A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about the complex relationships between men and women; Day of the Idiots, a visually baroque, operatic and highly dramatic film about madness; The Kingdom of Naples, Schroeter’s visually stunning depiction of Italy in the post-war years; and Palermo or Wolfsburg, for which Schroeter won the Golden Bear, an epic film about love, violence, and ...

Bertille Bak, an artist living and working in Paris, has been developing for more than a decade a practice that centres on observing societies, understanding the organisation between individuals, highlighting their personal and collective histories, traditions and folklores, their hobbies and revolts. Working in collaboration with community groups, she constructs narratives between fiction and documentaries where poetry and utopias usurp the simple assessment of a situation or site…

German cinema is best known for its art cinema and its long line of outstanding individual directors. The double spotlight on these two subjects has only deepened the obscurity surrounding the popular cinema. A Second Life performs a kind of archaeology on a period largely overlooked: the first two decades of German cinema. This collection of essays by established authors refocuses the terms of a debate that will develop in the years to come concerning the historical and cultural significance of popular cinema in Wilhelmine Germany.

Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the ‘Information Society,’ motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a ‘good life,’ and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual ...

Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book—the first of its kind in English—comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections ...

Robert Pippin and Tom Gunning discuss Douglass Sirk.

Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.

During the Algerian Revolution the French colonial regime designated large areas as zones interdites (forbidden zones), which consisted of free-fire zones for French military air and ground forces, and were to be cleared of any living beings. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians were forcibly evacuated from the forbidden zones and transferred into militarily controlled camps dubbed the centres de regroupement. Based on private and institutional archives, including the French Service cinématographique des armées (SCA), the exhibition at Archive Kabinett, curated by Samia Henni, features certain aspects of the massive forced resettlement of civilians, and disclosures the ways with which the ...

The production, distribution, and perception of moving images are undergoing a radical transformation. Ever-faster computers, digital technology, and microelectronic are joining forces to produce advanced audiovision—the media vanishing point of the 20th century. Very little will remain unchanged. The classic institutions for the mediation of film—cinema and television—are revealed to be no more than interludes in the broader history of the audiovisual media. This book interprets these changes not simply as a cultural loss but also as a challenge: the new audiovisions have to be confronted squarely to make strategic intervention possible. Audiovisions provides a historical underpinning for this active ...

“Foreword” by Matilde Soligno “About 2016. End of Year Notes” by Vincenzo Estremo, Flaka Haliti, and Studio Miessen (Berlin) “2016’s TOP 5” by Luca Panaro

In this edited extract from her new book The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Ina Blom examines the memory and history of early analog video, and investigates how the medium, heralding new forms of technological and social life, prehended the forms and forces of painting.