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Non-Cinema
Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude
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Book Presentation:
Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude provides an original film-philosophy through which to understand low budget digital filmmaking from around the globe. It draws upon a wide range of western and non-western philosophers, physicists, theorists of 'Third Cinema,' and contemporary film theorists and film-philosophers in order to argue that the future of cinema lies at the margins, in the extreme, the overlooked and the under-funded – the sort that distributors, exhibitors and audiences would not consider to be cinema at all, hence "non-cinema."
Analysing numerous films, William Brown argues that contemporary low-budget digital cinema is also through its digital form a political cinema that suggests that we are not detached observers of the world, but entangled participants therewith. Non-Cinema constructs this argument by looking at work by established filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Michael Winterbottom, as well as lesser known work from places as diverse as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Africa.
About the Author:
William Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, UK. He is the author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013),Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010), with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, and co-editor, with David Martin-Jones, of Deleuze and Film (2012).David Martin-Jones is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006), Deleuze Reframed (2008) and Scotland: Global Cinema (2009), and co-editor of Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and Deleuze and Film (forthcoming). He is on the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy and A/V: The Journal of Deleuzian Studies.
Press Reviews:
"Brown brilliantly introduces the concept of non-cinema as anti-thesis, remainder and emergent condition of a "post-colonial" world dominated and impoverished by the logistics of capital-cinema. Non-cinema investigates zones of invisibility at the margins of spectacle, in the poor image, and in the poor world, while also providing a powerful survey of global (non-)cinema, its various attributes and its urgent commitments to socially transformative modes of relation. The book is a significant theoretical elaboration and critique of the world-media system, that also collects and concentrates globally distributed, often liminal, instances of struggle, inspiration and liberation." ―Jonathan Beller, Professor and Director, Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, USA
"Whether we understand it as 'acinema', 'paracinema', or 'post-cinema', William Brown's extremely important text on all such non-cinemas is deeply impressive: its breadth of knowledge, both theoretical and geo-cultural, has clearly demonstrated Brown to be the best thinker of non-standard cinemas working today." ―John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film, Kingston University, UK
"William Brown's Non-Cinema is a brilliant speculative history of cinema acting out against itself, against every convention and institution of film. This masterpiece unfolds everywhere else, forming the contours of a cinema that is not one, but rather a series of interventions that articulate the deep values that forge a cinema in spite itself, a total cinema understood as the very limits of cinema, non-cinema." ―Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Literature and Film, University of Southern California, USA
"'Prompted by the digital explosion which allowed for the excluded to come into the picture, William Brown took on the challenge of navigating through and making sense of the multitude – that is, the images and sounds of those who populate the outside of the narrow frame of capitalism. Truly global in scope and erudition, Non-Cinema takes us on a revelatory journey through the hidden audiovisual jewels from Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Philippines, Uruguay, France, the UK, the US, culminating in Nigeria with the ultimate non-cinematic production of Nollywood. Exemplary in its intellectual ambition and analytical acumen, this is a must-read book by one of today's most original audiovisual specialists.'" ―Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK
"Non-Cinema is a ground-breaking book that provides a remarkable analysis of the political and ethical issues at stake in the global postcinematic profusion of digital film practices." ―Screen
"Brown brilliantly introduces the concept of non-cinema as anti-thesis, remainder and emergent condition of a "post-colonial" world dominated and impoverished by the logistics of capital-cinema. Non-cinema investigates zones of invisibility at the margins of spectacle, in the poor image, and in the poor world, while also providing a powerful survey of global (non-)cinema, its various attributes and its urgent commitments to socially transformative modes of relation. The book is a significant theoretical elaboration and critique of the world-media system, that also collects and concentrates globally distributed, often liminal, instances of struggle, inspiration and liberation." ―Jonathan Beller, Professor and Director, Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, USA
"Whether we understand it as 'acinema', 'paracinema', or 'post-cinema', William Brown's extremely important text on all such non-cinemas is deeply impressive: its breadth of knowledge, both theoretical and geo-cultural, has clearly demonstrated Brown to be the best thinker of non-standard cinemas working today." ―John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film, Kingston University, UK
"William Brown's Non-Cinema is a brilliant speculative history of cinema acting out against itself, against every convention and institution of film. This masterpiece unfolds everywhere else, forming the contours of a cinema that is not one, but rather a series of interventions that articulate the deep values that forge a cinema in spite itself, a total cinema understood as the very limits of cinema, non-cinema." ―Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Literature and Film, University of Southern California, USA
"Prompted by the digital explosion which allowed for the excluded to come into the picture, William Brown took on the challenge of navigating through and making sense of the multitude – that is, the images and sounds of those who populate the outside of the narrow frame of capitalism. Truly global in scope and erudition, Non-Cinema takes us on a revelatory journey through the hidden audiovisual jewels from Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Philippines, Uruguay, France, the UK, the US, culminating in Nigeria with the ultimate non-cinematic production of Nollywood. Exemplary in its intellectual ambition and analytical acumen, this is a must-read book by one of today's most original audiovisual specialists." ―Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK
"Non-Cinema is a ground-breaking book that provides a remarkable analysis of the political and ethical issues at stake in the global postcinematic profusion of digital film practices." ―Screen
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
> From the same author:
The Squid Cinema From Hell (2020)
Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia
by William Brown and David H. Fleming
Subject: Theory
> On a related topic:
Cinecepts, Deleuze, and Godard-Miéville (2025)
Developing Philosophy through Audiovisual Media
Subject: Theory
Contemporary Screen Ethics (2025)
Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew
Dir. Lucy Bolton, David Martin-Jones and Robert Sinnerbrink
Subject: Theory
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