Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231166560)

Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, André Breton, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.

Author: Adam Lowenstein
ISBN-10: 0231166567
ISBN-13: 9780231166560
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/11/2014
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/06/2015 pg. 17
Choice 05/01/2015 pg. 1506