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cabooseSpring 2020

caboose is an independent publisher of books about film located in Mon-treal, Canada. caboose publishes a small number of innovative books each year on topics related to film theory, history and criticism. Our books have an international focus and combine the highest standards of academic research and scholar-ship with reading enjoyment and usefulness. They are often collab-orative in nature and create whole new fields of enquiry and modes of discussion of interest to specialists and general readers alike.

title index

theory and practice

kino agora

Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television

André Bazin, André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943-1958

Laurent Le Forestier, Timothy Barnard and Frank Kessler, Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form

André Gaudreault & Philippe Marion, The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems

Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell & Catherine Grant, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image

Girish Shambu, The New Cinephilia

Jacques Aumont, Montage

Sergei Eisenstein, Mise en Jeu and Mise en Geste

Lesley Stern, Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing

Sarah Kozloff, The Life of the Author

translated by Timothy Barnard

with an essay by M ichael Witt

Introduc tion to a Tr ue H istor y of Cinema andTelevisionJean-Luc Godard

preface by Serge Losique

caboose Montreal

The only complete edition and English

translation of this landmark testament

by one of cinema’s greatest figures

?

In 1978, just before returning to the international stage for the second phase of his career, the world’s most renowned art-film director then and now, Jean-Luc Godard, improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal as part of a projected video history of cinema. These talks, published in French in 1980 and long out of print, have never before been translated into English. For this edition, the faulty and incomplete French transcription has been entirely revised and corrected, working from the sole videotape copies of the lectures, housed in the Concordia University archives, and Godard’s discussions with the audience restored.

For this project, Godard screened for a dozen or so students his own famous films of the 1960s—watching them himself for the first time since their production—alongside single reels of some of the films which most influenced his work (by Eisenstein, Dreyer, Rossellini, the American directors of the 1950s and many others). Working at the dawn of the video age, a technology which was to be essential to his completion of the project many years later, as the visual essay Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard used pieces of 35mm film, projected in an auditorium, to approximate the his-torical montage he was groping towards. He then held forth, in an experience he describes as a form of ‘public self-psychoanalysis’, on his personal and professional relationships (with François Truf-faut, Anna Karina, Raoul Coutard, film producers and audiences), working methods, aesthetic preferences, political beliefs and, on the cusp of 50, his philosophy of life.

The result is the most extensive and revealing account ever of his work and critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loqua-cious, lucid and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature, by perhaps the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius cinema has known.

Read a sample chapter from the book.

praise for introduction to a true history of cinema and

television

The Godard who emerges from Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television is a quint-essential twentieth-century high modernist—the author of an ongoing, not yet completed project comparable in ambition to In Search of Lost Time or The Cantos, composed in an idio-lect that, as with Joyce or Picasso or Gertrude Stein, effectively reinvented a medium. — J. Hoberman, The Nation

This is a major event in film studies: we hear as if for the first time the live pulse of Go-dard’s lectures and discussions in Montreal in 1978—a series of fourteen meetings that pave the way for the eight chapters of his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998). Timothy Barnard con-veys brilliantly Godard’s mercurial thought in action, even at its most hesitant, contradictory and ambivalent. This wonderfully accessible and superbly edited translation restores miss-ing material and conversations that were not transcribed in the original 1980 French edi-tion, the illustrations of which are reproduced here with translated captions. Michael Witt’s magisterial introductory essay to the volume on the dense archaeology of Histoire(s) com-plements the translation perfectly in its intel-lectual commitment and rigour. Previously un-available to the Anglo-Saxon reader, this now fully complete volume will prove indispensable to anyone seriously interested in the history and philosophy of film. — James Williams, Royal Holloway, University of London

Some great works must be preceded by a work without which their project itself would have been difficult to conceive. Thus Jean Santeuil for Marcel Proust, for example, was the work that opened the way to In Search of Lost Time. In the same way Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinema was the first laboratory in which the idea of Histoire(s) du cinema took shape. That is an indication of its importance and why its first scholarly publication, in a considerably enhanced English edition more than thirty years after its publication in French, is such an event. — Raymond Bellour, Emeritus Director of Research, CNRS

