Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion challenge the prognosis that cinema is dying, arguing that cinema has always been more an ‘evolving patchwork of federated cultural series’ than a static form with a fixed identity. In a discussion ranging from early cinema, of which today’s media landscape a century later is an eerie reflection, to opera films in local movie theatres to the ‘return of cinema’s repressed’ – animation, and now performance capture – The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems lays out a roadmap for negotiating the issues that will confront cinema in the years ahead as it increasingly mingles with other media. In the process the authors coin another neologism in their extensive repertoire, the ‘kinematic’, or the shift from the medium cinema to a convergence of moving image media, one that will engender a major ‘turn’ in study of the field.

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.

Describing editing as cinema’s formal and aesthetic soul because of its ability to represent time, in this lyrical 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, written especially for caboose, 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. It is the first of three Kino-Agora volumes on the essential concepts and practices of film montage, découpage and mise en scène. 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 Jacques Aumont has worked as a radio and television engineer, a critic with Cahiers du Cinéma and a member of the board of directors of the publisher Éditions de l’Étoile. He began teaching cinema studies in 1970, and later aesthetics, at the Paris-1, Paris-3 and Lyon-2 universities and at the E.H.E.S.S. in France, and in addition in Berkeley, Madison, Iowa City, Nijmegen and Lisbon. He is emeritus professor at the Université de Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. He has worked in three related (1) theoretical problems around representation; (2) the aesthetics of visual art, in particular the relationship between cinema and painting; and (3) film analysis, its methodology and related concepts. His publications Montage Eisenstein, 1979, 2005; L’Oeil interminable, 1989, 1995, 2007; L’image, 1990, 2011; Du visage au cinéma, 1992; Introduction à la couleur, 1994; De l’esthétique au présent, 1998; Les Théories des cinéastes, 2002, 2011; Matière d’images, 2005, 2009; Cinéma et mise en scène, 2006, 2010; Moderne?, 2007; L’Attrait de la lumière, 2010; Le Montreur d’ombre, 2012; and Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, 2012. He has edited or translated an additional twenty volumes and written some two hundred and fifty articles for journals, periodicals, catalogues and conference proceedings.

Mise en Jeu and Mise en Geste was composed in January 1948, a few months before Sergei Eisenstein’s untimely death. Here Eisenstein insists on subordinating all aspects of mise en scène to some unifying idea or principle inherent in the subject matter, thus transforming it from an incoherent jumble of staging decisions into a “legible text”, wherein the subtext of a given scene or event – its hidden meaning – may be writ large. Unlike Eisenstein’s previous writings on mise en scène, this essay treats separately distinct elements of that notoriously catch-all mise en jeu (transposition “of the interplay of motives” into a sequence of concrete actions); mise en geste (transposition of character into gesture); and mise en cadre (recreating the specific effects of a poetic passage through shot composition). Unfinished at the time of his death, the essay has been reconstructed by the Eisenstein Centre in Moscow and is appearing here in English for the first time. 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 Sergei Eisenstein’s films include Battleship Potemkin (1926), still recognised today as one of cinema’s great masterpieces. As an early theorist of montage and film aesthetics, his writings display dazzling intellectual virtuosity, erudition and scope. Sergey Levchin is an independent literary and academic translator living in Brooklyn, New York.

