Film Culture in Transition
About the Book Series
Film Culture in Transition is committed to a diverse range of approaches and to stimulating cutting-edge debates on the complex interdependence of cinema, other media and screen culture at large. While putting the emphasis on current work in film theory and media history, the series also feature studies on new forms of authorship, image politics and media art. With a strong tradition in European and North American cinema, we are welcoming innovative book projects on the diversity of film cultures in a global perspective.
Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project
1st Edition
Edited
By Roy Grundmann, Peter Schwartz, Gregory Williams
December 01, 2025
This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities ...
Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth
1st Edition
By Tiago de Luca
December 01, 2025
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It ...
Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema
1st Edition
By Lúcia Nagib
December 01, 2025
This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of ‘world cinema’ with the more substantive concept of ‘realist cinema’. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. ...
Improvising Cinema
1st Edition
By Gilles Mouëllic
December 31, 2025
This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as ...
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): 2-volume Set
1st Edition
By Daniel Fairfax
December 19, 2025
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by ...
A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon
1st Edition
By Paul Cuff
December 01, 2025
Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle...
Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology
1st Edition
Edited
By Julia Vassilieva, Deane Williams
December 01, 2025
In the wake of the explosion in the production of essay films over the last 25 years and its subsequent theorization in scholarly literature, this volume seeks to historicize these intertwined developments within the 'long durée' of the 20th century and into the 21st. By raising the issue of '...
Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media
1st Edition
Edited
By Maria Tortajada, François van den Albera
December 01, 2025
This collection brings together a number of leading scholars in film studies to explore viewing and listening dispositives - the Foucauldian concept of a strategic and technical configuration of practices and discourses - from the emergence of film studies as a field in the 1960s to more recent ...
Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula
1st Edition
By Steffen Hven
December 01, 2025
Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies-including such hits as Run, Lola, Run, 21 Grams, and Memento. This book sets those films and others in context with earlier works that tried new narrative ...
Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film
1st Edition
By Christine Brinckmann
December 01, 2025
The collection of essays brings together texts from two decades, documenting two of the author's ongoing areas of interest: the poetics of colour in film as well as affective viewer responses. Employing a bottom-up approach as a basis for theoretical exploration, each of the essays concentrates on ...
Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: Objectivists in Cinema
1st Edition
By Benoît Turquety
December 01, 2025
Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre Corneille, ...
Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime
1st Edition
By Nikita Mathias
December 01, 2025
How do we experience disaster films in cinema? And where does disaster cinema come from? The two questions are more closely related than one might initially think. For the framework of the cinematic experience of natural disasters has its roots in the mid-eighteenth century when the aesthetic ...