Animating Film Theory

Add to my list

Edited by Karen Redrobe

Type

Studies

Subject

Theory

Keywords

movement, theory

Publishing date

2014

Publisher

Duke University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 376 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8223-5640-0

User Ratings

(0 vote)

X

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously.

Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Herv Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi

About the Author:
Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman) is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis and Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and coeditor (with Jean Ma) of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, all also published by Duke University Press.

Press Reviews:
"The original arguments, concepts, and questions around animation introduced in this extraordinary project make it a major contribution to film and media theory and art theory more generally. Yet this is not just a book about animated films. Rather, it is a broad investigation of possible theories of animation that closely examines 'animation' as a concept with variable senses, and restores it as a central theme of past and current debates on the medium of film." - D. N. Rodowick, author of The Virtual Life of Film

"What a wonderful collection of essays! There is no other book that theorizes animation so thoroughly. The top-notch contributors take on the recent debate about the relationship of digital cinema to animated cinema, and they show us just how expansive the definition of animation can be. People who work in animation, and in film history more broadly, have been waiting for something like this." - Eric Smoodin, author of Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960

"This fecund, vivacious collection will be a vital resource for those interested in film animation." - T. Lindvall, Choice

“Animating Film Theory encompasses a wide concern for moving images and underexplored theoretical and aesthetic issues that thinking through and about animation opens up for readers.” - Amanda Egbe, Leonardo Reviews

"How has film theory discourse engaged animation up until now? And how would engagement with animation enrich contemporary film theory? Animating Film Theory explores these two questions.... Both discourse and engagement questions are thoroughly answered throughout this book, both explicitly and implicitly, and its goal has certainly been met." - Monika Raesch, International Journal of Communication

See the publisher website: Duke University Press