Persistent Images

Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema

Andrew Utterson

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474440745
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Considers the nature and status of contemporary cinema by way of a series of technological reflections on its past Argues for a progressive historiography that looks forward, moving beyond the sense of anxiety and loss that has dominated accounts of cinema's postulated demiseDraws on the latest thinking on evolving screen technologies and media archaeology and the development of cognate areas such as memory studiesCharts the historical memory of cinema, with a view to considering how our engagement with, and understanding of, this history might be reconfigured in the present.Channelling a focus on the history of cinema into the present and beyond, Persistent Images: Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema explores the continuing resonance of the memory of cinema as revealed in the technological and aesthetic expressions of a range of experimental practices. With case studies of films that reflexively foreground and creatively reimagine the past, including Shirin (2008), Goodbye to Language (2014) and Francofonia (2015), the book demonstrates how the medium of film can look simultaneously backwards and forwards, encountering and reframing the past in the present, and offering new ways of thinking about both film history and contemporary cinema alike.

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Media Archaeology and the Memory of a Medium: Dawson City: Frozen Time
• 2 A Drone’s-Eye View of History: Francofonia
• 3 The Movie Theatre as Haunted Space: Shirin and 70×70
• 4 Recalling the Past Lives of Cinema: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
• 5 3D Images at the Edge of History: Goodbye to Language and The Three Disasters
• 6 Voyaging in Deep Time: Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index