Dreaming of Cinema

Dreaming of Cinema

Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media

  • Autor: Lowenstein, Adam
  • Editor: Columbia University Press
  • Col·lecció: Film and Culture Series
  • ISBN: 9780231166560
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231538480
  • Lloc de publicació:  New York , United States
  • Any de publicació digital: 2014
  • Mes: Novembre
  • Idioma: Anglés
Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, André Breton, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.
  • Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Cinema as Digital Dream Machine
  • 1. Enlarged Spectatorship: From Realism to Surrealism: Bazin, Barthes, and The (Digital) Sweet Hereafter
  • 2. Interactive Spectatorship: Gaming, Mimicry, and Art Cinema: Between Un chien andalou and eXistenZ
  • 3. Globalized Spectatorship: Ring Around the Superflat Global Village: J-Horror Between Japan and America
  • 4. Posthuman Spectatorship: The Animal in You(Tube): From Los olvidados to “Christian the Lion”
  • 5. Collaborative Spectatorship: The Surrealism of the Stars: From Rose Hobart to Mrs. Rock Hudson
  • Afterword: Marking Cinematic Time
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index