What Is Cinema?

caboose

In 1978, just before his return to the international stage, the world’s most renowned art-film director Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal. These talks, part of a projected video history of cinema, were published in French in 1980. In this definitive English-language volume, translator Timothy Barnard has worked from the original footage to carefully revise and correct the faulty French transcription. The result is the most extensive and revealing account of Godard’s own work, his methods, and his critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid, and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume, by the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius cinema has known and available for the first time in English, is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature. Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television

Arts & Photography

GODARD, Jean-Luc

History & Criticism

In the cinema many were living and many kept on living and many became dead, as Gertrude Stein might say. Some kept on living and some kept on being dead and some became things. Bodies proliferate in cinema. Living bodies to be sure, but also dead bodies, and transitional bodies, suspended between the being of a subject and objecthood. We tend to use the same word to designate both a living and a dead body. We also, of course, use the word ‘corpse’. Dead is dead, no doubt, but if there are degrees of deadness then a corpse is probably deader than a dead body.
Lesley Stern is more interested in things than in death. It is thus the liveliness of corpses that lures her. Not dead bodies which act as though they were alive, nor live bodies which may really be dead, nor bodies which may in fact be composited, or even digitally constructed bodies. Rather, ordinary, old-fashioned bodies, bodies once living and now dead which exhibit a performative potential for conjuring a quality of cinematic thingness. They are bodies that insist on existing after they are dead. In some films in which dead bodies persist, time is concentrated in the body. And dispersed. When life leaves the body, time–or a particular quality of time–enters into the body, and into the film. The body, then, becomes an index of cinematic temporality. Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

Dead and Alive: The Body as a Cinematic Thing (Kino-Agora)

Stern, Lesley

Photography & Video

“We can clearly see how easily and imperceptibly one may slip from an essentially realistic composition towards one extreme, naturalistic, or the other, conventional and ‘formalist.’ It’s just like declaiming verse. A little too much emphasis on the period of the rhythm, and the recitation turns into a lifeless mechanical drone. A touch too slack on rhythmic delivery, and the distinct cadence of verse disintegrates into the baffling formlessness of semi-prose. A little too much emphasis on the circle [formed by the characters], and the mise en scène starts to lean towards ballet and conventional theatre. A bit too careless with the geometric figure, and the clear, distinct, meaningful mise en scène is sucked into the swamp of formless naturalism.” —Sergei Eisenstein Mise en jeu and Mise en geste was composed in January 1948, a few months before Sergei Eisenstein’s death. Here he subordinates all aspects of mise en scène to some unifying idea inherent in the subject matter, transforming it from an incoherent jumble into a “legible text.” There the subtext of a given scene—its hidden meaning—may be writ large. Unlike his previous writings on mise en scène, this essay treats separately mise en jeu (transposing the “interplay of motives” into a sequence of actions); mise en geste (transposing character into gesture); and mise en cadre (recreating the effects of a poetic passage through shot composition). Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

Mise en jeu and Mise en geste (Kino-Agora)

Eisenstein/Sergei

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital age. Today’s “new cinephilia” shares with the cinephilia of the 1950s a robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Cinephilic practice today—viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films—is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction, made possible by dramatically lower economic barriers to publication through the internet, giving rise to new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models. Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

The New Cinephilia (Kino-Agora)

Shambu, Girish

The last decade has seen extraordinary developments in the multimedia presentation of cinema and moving image scholarship via the form that is commonly known as the 'video essay'. What the finest examples of this videographic criticism have made clear is that such work allows for and even demands a different rhetoric than written film scholarship, which can in turn transform how we engage with and study cinematic texts. With special focus on the practice and pedagogy of videographic production, the volume contains detailed descriptions of the assignments that were designed to both stimulate work and teach technology; in addition, a companion page on the caboose website will feature videos produced by participants during the workshop. This unique volume will be of great value to teachers and students, critics and videomakers, as well as anyone interested in this growing area of critical practice. The volume will also address issues such as the professional validation of videographic work, copyright and fair use, and technology. Also featured are original contributions by the workshop's special guests: Eric Faden, Catherine Grant and Kevin B. Lee. "A must-read for all scholars, teachers and video makers interested in using moving images to understand moving images. The book not only forms a blueprint for how to develop skills in 'videographic essay' production, but also provides a window into the future of film and media studies as a discipline. Including essential creative and practical advice by leading practitioners in the field, the book is sure to play a key role in the advancement of this exciting new approach to film and media studies. - Richard Misek, University of Kent

