Dreaming of Cinema
Subtitle: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Nov 11, 2014
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780231166560
Description: 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.
Notes: Source title: Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (Film and Culture Series)