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Ex-Centric Cinema

by Janet Harbord

Motion pictures, moral and ethical aspectsMotion pictures, philosophyMotion pictures, aestheticsCriticism and interpretationMotion picturesMoral and ethical aspectsPhilosophyAesthetics

"Demonstrates how Agamben's ideas can enrich and extend our understanding of film as a medium and the cinema as an apparatus, constantly being remade"-- "In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors,

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Book data: Open Library