Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art

As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.

Jill Murphy is an independent scholar. Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland.

List of Illustrations, Acknowledgments, Foreword: Courtesy of the Artists, by Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder, Introduction: On Cinema Expanding, by Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli, Part One: Materialities, 1. Cinema as (In)Visible Object: Looking, Making, and Remaking, by Matilde Nardelli, 2. Objects in Time: Artefacts in Artists' Moving Image, by Alison Butler, 3. Materializing the Body of the Actor: Labour, Memory, and Storage, by Maeve Connolly, 4. How to Spell 'Film': Gibson & Recoder's Alphabet of Projection, by Volker Pantenburg, Part Two: Immaterialities, 5. The Magic of Shadows: Distancing and Exposure in William Kentridge's More Sweetly Play the Dance, by Jill Murphy, 6. Douglas Gordon and the Gallery of the Mind, by Sarah Cooper, 7. A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance: Tacita Dean's Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), by Kirstie North, Part Three: Temporalities, 8. The Photo-Filmic Diorama, by Agnes Petho, 9. The Cinematic Dispositif and its Ghost: Sugimoto's Theaters, by Stefano Baschiera, 10. Time/Frame: On Cinematic Duration, by Laura Rascaroli, Part Four: The Futures of the Image, 11. Interactivity without Control: David OReilly's Everything (2017) and the Representation of Totality, by Andrew V. Uroskie, 12. Post-Cinematic Unframing, by Lisa Åkervall, 13. Absolute Immanence, by D. N. Rodowick, Index.