Expanded Cinema Studies? Free eBook on Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art

Whether it involves remaking an old Hollywood movie, projecting a quiet 16mm film, or constructing a bombastic multi-screen environment, cinema now takes place not just in the movie theatre and the home, but also in the art gallery and the museum. The author of this engaging study takes stock of this development, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and the ramifications it has for art and cinema alike. Through the lens of contemporary art history, she examines cinema studies’ great disciplinary obsession – namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future. (blurb for Erika Balsom,  Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013])

Thanks to the legend that is Girish Shambu, Film Studies For Free heard of the latest, wonderful, freely accessible book from Amsterdam University Press: Erika Balsom's Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. The table of contents is below. It's a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of Expanded Cinema Studies. Read it for free but please order it for your libraries! It has been added to FSFF's permanent and regularly updated listing of online Open Access Film Studies e-Books

Another related resource: six video recordings have been uploaded online of all the sessions from the recent Mediamorphosis Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Sussex at which researchers, practitioners, artists (including filmmakers), designers, scientists were invited to submit, discuss, exchange and engage with analogue and digital practices as mediamorphosis. You can find links to the videos here. 

It's been so quiet around here that FSFF's readers probably won't even notice that it is going on holiday for two weeks (it will be taking Erika's book!). It promises to return refreshed, reinvigorated and possibly even sun-tanned after that, with LOTS of new Open Access items to link to. But, in the meantime, please check out this little video on a different kind of "expanded cinema studies" - it has one or two useful resources that you may find interesting.

Erika Balsom,  Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013)

Table of Contents

Introduction – The Othered Cinema 

Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition
The Passages of Cinema  Projection and Patrimony Black Box/White Cube The New Blockbusters  The Myth of Activity  Media at MoMA 

Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins  
Post-medium Post-mortem Indexing the Past A Little History of 35mm  Ruinophilia  Analogue Aura

Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives  Ambivalent Appropriations  The Four Operations Precursors  The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use”  Remaking Fandom “Room-for-Play”  VCR Memories 

Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction  Anti-anti-illusionism  Hybrid Forms Rehabilitating Narrative  A Return of the Real  Two Images of Death 
Conclusion – “Cinema and...”