean

Movies

Oxford University Press

An account of Western visual technologies since the Renaissance traces a history of the increasing control of light's intrinsic excess.
Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of this condition. The history of visual technologies reveals a centuries-long project aimed at controlling light. In this book, Sean Cubitt traces a genealogy of the dominant visual media of the twenty-first century―digital video, film, and photography―through a history of materials and practices that begins with the inventions of intaglio printing and oil painting. Attending to the specificities of inks and pigments, cathode ray tubes, color film, lenses, screens, and chips, Cubitt argues that we have moved from a hierarchical visual culture focused on semantic values to a more democratic but value-free numerical commodity.
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt's attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.

The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Leonardo)

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

The MIT Press

It has been said that all cinema is a special effect. In this highly original examination of time in film Sean Cubitt tries to get at the root of the uncanny effect produced by images and sounds that don't quite align with reality. What is it that cinema does? Cubitt proposes a history of images in motion from a digital perspective, for a digital audience.From the viewpoint of art history, an image is discrete, still. How can a moving image--constructed from countless constituent images--even be considered an image? And where in time is an image in motion located? Cubitt traces the complementary histories of two forms of the image/motion relationship--the stillness of the image combined with the motion of the body (exemplified by what Cubitt calls the "protocinema of railway travel") and the movement of the image combined with the stillness of the body (exemplified by melodrama and the magic lantern). He argues that the magic of cinema arises from the intertwining relations between different kinds of movement, different kinds of time, and different kinds of space.He begins with a discussion of "pioneer cinema," focusing on the contributions of French cinematic pioneers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He then examines the sound cinema of the 1930s, examining film effects in works by Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Hollywood's RKO studio. Finally he considers what he calls "post cinema," examining the postwar development of the "spatialization" of time through slow motion, freeze-frame, and steadi-cam techniques. Students of film will find Cubitt's analyses of noncanonical films like Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as enlightening as his fresh takes on such classics as Renoir's Rules of the Game.

The Cinema Effect

Mit Pr

A history of images in motion that explores the "special effect" of cinema.It has been said that all cinema is a special effect. In this highly original examination of time in film Sean Cubitt tries to get at the root of the uncanny effect produced by images and sounds that don't quite align with reality. What is it that cinema does? Cubitt proposes a history of images in motion from a digital perspective, for a digital audience.From the viewpoint of art history, an image is discrete, still. How can a moving image―constructed from countless constituent images―even be considered an image? And where in time is an image in motion located? Cubitt traces the complementary histories of two forms of the image/motion relationship―the stillness of the image combined with the motion of the body (exemplified by what Cubitt calls the "protocinema of railway travel") and the movement of the image combined with the stillness of the body (exemplified by melodrama and the magic lantern). He argues that the magic of cinema arises from the intertwining relations between different kinds of movement, different kinds of time, and different kinds of space.He begins with a discussion of "pioneer cinema," focusing on the contributions of French cinematic pioneers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He then examines the sound cinema of the 1930s, examining film effects in works by Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Hollywood's RKO studio. Finally he considers what he calls "post cinema," examining the postwar development of the "spatialization" of time through slow motion, freeze-frame, and steadi-cam techniques. Students of film will find Cubitt's analyses of noncanonical films like Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as enlightening as his fresh takes on such classics as Renoir's Rules of the Game.

Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture

Videography is an attempt to discover the conditions under which it is possible to speak, write and teach about the electronic media. It provides a materialist account of video and computer media as they are practised and used today. A theoretical section tests the claims of various theses in art history, media and cultural theory to account for the variety of video practice in the contemporary scene. The remainder of the book is devoted to close analysis of work, from amateur video to computer graphics.

Videography: Video Media As Art and Culture

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The growth of electronic media has been greeted with both celebration and fear, but few books have tried to analyse what is actually being made in the new media. How do people make sense of themselves, their world and the new mediations between them today? What new cultural and artistic practices are evolving, where do they come from and where are they going? Videography is intended as a general introduction to the study and appreciation of video media, and will be of interest to students of media and cultural studies, to art students and practicing artists, and to the general reader with an interest in the development of our electronic futures.

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Palgrave

Focusing on the aesthetics of video, Timeshift tests current semiotic, postmodernist and psychoanalytic approaches in the laboratory of real-life video viewing.

Timeshift: On Video Culture (Comedia)

History & Criticism

Routledge

"Timeshift" explores the powers and capabilities of video and the cultures it thrives in. Adding a new dimension to film, television and computer media, video has the potential to become a uniquely democratic medium. Sean Cubitt shows that viewers have found a new cultural relation through electronic recording, whether in video rentals, off-air recordings, music video, community, campaign or artists' videos. Focusing on the aesthetics of video, "Timeshift" tests current semiotic, postmodernist and psychoanalytic approaches in the laboratory of real-life video viewing. It goes beyond the traditional emphasis on the producer and the text to consider the roles of distributors, reviewers, exhibitors, traders, censors, technicians, engineers and viewers.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cubitt, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cubitt, Sean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cubitt, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritiqe from Hollywood to the Mass Image

Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritiqe from Hollywood to the Mass Image

The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Leonardo)

The Cinema Effect

The Cinema Effect

Videography: Video Media As Art and Culture

Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture

Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture

Timeshift: On Video Culture (Comedia)

Timeshift: On Video Culture (Comedia)