Timothy Barnard has given us a meticulous English translation of a fas-cinating experiment—a mix of classroom projections, lectures and dis-cussions in which Jean-Luc Godard comments on his own career and its relation to twentieth-century film and television. Inspired by Henri Langlois and André Malraux, Godard advocates a method of thinking about cinema in audio-visual form, by means of unexpected juxtaposi-tions, montage and collage. The digital revolution that would facilitate such thinking had not yet occurred, but this book was the seed from which one of its most remarkable products, Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, would eventually grow. Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television is important reading for anyone interested in Godard—in other words, anyone interested in cinema. — James Naremore, Emeritus Chancellors’ Professor, Indiana Univer-sity

The volcanic talks which make up the volume Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma are an explosive series of propositions on the image, flowing out of the magma of European cinephilia and spurting forth in the blaze of direct dialogue with the films and the audience. The splendid English version prepared by Timothy Barnard, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, should serve as the model for a new French edition. — Nicole Brenez, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne nouvelle

Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television is the outline of Jean-Luc Godard’s magisterial great work, Histoire(s) du cinéma. It also outlines a method, never before seen in cinema: comparison. In other words, the search, between films, for “resemblances which cry out”, to borrow Georges Bataille’s expression. Finally translated, this Introduction will enable English speakers to better understand the French criti-cal tradition bequeathed by Baudelaire and Malraux. — Dominique Païni, École du Louvre

January 2020.558 pp., 6” x 9”. 64 b+w illus. Index of names and film titles.Hardcover, sewn binding with cloth boards, 1 co-lour illus. + 1 errata sheet bound in, ISBN 978-0-9811914-2-3, $125*. Additional copies for the same location, $75*.Paperback, sewn binding, ISBN 978-0-9811914-1-6, $50*. (No institutional sales.)

Read a sample chapter

Recommend to a librarian

Get it free!! ‡Free with the purchase of five caboose Kino-Agora volumes and Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form ($180* for all 6) and the forth-coming electronic second edition of Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television via EBSCO ($160*†). Customers in Canada, Japan, China, India, Korea, Tai-wan and New Zealand please add André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958 in hardcover ($125*).

Expanded electronic edition avail-able December 2020 via EBSCO.

ISBN 978-1-927852-29-3, $160*† single user, $200*† 3 users, De-cember 2020.

With an additional major essay by Jacques Aumont and slight revisions to the essay by Michael Witt; the hardcover edition’s er-rate sheet will be incorporated into the text.

* Prices in USD. For bound books, the Canadian dollar is accepted at par for Canadian customers.

† 65% discount for institutions in the developing world. Details from EBSCO.

‡ Free with the purchase of six other caboose volumes in the present catalogue. See the Terms of Sale.

This volume is a stunningly beautiful full-cloth hardcover edition of the original sewn paperback edition, rebound by a master bookbinder. The paperback cover image is reproduced and bound into the hardcover edition on a printed front end page, with a brief errata sheet bound in on a printed back end page.

https://www.caboosebooks.net/node/65

https://www.caboosebooks.net/sites/default/files/Godard_Errata_Sheet_Letter.pdf



https://www.caboosebooks.net/sites/default/files/Godard_Errata_Sheet_Letter.pdf

andré

Selected1943

bazin

Writings1958

Montrealcaboose

–

Xwith an eSSay by jacqueS aumont

tranSlated bytimothy barnard

The most comprehensive English-language

collection of the major texts

in a renowned translation

and critical edition

X

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. This second edition of André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958 more than doubles the number of articles found in What is Cinema? to twenty-eight, totalling some 150,000 words, making this the most comprehensive collection in English of a broad range of Bazin’s most important writings throughout his entire career, with extensive annotations and corrections. No other English-language edition has brought together all the major texts in this way.

