UPDATES

POST-CINEMA now out in PDF (plus two new recommendations)

Shane Denson and Julia Leyda’s indispensable open-access ebook collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is now available in complete PDF versions (of different mb sizes for your storage convenience):

You can opt to save a file to your computer or mobile device, or to open it directly in a variety of e-readers. These versions join the highly successful web-based version of the book that already offered PDFs of individual chapter (downloadable at the end of each chapter-webpage). Open-access EPUB, and MOBI versions of the book will also be made available at this website’s eBook Archive page in due course. Please follow this blog to receive updates.

To accompany this news we also bring you, below, two further resounding endorsements of the collection, and a reminder of the book’s excellent video trailer.

Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is an intellectually exciting and important book. Editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have assembled an extraordinary range of notable contributors with the aim to open up a critical conversation on the very notion of the post-cinematic – something they achieve in a most novel and engaging way. Through essays and roundtable discussions, Post-Cinema formulates fresh and nuanced questions about the consumption and spectatorship of post-millennial film and other media as they circulate through contemporary digital media ecologies. As is fitting given its subject matter of changing media formats, the design and layout of this book – with its open access digitality and its collaborative dialogues – is as relevant and pioneering as its content. Inviting us to rethink received ideas about how 21st-century media reshape “new forms of sensibility,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is critically imperative reading for anyone interested in ongoing vital transformations in moving image media.

– Tanya Horeck, Reader in Film, Media, and Culture, Anglia Ruskin University

The essays and discussions that have been assembled in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st–Century Film provide the reader with a remarkably comprehensive and compelling survey of the diverse critical and theoretical responses to the formal, technological, affective, political and ecological dimensions of our contemporary post-cinematic landscape. That landscape now has an authoritative and inspirational field guide: by gathering together foundational interventions alongside the most recent contributions this collection will prove indispensable to anyone wishing to take these conversations forward.

– Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies, University of Sussex

Trailer for POST-CINEMA: Theorizing 21st-Century Film

Shane Denson, one of the co-editors (with Julia Leyda) of the open-access collection Post-CInema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, has produced a fantastic video essay about the book, outlining its aims and scope, surveying its contents and showcasing its examples. You can find it at Vimeo here and at Shane’s website here. Please share far and wide!

Also, if you are in the vicinity of Berlin this Friday (June 24), please also be reminded that the book launch for the collection will take place in that city at Pro qm Books. Further information here and here.

Post-Cinema Book Launch Party

On June 24, 2016, Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, the editors of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, will be celebrating the book’s launch at Pro qm Books in Berlin. Several contributors (including Steen Christiansen, Felix Brinker and Andreas Sudmann) will be on hand as well for a short book presentation, Q&A, and wine! Do please join them if you are in the neighborhood!

The book is currently available for free in its web-based version, with PDF chapter downloads. The complete open-access PDF book, EPUB, and MOBI versions will be made available in due course.

Recommendation for POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st CENTURY FILM

“This vital collection surveys the ceaselessly changing terrain of post-cinema, identified in broad terms as the contemporary landscape of moving-image production and reception, technology and aesthetics, and politics and ethics. As the book’s editors (Shane Denson and Julia Leyda) point out, there are particular transformations taking place across the post-cinematic environment that have only begun to be theorized. Taken together, the chapters of the book thus provide a rigorous and timely set of theoretical frameworks for analyzing post-cinematic works and contexts. At the same time, such frameworks are hardly prescriptive or standardized. Instead, the collection draws out and celebrates the diversity of thought around post-cinema as an on-going conversation. It is apt, then, that the book ends with a series of dialogues amongst theorists who are engaging in unique and powerful ways with contemporary post-cinematic environments. As it ends, the book opens out, sketching out inspiring new possibilities for research.”

Matilda Mroz, author of Temporality and Film Analysis
(Edinburgh University Press, 2012), on POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21ST CENTURY FILM

Published today

About Post-Cinema: TheoriZing 21st Century Film

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 new collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia 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

Caitlin Benson-Allott, Paul Bowman, Felix Brinker, Kristopher L. Cannon, Francesco Casetti, Steen Christiansen, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Rosalind Galt, Therese Grisham, Richard Grusin, Leon Gurevitch, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bruce Isaacs, Adrian Ivakhiv, Kylie Jarrett, Selmin Kara, ​Julia Leyda, 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

  • Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016)