|
"In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema. "-- "Demonstrates how Agamben's ideas can enrich and extend our understanding of film as a medium and the cinema as an apparatus, constantly being remade"-- Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction -- 1 Ex-centric Cinema: An Archaeological Method -- 2 Mute Cinema: Gesture and the Impression of Character -- 3 Animal: Cinema as an Anthropological Machine -- 4 Profaning the Cinematic: Children, Assistants, Ghosts -- 5 Conditions of Cinematic Possibility: Repetition and Stoppage -- 6 The Coming Community -- Bibliography -- Index
|