All the texts are offered in their original form, as they were published in Bazin’s day—before Bazin or his posthumous editors revised and abridged them for republication. Several of the essays have never before been translated into English. The volume in-cludes brilliant essays on major filmmakers of the classical film period; essays on film and the other arts; on Italian neo-realism; documentary and science film; comedy; film language and mise en scène; 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 the translator.

Bazin sparkles in these new translations, accompanied by 50,000 words of commentary. Jacques Aumont, France’s pre-emi-nent living film theorist, offers a portrait of Bazin in an introduc-tory essay that places him in his time and highlights his work as a cultural activist. This essay, written especially for this volume, is a rare opportunity for English readers to enjoy Aumont’s marvellous writing style and keen insights, some of which go against the grain of the myth around Bazin It is the first time in an extraordinary career that he has trained his sights on his illustrious predecessor.

The volume also includes a glossary of terms by the translator, who presents a lively and accessible discussion of some of Bazin’s key terms, including découpage, montage, mise en scène and fait, and situates this terminology in a history of film theory.

This unique translation is a must-have for every film scholar working in English. It represents a massive and vital undertaking that, for the first time, brings together key essays by Bazin, many of which were previously unavailable in English — and it does so by going back to the original French versions rather than the edited and revised ones that circulated after Bazin’s death! This collection is simply the best access to Bazin’s work that currently exists in English. It also includes a very useful glossary of terms that in itself stands as an important contribu-tion to film studies. Attention to details, as well as an introductory essay by major French film scholar Jacques Aumont, adds to the excellent translations to make this volume an essential document for every serious film studies library.— Martin Lefebvre, Concordia University Research Chair in Film Studies

praise for the caboose edition of selections from

andré bazin’s what is cinema?This is the most accurate, thoughtful and in-spired translation of Bazin (or, for that matter, of any French film theorist) into English we have seen in a very long time. Barnard has tak-en up the challenge of cleaning up the appar-ent mess created by previous English versions of Bazin’s work, commenting upon a number of key passages and concepts and making Bazin’s prose more accessible and enjoyable than ever before. Any serious film scholar should make the extra effort necessary to obtain a copy of this book.— Paolo Cherchi Usai, Journal of Film Preservation

Vastly superior to the two volumes published by the University of California Press. I’m espe-cially taken with the graceful flow of the trans-lation. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the many merits of Timothy Barnard’s new translation is that it puts Bazin back into history. The translation restores some of the ur-gency of the writing, while the copious footnotes supply much-needed context. It is far more scholarly than the existing edition, both in its annotations and in the quality of the translation, which is both elegant and accurate. — Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Film Quarterly

For the first time, Timothy Barnard has given us the meticulous and scholarly edition of What is Cinema? that every lover of Bazin has dreamt of. The translator’s notes alone, with their enthralling discus-sions of important theoretical problems, make this edition worth con-sulting without delay. — Jacques Aumont, Université Paris 3

Each [text] is accompanied by an impressive philological labour, con-sisting either in finding the original of a quotation that Bazin had dis-torted or in setting out hypotheses, backed up by evidence, as to the meaning Bazin accorded to one word or another. The most imposing (and conclusive) research concerns the meaning of a term essential to Bazin, découpage. Barnard devotes to this word and to the difficulty of translating it a twenty-page note that is a veritable exercise in historical semantics. Most of all, Barnard’s entire enterprise consists in reintro-ducing history into a body of work from which it had largely disap-peared. Through his editorial choices, Barnard has in a sense turned What is Cinema? inside out like a glove, revealing part of its hidden historical dimension. Anchored by his apposite notes, Bazin’s texts re-cover their historical weight.— Laurent Le Forestier, 1895

Girish Shambu informed me of a bookshop on Toronto’s College St. that carries a new translation of Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema? Be-cause of copyright conflicts with the publisher of the previous transla-tion, this edition, published by caboose, is unavailable [in the United States]. When I arrived and began perusing the film section, the clerk called out to me, “Are you looking for What is Cinema?” Rather aston-ished, I replied, “How did you know that?” “Oh, everyone with a TIFF badge who comes in here is looking for that book,” he replied. It seems that bringing home this translation is, hyperbole aside, almost remi-niscent of the Americans who had to smuggle Ulysses out of France in their suitcases during the 1920s. Girish told me that, when he bought the book a few days earlier, the clerk quipped, “Some good, old-fash-ioned contraband, eh?” — Richard Porton

