What cinema is!
Subtitle: Bazin's quest and its charge
By: Dudley Andrew.
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Malden, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 184
ISBN-13: 9781405107594; 9781405107600
Subjects: Motion pictures -- Philosophy
Description: What Cinema Is! offers an engaging answer to Andre Bazin's famous question through a sweeping look back over the phenomenal ascendancy of a certain idea of cinema. Written by one of the foremost film scholars of our time, this provocative volume proclaims cinema's distinct value not just for the last century but for our current audio–visual culture. Whatever cinema may yet become, this unique idea should orient and guide it. Examining cinema's institutions and its social force but always through the qualities of key films 'What Cinema Is!' testifies to the power of something that didn't even exist before 1895. From the art films cherished by cinephiles after World War II through the banner years of the New Wave to a technologically expanded cinema, Andrew traces the long nerve of this idea that has made cinema supremely alive to (and in) our times.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Preface:  The target of film theory; title: Camera searching in the world; title: Is a camera essential?; title: Cahiers axiom; title: Tracing Bazin's trace; title: Images contested today; title: Editor's discovery of form; title: Bazin's forerunners; title: Documentaries in the cauldron of history; title: Cahiers line; title: Pursuing cinema in the twenty-first century; title: Projector as spectator's searchlight; title: Power of projection; title: Opening the screen's dimensions; title: Frame as threshold; title: Writing out of the frame; title: Evolution of the subjects of cinema; title: Modern film:  Between classic and avant-garde; title: Ontogeny of cinema; title: Credits and auteurs:  An ecology of adaptation; title: Fidelity:  The economy of adaptation.