Overview

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the historical fever of the 1980s and 1990s-the rise of the heritage industry, a global museum-building boom, and a cinematic fascination with costume dramas and literary adaptations-it explores the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. Author James Tweedie retraces the ""archaeomodern turn"" in films and theory that framed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative experiments. He examines late twentieth-century filmmakers who were inspired by old media, especially painting, and often viewed those art forms as portals to the modern past. In detailed discussions of Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Agnès Varda, and other key directors, the book concentrates on films that fill the screen with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes. It also considers three key figures-Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney-who grappled with the late twentieth century's characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes their theoretical work on film as a mourning play for past revolutions and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Looking at cinema and the century in the rear-view mirror, the book highlights the unrealised potential visible in the history of film, as well as the cinematic phantoms that remain in the digital age.

Full Product Details

Author:   James Tweedie (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Washington)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 23.10cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 15.20cm
Weight:   0.499kg
ISBN:  

9780190873882

ISBN 10:   0190873884
Pages:   302
Publication Date:   26 July 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Archaeomodern Turn1. The Old Medium of Film2. Film and History in the Late Twentieth Century3. The Baroque Present4. Museums for Time Machines5. Archaeomodern Images6. The Cinema of PaintersPart I: Theory and the Modern PastChapter OneThe Hauntology of the Cinematic Image:Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Mourning Play1. Haunted Screens2. History, Allegory, and Mourning3. Specters of Cinema4. After CinemaChapter TwoTime's Arrow, Time's Bow: Gilles Deleuze in the Baroque Age of Cinema1. Deleuze and the Baroque2. Cinema Unfolds3. After CinemaChapter ThreeSerge Daney, Zapper: Film, Television, and the Persistence of Media1. The Rearview Mirror2. An Adult Art3. Zapping the CinemaPart II: The Cinema of PaintersChapter FourThe Suspended Spectacle of History:The Tableau Vivant in Late Twentieth-Century Cinema1. The Post-Historical Image2. A Painting Ruined3. Caravaggio's Moving PicturesChapter FiveThe Afterlife of Art and Objects: The Cinematic Still Life in the Late Twentieth Century1. The Object as Event2. Modernity and the Sacred Object: Alain Cavalier's Therese3. Moving Pictures, Still Lives: On Terence DaviesChapter SixCaliban's Books: Old and New Media in the Work of Peter Greenaway1. The Canonical Artifact in a Thatcherite Moment2. Prospero's Library and the Unbound Book3. Illuminated Manuscripts4. A Nomadic Shakespeare and the Confines of HeritageChapter SevenOld Haunts: Commemoration and Mourning in Agnes Varda's Landscapes1. Unearthed2. Nature's Studio3. Land and Escapes

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Author Information

James Tweedie is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at The University of Washington and author of The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (2013), which won the 2014 Katherine Singer Kovacs book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

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