January 2020530 pp., 6” x 9”. Index of names and film titles.Hardcover, sewn bind-ing with cloth boards, 1 colour illus., ISBN 978-1-927852-13-2, $125*. Additional copies for the same location, $75*.Paperback, sewn binding, ISBN 978-1-927852-27-9, $60*. (No institutional sales.)Electronic version, ISBN 978-1-927852-28-6, $160*† single user, $200*† 3 users.

Not for sale in the U.S.A., U.K., European Union or Australia.



Expanded and revised second edition

Read samples from the book


One of the boldest moves ever seen in Anglophone cinema studies. This new translation challenges us to jettison received wisdom and take a fresh look at what Bazin actually wrote, linking him tellingly to Malraux and Kra-cauer (an astounding and ingenious intuition). Barnard’s mission is to strip the questions in each essay bare for others to address. This tender and chiv-alrous sentiment is reinforced by painstaking translator’s notes, certain of which will undoubtedly become famous in their own right. — Dudley Andrew and Prakash Younger, Cinémas



Essential essays, in robust, lively prose,

on film aesthetics and the history

of film style and film theory

Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène

Essays on Film Form

Timothy Barnard, Frank Kessler

Laurent Le Forestier,

Montage, découpage, mise en scène: these three French terms are central to debates around film history and aesthetics in every lan-guage, yet the precise meaning of each and especially their rela-tionship 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 30,000-word essay serves as an essential guide for students, cinephiles and spe-cialists alike, combining historical overview with fresh ideas about film aesthetics today.

laurent le forestier is a professor in the film history and aesthetics section of the Uni-versité de Lausanne. He is also editorial secretary of the journal 1895 revue d’histoire du cinéma and director of the Swiss branch of the international research partnership TECH-NÈS, on the history of film technology and techniques. He works on early cinema, the his-tory of film criticism and the relations between découpage and montage. He has recently published La Transformation Bazin (PUR, 2017) and is currently completing a book with André Gaudreault on editing practices in the silent era. He is also preparing two other volumes, on the international reception of Citizen Kane and its effects on the emergence of the academic discipline “cinema studies” and on comic cinema’s questioning of the thirty-year boom period following the Second World War.

timothy barnard is the proprietor of caboose, for which he has translated Jean-Luc Go-dard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television and the volume André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958.

frank kessler is professor of media history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and one of the founders and editors of KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. He is a past president of Domitor, an international association for research on early cinema. His research mainly concerns the period of the emergence of cinema and nineteenth-century visual culture, as well as the history of film theory. He currently leads a research project entitled “Projecting Knowledge: The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Com-munication in the Netherlands, 1880–1940”.

praise for montage, découpage, mise en scène

Montage, Découpage and Mise en scène are of considerable interest for film criticism. Most striking, and most significant in terms of the central concerns of this journal, is Timothy Barnard’s Découpage, which develops key as-pects of his Bazin translation. His treatment of découpage in the two volumes both transforms the ways in which Bazin’s ideas have been com-monly understood in the English-speaking world and offers new perspectives on the his-tory of film theory. . . . The caboose connection has already proved extremely energising. This group of publications offers mutually enriching perspectives, both historical and conceptual, to inform debates about and practices of detailed film criticism. — Douglas Pye, Movie

How handy to have, in a single volume, “mise en scène” correctly shorn of its unnecessary hyphens and treated by Frank Kessler as a particular way station in the development of film criticism and film theory, “montage” il-luminated historically and kaleidoscopically by Laurent Le Forestier, and most importantly (because most in need of clarification for An-glo-Americans), “découpage” extensively and definitively redefined by Timothy Barnard.— Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Mise en scène and Découpage essays in this volume are revised and expanded versions of the essays which originally appeared separately in the caboose Kino-Agora series. The Montage essay, translated from the French, has never before appeared in English or French.

