Download or read book Cinema as a Worldbuilding Machine in the Digital Era written by Alain Boillat and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay examines the primacy of worldbuilding in the age of CGI, transmedia practices and "high concept" fiction by studying the principles that govern the creation of a multiverse in a wide range of film and TV productions. Emphasis is placed on Hollywood sci-fi movies and their on-screen representation of imaginary machines that mirror the film medium, following in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's writings and the cyberpunk culture. A typology of worlds is established, as well as a number of analytical tools for assessing the impact of the coexistence of two or more worlds on the narrative structure, the style (uses of color, editing practices), the generic affiliation (or hybridity), the seriality and the discourse produced by a given film (particularly in fictions linked to post-9/11 fantasies). Among the various titles examined, the reader is offered a detailed analysis of the Resident Evil film series, Total Recall and its remake, Dark City, the Matrix trilogy, Avatar, Source Code and other time-loop films, TRON and its sequel, Christopher Nolan's Tenet, and several TV shows – most notably HBO's Westworld, but also Sliders, Lost, Fringe and Counterpart.
Download or read book What Film Is Good For written by Prof. Julian Hanich and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For well over a century, going to the movies has been a favorite pastime for billions across the globe. But is film actually good for anything? This volume brings together thirty-six scholars, critics, and filmmakers in search of an answer. Their responses range from the most personal to the most theoretical—and, together, recast current debates about film ethics. Movie watching here emerges as a wellspring of value, able to sustain countless visions of "the good life." Films, these authors affirm, make us reflect, connect, adapt; they evoke wonder and beauty; they challenge and transform. In a word, its varieties of value make film invaluable.
Download or read book The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives written by Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives considers the concept of the multiverse beyond the immediacy of being merely an excuse or scenario for the development of stories, instead positioning the multiverse as a theoretical method in which speculative fiction narratives can explore diverse issues to bridge ideas across cultural, social, and philosophical analysis. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the book centres around the critical engagements that literary and media texts have with the representations of the multiverse, beyond considering this subject as a mere rhetorical flourish or a passing fad. A diverse and international team of authors engage with the multiverse from the point of view of “other worlds,” understanding it not as the appearance of another independent world, but as the collision of two or more different worlds into one of them. From this key finding, the multiverse encourages us to pay attention to the influence that fiction exerts on narratives and world-building, providing possible frameworks to rethink critical aspects of temporality, space, self, society, and culture in contemporary times. This pioneering work will interest students and scholars working in the areas of media and cultural studies, comparative literature, popular culture studies, speculative fiction, and transmedia studies.
Download or read book Entering the Multiverse written by Paul Booth and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The multiverse has portaled into the mainstream. Entering the Multiverse unpacks the surprising growth of the multiverse in media and popular culture today, and explores how the concept of alternate realities and parallel worlds has acted as a metaphor for centuries. Edited by leading media and popular culture scholar Paul Booth, this collection explores the many different manifestations of the multiverse across different genres, media, fan-created works, and cultural theory. Each chapter delves into different aspects of the multiverse, including its use as a metaphor, as a scientific reality, and as a media-industry strategy. Addressing the multiplicity of multiversal meanings through multiple perspectives and always with an eye toward engagement with contemporary cultural issues, the chapters also examine various distinctions and contradictions, in order to provide a strong basis for further thinking, writing, and research on the concept of the multiverse. Chapters in this collection tell the story of the multiverse in multiple realities: creative nonfiction, academic essay, screenplay, art, poetry, video, and audio essay. A compelling read for students, researchers, and scholars of media and cultural studies, film and media culture, popular culture, comics studies, game studies, literary studies, and beyond.
Download or read book WORLDBUILDING written by Julia Stoschek Foundation and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age examines the relationship between gaming and time-based media art. It is the first transgenerational show of this scope to survey how contemporary artists world-wide are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their form of expression. Commissioned by the Julia Stoschek Foundation and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists, including Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Harun Farocki, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Pierre Huyghe, Rindon Johnson, KAWS, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Sturtevant, and Suzanne Treister. This catalogue is conceptualized as a future standard reference in the field in close collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist. In addition to texts by contemporary theorists, curators, and critics on the individual works, a series of newly commissioned contributions will investigate various perspectives on the intersection of gaming and time-based media art. This playfully designed volume features rounded edges, a screen-printed PVC dust jacket and kiss-cut stickers showing a range of different digital avatars.
Download or read book Films from the Future written by Andrew Maynard and published by Mango Media Inc.. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.
Download or read book The Cinema Effect written by Sean Cubitt and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of images in motion that explores the"special effect" of cinema.