The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image

Following its acclaimed edition of selections from André Bazin’s What is Cinema?, caboose is pleased to present a greatly expanded collection of articles by France’s foremost film critic and theorist. André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943-1958 doubles the number of articles found in the earlier volume to twenty-six, making this the most comprehensive collection in English of a broad range of Bazin’s writings throughout his entire career, with extensive annotations and corrections. The texts included here are all offered in their original version, as they were written, published and discussed in Bazin’s day in post-war France—before Bazin and in some cases his posthumous editors revised and abridged them for republication. In most cases this is the first time these articles have been republished in their original form in any language, including French. Readers will discover the essay “Découpage,” the basis of Bazin’s most famous text and the most widely-read article in cinema studies, “The Evolution of Film Language.”  The volume includes brilliant essays on major filmmakers of the classical film period, including Renoir, Welles, Chaplin, Bresson, Malraux and Wyler; essays on film and the other arts; the famous essay on Italian neo-realism; essays on documentary and science film; comedy; film language; film history; and the 'politique des auteurs’ and the role of the critic. The volume’s new translations of these texts re-assert Bazin’s status as the pre-eminent film critic and theorist of all time. Each essay is extensively annotated by Timothy Barnard, situating the man and his work in the cultural and social climate of post-war France.   Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943-1958

Bazin, André

Montage, découpage, mise en scène: these three French terms are central to debates around film history and aesthetics in every language, yet the precise meaning of each and especially their relationship to one another remain a source of confusion for many. In this unique volume, film scholars Laurent Le Forestier, Timothy Barnard and Frank Kessler examine in lively, readable prose the history of these concepts in film theory and criticism and their genesis and development in practice during cinema's foundational first half-century and beyond--from early cinema to the modern mise en scène criticism of the 1950s and 60s by way of silent-era explorations of the theory and practice of montage and the early sound period's counter example of découpage. Each essay serves as an essential guide for students and specialists alike, combining historical overview with fresh ideas about film aesthetics today.

Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form

Kessler, Frank

Le Forestier, Laurent

Barnard, Timothy

The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems

Gaudreault, André

Marion, Philippe

Product Description Describing editing as cinema's formal and aesthetic soul because of its ability to represent time, in this wide-ranging essay Jacques Aumont surveys the theory and practice of editing and montage from early cinema to the digital era. Aumont addresses the Soviet filmmaker-theorists of the 1920s, of course – he is a translator of Eisenstein and the author of a book on Eisenstein's montage – but also brings into the discussion contemporary directors such as Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Aleksandr Sokurov, Kathryn Bigelow and Lisandro Alonso, with stops along the way for the ideas of André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This original essay is essential reading by one of the leading film scholars at work in the world today and a rare opportunity for English speakers to enjoy his work. This expanded and revised edition adds a dozen pages to the original volume. "We have entered into a period in which the reign of vision has become contested by that of the image, with the result that editing has changed nature, because its job is no longer to regulate a succession of shots as much as it is to regulate a succession of images. And while the shot has a responsibility towards reality, the image is responsible only to itself." ― Jacques Aumont About the Author Jacques Aumont taught cinema and aesthetics for forty years in Paris universities. His work has focused on three related fields: (1) theoretical problems around representation and the aesthetics of visual art; (2) the relationship of film and fiction; and (3) film analysis, its methodology and related concepts. He is the author, co-author, editor or translator of more than twenty books, including in English Montage Eisenstein, The Image and Aesthetics of Film. In 2019, he received the prestigious Balzan Prize for his career in film studies.

Montage

Aumont, Jacques

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