January 2020.272 pp., 6” x 9”. Hardcover, sewn bind-ing with cloth boards, 1 colour illus. ISBN 978-1-927852-07-1, $90*. Additional copies for the same location, $60*.Paperback, sewn binding, ISBN 978-1-927852-08-8. $45*. Electronic version, ISBN 978-1-927852-26-2, $100*† single user, $125*† 3 users.




Montage . . .In the ‘Montage’ essay in the volume Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène, French film historian Laurent Le Forestier starts from the prem-ise that the concept ‘montage’ does not exist in the absolute but must always be considered in light of the time and place in which it operates and is understood, and must always be studied in relation to other arts and social phenomena.

Giorgio Agamben, taking up a topic – the cinema – he did not usually address, once remarked: ‘The specific character of cinema stems from montage, but what is montage? Or rather, what are the conditions of possibility of montage?’ Agamben proposes a solely theo-retical response to these two questions: ‘There are two transcendental conditions of montage: repetition and stoppage’. Le Forestier’s essay on montage will start over from this two-part question, with the prem-ise that this theoretical response is insufficient, or at least necessarily incomplete: montage, seen as a practice – editing – and/or as a form of thought – montage – speaks to quite diverse realities depending on the time and place. Agamben’s ‘conditions of possibility’ are constantly fluctuating within highly variable parameters: production systems, available technologies, the status of the professionals involved in the work of editing, the dominant ideas around film, its social uses, etc.

Découpage . . .In this section of the volume, the only discussion in English of cin-ematic découpage, Timothy Barnard surveys the writings of a broad range of filmmakers, historians and theorists of the classical and mod-ern eras to explore the meanings of découpage and the usefulness of the concept to film theory and criticism today. Almost universally con-fused 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 assembly, 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. De-spite 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’.

Mise en scène.The Belgian film critic Dirk Lauwaert once proclaimed that mise en scène is the “most beautiful word” when talking about cinema. In this essay Frank Kessler charts the term’s use from its origins in theatre circles in the 19th century through to the auteur theories found in French film criticism of the 1950s and 60s up to the present day and the place of mise en scène in the contemporary digital cinematic landscape. Mise en scène, when un-derstood as one of the most fundamental techniques of filmmaking, has always been a part of film history, from Georges Méliès’s “artificially ar-ranged scenes” to contemporary blockbusters or art house movies. But the practices to which the term refers have changed over time, and recent de-velopments have shown that the complex interplay between space, actors and camera is also dependent upon technological constraints. Mise en scène disentangles the various ways in which mise en scène appears in writings about film, with regard to its descriptive scope as well as its strategic func-tions. It will also look at the different practices of mise en scène and the way in which these are conceptualised. Kessler’s three-pronged historical, theoretical and practical approach fills a major gap in the existing literature on cinematic mise en scène.



Innovative short essays by

leading authors on topics in

film history and theory which

blaze new trails in academic

writing. A new form of

dialogue on the issues

in film studies today.

kino -agora

c a b o o s e

Once upon a time, in a world that no longer exists, books

were published by people with specialised knowledge

of a field. Not all fields, just the fields in which these

publishers were experts. Paris alone could boast of many

dozen booksellers who were also specialty publishers.

Now, once again, with Timothy Barnard’s caboose press,

we have a privileged opportunity to return to the world

of the publisher/expert. Whether a new edition of

Bazin’s writings, Godard’s Introduction to a True History

of Cinema and Television, or the extraordinary variety in

the Kino-Agora series, caboose promises—and deliv-

ers—a very special range of books carefully tailored for

film scholars. —Rick Altman, University of Iowa

praise for the kinematic turn

First, the authors open a can of worms. Ten cans, in fact. They identify concepts and prin-ciples that led to the formation of cinema as a culmination, extension and initiation of various “cultural series” from its several begin-nings, through its repeated “deaths” and “re-births.” Then they attempt to put the trouble-some and highly problematic worms back into the cans. Along the way they engage such dif-ficult issues of history, theory and philosophy as whether cinema has an essential nature—an anima—and whether film presentations are recordings, archives or performances that tran-scend their photochemical or digital traces.

