At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.

At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

From the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame becomes crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around and fascinated by this frame. The frame decontextualizes, cutting everything that is within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen—all present us with such framed-off zones. Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as this book argues, what is outside the frame, what is offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this "off" that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D.W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Tracing the history of contemporary French cinema, Guy Austin addresses key issues in French films such as national identity, representations of sexuality and the new realism

A collection of texts by researchers, artists and critics, exploring Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices. Positioned at the intersection of cinema, painting, installation, architecture, video, drawing and photography, the work of filmmaker Morgan Fisher remains to be explored, as is its influence on new generations of artists. This collection considers Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices, and investigates the very special temporality created by Fisher's structural interventions. The publication gathers researchers, artists and critics, to draw up the unprecedented profile of a work guided by the love of cinema, while going beyond it. Morgan Fisher, an artist and filmmaker, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1942. He received an A.B. in art history from Harvard College, then studied film production in Los Angeles. His early work was predominantly in film. His films have been shown at international film festivals (Berlin, Rotterdam, London, among others) and in one-person screenings or exhibitions at, among other places, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the early 1990s he started making works on paper, then paintings and sculptures. One-person exhibitions that included examples of such work were at Portikus, Raven Row, Museum Abteiberg, Generali Foundation, and Aspen Art Museum. More recently, he has exhibited photographs. He was in the 1985, 2004, and 2014 Whitney Biennials. A collection of his writings was published in 2012 by Walther König. He has been a visiting teacher at Brown University, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

An eclectic collection of essays by the winner of the National Award Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic 1997 With more than a thousand films produced annually in over fifteen languages India is acknowledged as the largest producer of motion pictures in the world.50 Indian Film Classics provides detailed critical accounts of the most important Indian films beginning with Prem Sanyas (1925) to Rang De Basanti (2006) in languages ranging from Bengali and Hindi to Manipuri and Malayalam and representing a whole gamut of themes: from the 1930s mythological Sant Tukaram to the politically radical Calcutta '71, from art-house favourites like Uski Roti and Mukhamukham to blockbusters like Sholay and Lagaan. These perceptive essays introduce the reader to the many moods that inform Indian cinema, the austerity of Pather Panchali, the lavishness of Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, the solemnity of Samskara and the fun and frolic of Amar Akbar Anthony.Illustrated with rare posters and stills this is an invaluable guide to the most significant cinema India has ever produced.