Author: James S. Williams
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438460635
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics.
Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.
“A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole.” — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible
“Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century.” — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema
Encounters with Godard
Author: James S. Williams
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438460635
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics.
Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.
“A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole.” — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible
“Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century.” — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438460635
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics.
Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.
“A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole.” — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible
“Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century.” — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema
Seeing from Scratch
Author: Richard Dienst
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253068533
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over "from scratch," Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard's oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to think through images. Along the way we encounter, in this brief, accessible essay, ideal for classroom use, a wide range of thinkers whose ideas are put to use working through the intellectual and aesthetic questions and challenges Godard's epigrams suggest – not in the abstract, but as part of the book's practical approach to intellectual problem solving. In its conversational tone, return to fundaments and practical pedagogical approach, Seeing from Scratch is an essay for the media age in the mould of John Berger's Ways of Seeing from the 1970s: a new way of discussing the theory and practice of images and the film image. A companion piece, "The Postcard Game," presents a scene from an imaginary classroom, where a stack of postcards – like those found throughout Godard's work – provokes a spiralling series of questions about images, texts and the manifold pathways of the creative process.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253068533
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over "from scratch," Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard's oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to think through images. Along the way we encounter, in this brief, accessible essay, ideal for classroom use, a wide range of thinkers whose ideas are put to use working through the intellectual and aesthetic questions and challenges Godard's epigrams suggest – not in the abstract, but as part of the book's practical approach to intellectual problem solving. In its conversational tone, return to fundaments and practical pedagogical approach, Seeing from Scratch is an essay for the media age in the mould of John Berger's Ways of Seeing from the 1970s: a new way of discussing the theory and practice of images and the film image. A companion piece, "The Postcard Game," presents a scene from an imaginary classroom, where a stack of postcards – like those found throughout Godard's work – provokes a spiralling series of questions about images, texts and the manifold pathways of the creative process.
A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard
Author: Tom Conley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118587014
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 597
Book Description
This compendium of original essays offers invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential directors in the history of cinema, exploring his major films, philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and directors. Presents a compendium of original essays offering invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema Features contributions from an international cast of major film theorists and critics Provides readers with both an in-depth reading of Godard’s major films and a sense of his evolution from the New Wave to his later political periods Brings fresh insights into the great director’s biography, including reflections on his personal philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and filmmakers Explores many of the 80 features Godard made in nearly 60 years, and includes coverage of his recent work in video
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118587014
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 597
Book Description
This compendium of original essays offers invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential directors in the history of cinema, exploring his major films, philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and directors. Presents a compendium of original essays offering invaluable insights into the life and works of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema Features contributions from an international cast of major film theorists and critics Provides readers with both an in-depth reading of Godard’s major films and a sense of his evolution from the New Wave to his later political periods Brings fresh insights into the great director’s biography, including reflections on his personal philosophy, politics, and connections to other critics and filmmakers Explores many of the 80 features Godard made in nearly 60 years, and includes coverage of his recent work in video
Duras/Godard Dialogues
Author: Marguerite Duras
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999468364
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
"The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech."--Cyril Béghin, back cover.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999468364
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
"The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech."--Cyril Béghin, back cover.
The French Cinema Book
Author: Michael Temple
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349929093
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349929093
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.
Guy Debord and the Situationist International
Author: Tom McDonough
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262633000
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 524
Book Description
Critical texts, translations, documents, and photographs on the work of the Situationist International. This volume is a revised and expanded version of a special issue of the journal October (Winter 1997) that was devoted to the work of the Situationist International (SI). The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith. Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262633000
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 524
Book Description
Critical texts, translations, documents, and photographs on the work of the Situationist International. This volume is a revised and expanded version of a special issue of the journal October (Winter 1997) that was devoted to the work of the Situationist International (SI). The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith. Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking
Author: Irmgard Emmelhainz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319720953
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319720953
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.
Cinema
Author: Jean-Luc Godard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. He expounds on his central concerns - how film can "resurrect the past," the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an "art that thinks." Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history. --
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. He expounds on his central concerns - how film can "resurrect the past," the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an "art that thinks." Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history. --
Éric Rohmer
Author: Antoine de Baecque
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541570
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 670
Book Description
The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541570
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 670
Book Description
The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.