In its deceptively few but idea-packed pag-es, The Kinematic Turn provides a concise hand-book that will provoke students, teachers, film specialists and anyone else who thinks deeply about contemporary media cultures. They will become informed, intrigued, swayed, outraged and fully absorbed in these arguments.—Donald Crafton, Author of Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and WorldMaking in Animation

Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, the authors 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.

andré gaudreault is a professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Cin-ema and Media Studies, director of the technès International Research Partnership on Cinema Technology and the author of numerous books. philippe marion is a professor at the Univer-sité de Louvain. He is co-founder of the Observatoire du récit médiatique (orm), director of the research group Analyse des médias, and author of several books.

from the book

The crises that cinema has undergone in its ge-nealogy demonstrate the implicit hybridisation shaping any medium’s identity. A medium’s seemingly singular identity is never more than an evolving federation of media from a range of cultural series that have historically crystallised and been vouchsafed in a relatively consensual manner by an institution. Seen in this light, we might almost say that media are always hyper-media that are unaware of the fact. To carry out the dynamic genealogy we are outlining here, it is particularly important to undertake an applied mirror image study: if we wish to un-derstand the evolution of cinema’s identity we must first attempt to understand the hybridisa-tion phenomena at work at both ends. The first end was the turn of the twentieth century, that intermedial mash-up, that veritable broth of media culture around the birth of kinematog-raphy, to which corresponds, at the other end, today’s intermedial mash-up of what we call the kinematic in the polyphony of contempo-rary hypermedia.—André Gaudreault & Philippe Marion

January 2020

86 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-927852-16-3, $25*.

Electronic version, ISBN 978-1-927852-17-0, $50*† single user, $62.50*† 3 users, $75*† unlimited users.




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

André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion


Expanded second edition

129 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Hardcover, January 2020, ISBN 978-1-927852-16-3, $35*.

Electronic version, December 2019, ISBN 978-1-927852-17-0, $60*† single user, $75*† 3 users, $90*† unlimited users.




The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image

Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell and Catherine Grant


the only book on the topic of the videographic essay

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 ex-periment with the new form. This volume grows out of that workshop, and out of a follow-up edition in 2017.

With special focus on the practice and pedagogy of videographic production, the volume con-tains detailed descriptions of the assignments that were designed to both stimulate work and teach technology; in addition, a companion page on the caboose website features videos produced by participants during the workshop. This unique volume will be of great value to teachers and stu-dents, critics and videomakers, as well as anyone interested in this growing area of critical practice. The volume also addresses issues such as the professional validation of videographic work, copy-right and fair use, and technology. Also featured are two scholarly essays by co-editor Catherine Grant and original contributions by the workshop’s special guests: Eric Faden and Kevin B. Lee.

christian keathley is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. jason mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. His most recent books are Complex Television and Narrative Theory and Adaptation. catherine grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on theories and practices of videographic criticism, digital film and media studies.

praise for the videographic essay

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 pro-vides a window into the future of film and me-dia studies as a discipline. Including essential creative and practical advice by leading prac-titioners in the field, this 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

from the book

A videographic essay class needs to be highly collaborative, and the instructor needs to be prepared to relinquish some of the author-ity she commonly enjoys in traditional critical studies courses. But it is a collaborative oppor-tunity that is all too rare: working with students to develop the forms this nascent scholarly in-novation will inhabit. Our experience of the workshop with faculty and graduate students suggests that it is never too late to learn by do-ing, to open yourself up to new tools, methods and discoveries, and to make first, think later.



80 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9918301-8-3, $25*.





The New Cinephilia

Girish Shambu


praise for the new cinephilia

Girish Shambu is not only a cinephile but a collector, bringing in discussions from around the world (a world both physical and digital). While he has long been an essential resource on the web, with The New Cinephilia he has written a necessary, compelling and elegant book that takes stock of the state of cinephilia in the twenty-first century, and the conditions that are changing it but also renewing its vi-tality. Shambu shows that cinephilia is not a solitary activity but one that is—and continues to be—defined with conversation, whether in person, through published texts, or across so-cial media platforms. But most of all Shambu has written a plea for writing: for a new cine-philic and academic writing about film, a writ-ing that is alive to the fascination of moments and to the insights of sustained reflection. This is a book about what it means to be a cinephile right now, what it means to embrace the cin-ema and to do so within the contemporary world.— Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technolo-gies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today’s “new cinephilia” and the clas-sical 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 writ-ing 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 Associate Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He has run his film blog, ‘girish,’ since 2004. His writings have appeared in Framework, Film Quarterly and Film Comment. He is editor of the Film Quarterly blog quorum.

from the book

As a cinephile, the Internet is where I find my mediators every day: on blogs, Facebook, Twit-ter, Tumblr, magazines, journals and other sites. Placing myself in the path of these media-tors, these waves of thought and creation and reflection that are swirling around me daily, I am swept up by them. Several times a day they carry me, bounce me, from one image to an-other, one essay to another, one idea to anoth-er, one spark of curiosity to another. But there is more to this experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion. How does this movement—this daily proliferation of encounters—power one’s cine-philia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile affectively different from that of a ‘traditional’ cinephile who spends little time online?— Girish Shambu

praise for montage

As lively as it is concise, Montage will prove very useful in the classroom. Jacques Aumont packs a surprisingly wide range of theorists and examples into this book, from Lumière and the Soviets to classical Hollywood and even global cinema today. Montage demonstrates anew Au-mont’s expertise in the functions of montage and editing for film theory as well as practice.—Richard Neupert, University of Georgia

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 mon-tage 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.

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. He has worked in 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.

His publications include: 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; Que restetil du cinéma?, 2012; Montage, 2013; L’interprétation des films, 2017; Fictions filmiques, 2018; L’Attrait de l’illusion, 2019.He has edited or translated an additional twenty volumes and written some two hundred and fifty articles for journals, periodicals, catalogues and conference proceedings.

In 2019, he received the Balzan Prize for his career in film studies.

from the book

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

January 2020.

76 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-927852-20-0, $25*.


* Prices in USD. For bound books, the Canadian dollar accepted at par for Canadian customers.



Montage

Jacques Aumont





lesley stern is an emeritus professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Cali-fornia at San Diego. She is the author of The Scorsese Connection (British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1995) and The Smoking Book (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Her work moves between a number of disciplin-ary locations, and spans both theory and production. She has published extensively in the areas of film, performance, photography, cultural history and feminism, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Screen, M/F, Camera Obscura, Film Reader, Image Forum (in Japanese), Trafic (in French), Emergences and Critical Inquiry.

from the book

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 sub-ject and objecthood. We tend to use the same word to designate both a living and a dead body. The body is constant, qualified only by an adjective—‘living’ or ‘dead’. 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.

Innumerable cinematic operations pro-duce the allure of a thing. Because I am more interested in things than in death, it follows that it is the liveliness of corpses that lures my attention. Not dead bodies that act as though they were alive, nor live bodies that may really be dead, nor bodies that may in fact be com-posited, or even digitally constructed bodies. No, what lures my attention are ordinary, run-

Electronic edition: January 2020, ISBN 978-1-927852-19-4, 64 pp., $40* single user, $50* 3 users, $60* unlimited users.

* Prices in USD. 65% discount for institutions in the developing world. Details from EBSCO.


Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing

Lesley Stern

of-the-mill, old-fashioned bodies, bodies once living and now dead which somehow, in their corporeal materiality, exhibit a performative potential for conjuring a quality of cinematic thingness. They are bodies that are physically present in the films, bodies that insist on exist-ing 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.

I will venture a generalisation: a dead body or corpse in the cinema usually interrupts the flow of time. If we are to follow Kracauer, we might conceive of it then as antithetical to the medium itself. The contrary, however, is true. Corpses keep the machinery of cinema running smoothly.— Lesley Stern

electronic-only editions

praise for mise en jeu and mise en geste

This four-part essay is one of the last pieces written by Eisenstein before his untimely death in February 1948. Sergey Levchin has performed a heroic task and his fine translation has rendered the Russian text as clearly and in-telligibly as could possibly be done so that it reads (what higher praise could there be?!) as if it had been written in English in the original. He also has my sympathy for his achievement in coping with an essay that analyses the more complex novels of Dostoevsky and Balzac but also mentions Shakespeare, Gogol, Disney and Eisenstein’s own films, particularly his final masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible.—Richard Taylor, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

Mise en jeu and Mise en geste was composed in January 1948, a few months before Sergei Eisen-stein’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 in-coherent 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 category: 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 po-etic passage through shot composition). Unfinished at the time of his death, the essay has been re-constructed by the Eisenstein Centre in Moscow and is appearing here in English for the first time.

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 dis-play dazzling intellectual virtuosity, erudition and scope. sergey levchin is an independent literary and academic translator living in Brooklyn, New York.

from the book

We can clearly see how easily and impercep-tibly one may slip from an essentially realistic composition towards one extreme, naturalis-tic, 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

January 2020.

91 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-927852-22-4, $25*.


* Prices in USD. For bound books, the Canadian dollar is accepted at par for Canadian customers..



Mise en jeu and Mise en geste

Sergei Eisenstein

translated by Sergey Levchin



praise for the life of the author

Sarah Kozloff has written a refreshingly straightforward defence of authorship and in-tentional creative agency. Academics and their students, who have been told for the past forty years that the idea of the author is pernicious, badly need to hear what she says. She has a welcome ability to deal concisely with jargon-encrusted theory and is very good at pointing out the historical inaccuracies, logical weak-nesses, evasions and contradictions in familiar arguments. Her book is a deceptively simple, well-reasoned intervention in the field.— James Naremore, author of An Invention without a Future: Essays on Cinema

When Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ nearly fifty years ago, they did so in the name of freedom. They could never have foreseen that its indiscriminate embrace by many film theorists would turn the anti-authorship stance into a restrictive ortho-doxy. Sarah Kozloff daringly advocates a new paradigm, a theory of film authorship that takes into account flesh-and-blood filmmakers, including their biographies, their intentions and their collaborations. Building upon scholarship by Noël Carroll, Paisley Livingstone, Robert Carringer and Paul Sellors, Kozloff argues that we watch films in large part to feel a sense of communion with the people behind them. Writing with clarity and verve, Kozloff moves gracefully back and forth between film history and film theory. She offers an extended examination of The Red Kimono (1925) in order to demonstrate how knowledge about the people who created this intriguing early feminist movie can change a viewer’s interpretation. She also weaves in the voices of numerous filmmakers, revealing these artists’ thoughtful intentionality.

sarah kozloff is emeritus professor of film on the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Best Years of Our Lives in the BFI Film Classics Series (2011), Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) and Invisible Storytellers: VoiceOver Narration in American Fiction Film (1988). Her articles and chapters appear in numerous journals, anthologies and textbooks.

from the book

I believe art works are made by people oper-ating (struggling) within their historical mo-ment. Without denying or downplaying larger cultural forces—indeed, while drawing them into the mix—I want to study films from this standpoint. Yet, I do not think of myself as a naïve fan. Filmmakers as famous, success-ful celebrities hold no interest for me. If I am teaching or studying a film, however, I do want to know how the filmmakers’ biographies, in-tentions and agency combine with these larger social structures to influence the text before me. If I can’t find kindred spirits within film theory, I will search elsewhere.— Sarah Kozloff

64 pp., 5.75” x 7.5”.

Electronic version, ISBN ISBN 978-1-927852-30-9, $40* single user, $50* 3 users, $60* un-limited users.

* Prices in USD. 65% discount for institutions in the developing world. Details from EBSCO.


The Life of the Author

Sarah Kozloff

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title index caboose · period; essays on film and the other arts; on italian neo-realism;...

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