In this volume, the only book on the topic of cinematic découpage in any language, Timothy Barnard surveys the writings of a broad range of filmmakers, historians and theorists of cinema’s early, classical and modern eras to explore the meanings of découpage and the usefulness of the concept to film criticism and theory today. Almost universally confused in English-language writing on film with editing—when it isn’t completely ignored—découpage articulated instead an understanding by French critics that sequencing was conceived before and during the shooting of a film, not in the cutting, and that the camera played not merely a pictorial role but instead structured the film through its formal treatment and sequencing of the mise en scène. A nascent theory of découpage was sketched out by André Bazin, but the term and the concept have been obliterated from most English translations of his work, in which it has perversely been replaced by editing. Despite everything we have been told, D.W. Griffith, as Bazin remarked, did not invent editing: he invented découpage. ‘Griffith didn’t invent the close-up either’, Bazin quipped in a 1947 article defending Orson Welles against the charge by Georges Sadoul that Citizen Kane did not invent the use of depth of field. ‘But he invented découpage—which is to say thirty years of cinema’. Employing an innovative découpage-like writing structure that flows effortlessly between his sources and disentangles découpage for the English reader in direct prose that will find a welcome home in undergraduate lecture halls, graduate seminar rooms and on the bookshelves of general readers alike, Barnard leads us on a journey through the history and theory of découpage and argues for its importance to film theory today. The authors discussed include Henri Agel, Alexandre Astruc, Jean George Auriol, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, Raymond Borde, David Bordwell, Eileen Bowser, Luis Buñuel, Noël Burch, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Tom Gunning, Roger Leenhardt, Rachael Low, André Malraux, Jean Mitry, Harry Alan Potamkin, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Éric Rohmer, Georges Sadoul and Kristin Thompson. Timothy Barnard is the proprietor of caboose, for whom he has translated a selection of essays from André Bazin’s What is Cinema? in 2009 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television in 2014.

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today’s “new cinephilia” and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today’s cinephilic practice – viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films – is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today’s cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models. This book both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today. Girish Shambu is a cinephile and Associate Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He runs a community-oriented film blog named “girish” at girishshambu.blogspot.com, and co-edits, with Adrian Martin, the on-line cinema journal LOLA. His writings have appeared in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Artforum.com, Cineaste and in the collection Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 1: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture (Wallflower Press).

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. Some of the form’s alternative rhetorical approaches to the traditional scholarly goal of producing knowledge were tested in summer 2015 at an NEH-funded workshop, ‘Scholarship in Sound and Image’, organised by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell at Middlebury College in Vermont. There, fourteen international scholars gathered to experiment with the new form. This volume grows out of that workshop. 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.

Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over ‘from scratch’, Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard’s oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to think through images. Along the way we encounter, in this brief, accessible essay, ideal for classroom use, a wide range of thinkers whose ideas are put to practical use working through the intellectual and aesthetic questions and challenges Godard’s epigrams suggest. Readers are thus introduced to some of the essential currents in canonical and contemporary thinking on the image, from Kant to Klee, Reverdy to Rancière and Brecht to Bresson – not in the abstract, but as part of the book's practical approach to intellectual problem solving. In its conversational tone, return to fundaments and practical pedagogical approach, Seeing from Scratch is an essay for the media age in the mould of John Berger's Ways of Seeing from the 1970s: a new way of discussing the theory and practice of images and the film image. A companion piece, ‘The Postcard Game’, presents a scene from an imaginary classroom, where a stack of postcards—like those found throughout Godard’s work—provokes a spiralling series of questions about images, texts and the manifold pathways of the creative process, providing a template for similar new kinds of pedagogical activity and discussion. Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard arrives on our virtual bookshelves at the perfect time. Never have we needed to rethink how we teach and learn about images more than we do now, a time when we are buried beneath bewildering imagery and when higher education is being transformed in dispiriting ways before our very eyes. Richard Dienst offers us a series of provocations infused with a wit and intelligence equal to that of Jean-Luc Godard, whose work is the inspiration for this ambitious attempt to rebuild a pedagogy of images from the ground up. It should inspire students and teachers of film alike in ways that will surely surprise them. — Christopher Pavsek, Simon Fraser University In Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard, Richard Dienst teaches us how to see and thereby think through the Swiss filmmaker’s cinematic imaginary. Combining his acute critical lens with a more playful example from a postcard game, Dienst illuminates Godard’s strategic deployment of a system of montage in which a careful selection of images is set in motion, generating a series of profound meditations. Dienst persuasively demonstrates how images, even when isolated, are never alone but exist in complex relationships with each other, forming ever-changing constellations. Seeing from Scratch traces the evolution of the nonagenarian’s image theory from the 1960s to more recent iterations in The Image Book (2018) or Goodbye to Language (2014). The lessons we learn from Dienst extend beyond an understanding of Godard and make us rethink the way in which moving images can produce critique in the twenty-first century. — Nora M. Alter, Temple University Richard Dienst is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good and Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. His essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht and cultural theory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.