Product Description

Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And, as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema's 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films - from "Being John Malkovich", "Donnie Darko", and "The Sixth Sense" to La mala educacion and Cache - Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film's original rolling reel to today's digital pixel. He goes on to show - with 140 stills - how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly after-lives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with "Between Film and Screen", breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #826847 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"Like all really fine critics, Garrett Stewart has an eye for the telling detail, and a way of registering how even the subtlest effects can be made to ramify in significant ways. The readings in this book constitute an extended analytic comparison of how recent American and European filmmakers address, or betray, a change in the way in which time is registered on screen - from the regime of the rolling film strip to the regime of the altering pixel." - James Chandler, University of Chicago"

About the Author
Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the English department at the University of Iowa. He is the author of several books, including Between Film and Screen, and, most recently, The Look of Reading, both published by the University of Chicago Press.