Zoom In, Zoom Out
Author: Sandra Barriales-Bouche
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807966
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
In the context of the transformations that Europe is undergoing, Zoom in, Zoom out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema attempts to serve as a testimony to the multiple ways in which European filmmakers are questioning the many borders of the continent. European films have become a vital cultural space where the relationship between borders and identity is being renegotiated. The films discussed here self-consciously address the question of European identity while overtly crossing geographic, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic borders. While all the articles explore the crossing of borders in Contemporary European films, the volume maintains diverse themes and perspectives as subtopics. It includes articles not only about films that deal thematically with border-crossings, but also articles that examine movies that cross borders in genres and techniques. The articles have different theoretical approaches (Film theory, Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis) and cover films from well-known cinematic traditions (French, Spanish, German, and Italian) as well as lesser-known cinematic traditions (Yugoslavian, Greek, and Irish). As a whole, the essays frame the self-conscious gesture by European filmmakers to define European cinema as a work-in-progress, or at the very least, as a project that, like Europe itself, raises as many questions as it answers. "This volume is a welcome addition to the growing critical literature on the evolution of the conception and practice of national cinema in Europe over the last two decades. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon have chosen a solid selection of representative case studies that reflects different critical approaches to the problem of maintaining local or national cinema production in Europe during a period of intense globalization. Their insightful introduction formulates the theme of “unsettled borders” and “renegotiated identities” that will resonate in the nine essays that follow. With a focus on the critical concept of these unsettled borders, the various authors explore the ways that the traditional mark of national space has been transformed through political and economic realignments as well as new technologies and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers for whom national cinema no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. The volume provides a good balance of critical approaches that includes auteur studies, descriptions of state policies and the particular practices of filmmakers and producers in different parts of the continent (Spain, Germany, Ireland, the Balkans) and, finally, useful appendices that provide a close-up view of the complex nature of international co-productions." —Marvin D’Lugo, Professor of Spanish, Clark University "This is an interesting collection of essays that has been well conceived and organised. The standard of writing is high and I recommend publication. I particularly commend the conceptual framework underpinning the volume. This marries a cultural studies approach, which still dominates the study of film in Area Studies and language departments across Europe and the US (where filmic texts are increasingly used as teaching tools), with the more industry-based focus one tends to find adopted by Media and Screen Studies departments. Thus this collection will appeal to a wide range of students and academics. The introduction sets out the volume’s overarching framework cogently and clearly, giving a nuanced exploration of the way that the notion of the border can be used as a dynamic prism to help define and explore the limits of our understanding of Europe, European identity and European culture, within which cinema has long played a key role. The editors give a good account, for example, of the way film has been employed as a space to explore the possibilities of European integration by EU politicians as well as highlighting the flaws inherent within this project. They do, however, perhaps suggest a certain Western European/North American-centric view in their suggestion that the cinema of Yugoslavia, Greece or Ireland is somehow less well known than other national and transnational cinemas explored here. Less well known to whom? ... However, from the broad range of cinemas explored in the rest of the volume clearly this is not the case. Particular high points for me are the chapters on the work of Fatih Akin by Janis Little Solomon and John Davidson’s discussion of Schulze gets the Blues, as well as Olivier Asselin’s fascinating account of Database Cinema. This will be a good addition to scholarship on European film and I look forward to receiving my copy." —Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds)
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807966
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
In the context of the transformations that Europe is undergoing, Zoom in, Zoom out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema attempts to serve as a testimony to the multiple ways in which European filmmakers are questioning the many borders of the continent. European films have become a vital cultural space where the relationship between borders and identity is being renegotiated. The films discussed here self-consciously address the question of European identity while overtly crossing geographic, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic borders. While all the articles explore the crossing of borders in Contemporary European films, the volume maintains diverse themes and perspectives as subtopics. It includes articles not only about films that deal thematically with border-crossings, but also articles that examine movies that cross borders in genres and techniques. The articles have different theoretical approaches (Film theory, Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis) and cover films from well-known cinematic traditions (French, Spanish, German, and Italian) as well as lesser-known cinematic traditions (Yugoslavian, Greek, and Irish). As a whole, the essays frame the self-conscious gesture by European filmmakers to define European cinema as a work-in-progress, or at the very least, as a project that, like Europe itself, raises as many questions as it answers. "This volume is a welcome addition to the growing critical literature on the evolution of the conception and practice of national cinema in Europe over the last two decades. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon have chosen a solid selection of representative case studies that reflects different critical approaches to the problem of maintaining local or national cinema production in Europe during a period of intense globalization. Their insightful introduction formulates the theme of “unsettled borders” and “renegotiated identities” that will resonate in the nine essays that follow. With a focus on the critical concept of these unsettled borders, the various authors explore the ways that the traditional mark of national space has been transformed through political and economic realignments as well as new technologies and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers for whom national cinema no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. The volume provides a good balance of critical approaches that includes auteur studies, descriptions of state policies and the particular practices of filmmakers and producers in different parts of the continent (Spain, Germany, Ireland, the Balkans) and, finally, useful appendices that provide a close-up view of the complex nature of international co-productions." —Marvin D’Lugo, Professor of Spanish, Clark University "This is an interesting collection of essays that has been well conceived and organised. The standard of writing is high and I recommend publication. I particularly commend the conceptual framework underpinning the volume. This marries a cultural studies approach, which still dominates the study of film in Area Studies and language departments across Europe and the US (where filmic texts are increasingly used as teaching tools), with the more industry-based focus one tends to find adopted by Media and Screen Studies departments. Thus this collection will appeal to a wide range of students and academics. The introduction sets out the volume’s overarching framework cogently and clearly, giving a nuanced exploration of the way that the notion of the border can be used as a dynamic prism to help define and explore the limits of our understanding of Europe, European identity and European culture, within which cinema has long played a key role. The editors give a good account, for example, of the way film has been employed as a space to explore the possibilities of European integration by EU politicians as well as highlighting the flaws inherent within this project. They do, however, perhaps suggest a certain Western European/North American-centric view in their suggestion that the cinema of Yugoslavia, Greece or Ireland is somehow less well known than other national and transnational cinemas explored here. Less well known to whom? ... However, from the broad range of cinemas explored in the rest of the volume clearly this is not the case. Particular high points for me are the chapters on the work of Fatih Akin by Janis Little Solomon and John Davidson’s discussion of Schulze gets the Blues, as well as Olivier Asselin’s fascinating account of Database Cinema. This will be a good addition to scholarship on European film and I look forward to receiving my copy." —Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds)