In 1900, Paris had no skyscrapers, no tourist helicopters, no drones. Yet well before aviation made aerial views more accessible, those who sought such vantages had countless options available to them. They could take in the vista from an observation ride, see a painting of the view from Notre-Dame, or overlook a miniature model city. In Aeroscopics, Patrick Ellis offers a history of the view from above, written from below. Richly illustrated and premised upon extensive archival w...

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell.As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be los...

In a world of stupidity, the smart person is king. This may not be reality in this world, but that does not mean we cannot make it a reality. This book, this bible, is designed to make ignorant people smarter and to make intelligent people think. It is designed to make everyone see the world from a different point of view. It is designed to give a voice to those who want to say something but cannot. It is designed to make you laugh, make you mad, make you scream and make you change the wor...

Modern Architecture began with the advent of electric power; once harnessed the power of electricity produced steel for structure, drives to operate elevators, and even telephones to comunicate specifications instantly. With electric power modern architecture was free to separate from classical architecture as clearly defined by Rushkin who claimed that: "... once metal touches stone it is no longer classic architecture." No definition has ever been concieved to describe what modern archit...

Expo 67, the world's fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967, brought architecture, art, design, and technology together into a glittering modern package. Heralding the ideal city of the future to its visitors, the Expo site was perceived by critics as a laboratory for urban and architectural design as well as for cultural exchange, intended to enhance global understanding and international cooperation. This collection of essays brings new critical perspectives to Expo 67, an event...

Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide...

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults ‘who should know better’, in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the ‘Ninth Art’ and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessinée [comic strip] has its own national institutions, regularly obtains front-page coverage and has received the accolades of statesmen from De Gaulle onwards. On the way to providing a comprehensive introduction to the most francophone of cultural...

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs/Documenteur (1980–81), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production...

Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our habits and excite our imaginations.Casetti travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing r...

Chris Marker is one of the most extraordinary and influential film-makers of our time. In landmark films such as Letter from Siberia (1958), La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1982) and Level Five (1996), he overturned the conventions of the cinema, confounding normal distinctions between documentary and fiction, private and public concerns, writing and visual recording, and the still and moving image. Yet these works are only the better-known elements of a p...

Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media.In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and t...

Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape.The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over c...