Download or read book Flickers of Film written by Jason Sperb and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether paying tribute to silent films in Hugo and The Artist or celebrating arcade games in Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It-Ralph, Hollywood suddenly seems to be experiencing a wave of intense nostalgia for outmoded technologies. To what extent is that a sincere lament for modes of artistic production that have nearly vanished in an all-digital era? And to what extent is it simply a cynical marketing ploy, built on the notion that nostalgia has always been one of Hollywood’s top-selling products? In Flickers of Film, Jason Sperb offers nuanced and unexpected answers to these questions, examining the benefits of certain types of film nostalgia, while also critiquing how Hollywood’s nostalgic representations of old technologies obscure important aspects of their histories. He interprets this affection for the prehistory and infancy of digital technologies in relation to an industry-wide anxiety about how the digital has grown to dominate Hollywood, pushing it into an uncertain creative and economic future. Yet he also suggests that Hollywood’s nostalgia for old technologies ignores the professionals who once employed them, as well as the labor opportunities that have been lost through the computerization and outsourcing of film industry jobs. Though it deals with nostalgia, Flickers of Film is strikingly cutting-edge, one of the first studies to critically examine Pixar’s role in the film industry, cinematic representations of videogames, and the economic effects of participatory culture. As he takes in everything from Terminator: Salvation to The Lego Movie, Sperb helps us see what’s distinct about this recent wave of self-aware nostalgic films—how Hollywood nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be.
Download or read book World Building written by Marta Boni and published by Transmedia. This book was released on 2017 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanks to modern technology, we are now living in an age of multiplatform fictional worlds, as television, film, the Internet, graphic novels, toys, and more facilitate the creation of diverse yet compact imaginary universes, which are often recognizable as brands and exhibit well-defined identities. This volume, situated at the cutting edge of media theory, explores this phenomenon from both theoretical and practical perspectives, uncovering how the construction of these worlds influences our own determination of values and meaning in contemporary society.
Download or read book Translation Studies and China written by Haiping Yan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on transculturality, this edited volume explores how the role of translation and the idea of (un)translatability in the transformative complementation of different civilizations facilitates the transcultural connection between Chinese and other cultures in the modern era. Bringing together established international scholars and emerging new voices, this collection explores the linguistic, social, and cultural implications of translation and transculturality. The 13 chapters not only discuss the translation of literature, but also break new ground by addressing the translation of cinema, performance, and the visual arts, which are active bearers of modern and contemporary culture that are often neglected by academics. Through an engagement with these diverse fields, the title aims not only to reflect on how translation has reproduced values, concepts, and cultural forms, but also to stimulate the emergence of new possibilities in the dynamic transcultural interplay between China and the diverse national, cultural-linguistic, and contexts of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It shows how cultures have been appropriated, misunderstood, transformed, and reconstructed through processes of linguistic mediation, as well as how knowledge, understanding, and connections have been generated through transculturality. The book will be a must read for scholars and students of translation studies, transcultural studies, and Chinese studies.
Download or read book Religion and Film written by S. Brent Plate and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.
Download or read book Fictioning written by David Burrows and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the process of fictioning in contemporary art through three focal points: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning.
Download or read book Ecologies of the Moving Image written by Adrian J. Ivakhiv and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an ecophilosophy of cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to the lived ecologies – material, social, and perceptual relations – within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. If cinema takes us on mental and emotional journeys, the author argues that those journeys that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. A range of styles are examined, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
Download or read book Techn Technology written by Annie Van Den Oever and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fourth title in the series 'The key debates' sets out where the term "technē" comes from, how it released a revolution in thought and how the concept in the midst of the current digital revolution, once again, is influencing the study of film. In addition, the authors investigate how technologies have affected the major debates about film, how they affected film theory and some of its key concepts. This is one of the first books to assess the comprehensive history of the philosophies of technology and their impact on film and media theory in greater detail.
Download or read book The Digital Image and Reality written by Dan Strutt and published by Film Culture in Transition. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity.
Download or read book Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling written by Sean Guynes and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies' projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world's most profitable transmedia franchise.
Download or read book Art of the Cut written by Steve Hullfish and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-07-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second volume of the widely acclaimed Art of the Cut book published in 2017. This follow-up text expands on its predecessor with wisdom from more than 360 interviews with the world’s best editors (including nearly every Oscar winner from the last 30 years). Because editing is a highly subjective art form, and one that is critical to the success of motion picture storytelling, it requires side-by-side comparisons of the many techniques and solutions used by a wide range of editors from around the world. That is why this book compares and contrasts methodologies from a wide array of diverse voices and organizes that information so that it is easily digested and understood. There is no one way to approach editorial problems, so this book allows readers to see multiple solutions from multiple editors. The interviews contained within are carefully curated into topics that are most important to film editors and those who aspire to become film editors. The questions asked, and the organization of the book, are not merely an academic or theoretical view of the art of editing but rather the practical advice and methodologies of actual working film and TV editors, bringing benefits to both students and professional readers. The book is supplemented by a collection of downloadable online exclusive chapters, which cover additional topics ranging from Choosing the Project to VFX. In addition to the supplementary chapters, access to the full-color, full-resolution images printed in the book—and other exclusive images—is included.
