April Roundup: POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st-CENTURY FILM ebook, SEQUENCE on Analogue-Digital; Rascaroli & Sharma videos, plus more

POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st-CENTURY FILM – a wide-ranging and important open access edited collection, published by REFRAME Books;
New SEQUENCE on the Analogue-Digital opposition;
New videos in TALKS@MFM – Our continuing series of video recordings of research seminars and masterclasses;
Mediático, Reframing Psychoanalysis, The Audiovisual Essay and Reframing Activism updates.

REFRAME‘s latest round up of open access publications and research website and project launches is given below.

1. POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st-CENTURY FILM, a major new open access edited collection from REFRAME Books

We are very excited to announce the launch of a major scholarly collection edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, and published by REFRAME’s open access ebook imprint (publisher of THE TABLET BOOK, 2015). If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, Denson and Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.

Contributors include: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Paul Bowman, Felix Brinker, Kristopher L. Cannon, Francesco Casetti, Steen Christiansen, Elena del Río, Rosalind Galt, Therese Grisham, Richard Grusin, Leon Gurevitch, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bruce Isaacs, Adrian Ivakhiv, Kylie Jarrett, Selmin Kara, Patricia MacCormack, Lev Manovich, Ruth Mayer, Michael O’Rourke, Patricia Pisters, Alessandra Raengo, David Rambo, Nicholas Rombes, Sergi Sánchez, Karin Sellberg, Steven Shaviro, Michael Loren Siegel, Vivian Sobchack, Billy Stevenson, Andreas Sudmann.

The book appears first in an easily navigable web and mobile browser format from which chapter PDFs may be generated and saved (see the foot of each entry). The collection will shortly appear in a collected PDF edition, followed by EPUB and MOBI formats readable on most e-readers. Online at: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/.

2. The latest issue of SEQUENCE: Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, and sequential edited-collection format has been published.

SEQUENCE Four: Analogue-Digital offers its readers, and potential interlocutors, space for reflection on the many forms and techniques of recombinatory media and culture. The inaugural contribution to this issue, and to this topic, is by Paul Atkinson, a specialist in the philosophy of science, media theory and visual culture, based at Monash University in Melbourne. Atkinson’s essay for SEQUENCE (4.1 [2016]) — ‘THINKING WITH DIGITS: Cinema and the Digital-Analogue Opposition’ offers a compelling exploration of what is at stake when we deploy these, now binary terms. He sets out to clarify the representational differences between them, among other distinctions:

It is often pronounced that we live in a digital age and that our social and aesthetic beliefs are underpinned by the concept of digitality. But when a term is used to herald a broad cultural change it loses much of its specificity and critical purpose. The digital becomes a shibboleth of the new and its counterpart, the analogue, a locus for nostalgia and a presumed indexical connection with the real. We are at a point now in the study of media and cinema, when it is important to rethink both the analogue and the digital if they are to continue to have any critical value. This is not a plea to limit discussion to technological affordances, for the terms precede the many recent technologies to which they are applied. Rather it is a call to reconsider the digital-analogue distinction as a mode of representation and how this might apply to cinema. This is not just a matter of providing a clear definition in the manner favoured by philosophy, because any theoretical repositioning has to bear some relationship to the material, aesthetic and spectatorial aspects of cinema. The representational differences must affect the way we watch films as well as provide a means for understanding distinct filmmaking practices. In short, it is about redeploying the analogue-digital distinction as a mode of thinking in cinema – in terms of both reason and aesthetics – that extends well beyond the application of specific technologies.

3. TALKS@MFM – REFRAME continues with its series of video and audio recordings of research presentations and masterclasses held at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex.

Including:

4. Mediático, Reframing Psychoanalysis, The Audiovisual Essay and Reframing Activism updates

AT MEDIÁTICO: