Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture

Much has shifted since the emergence of the first volume of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Many of the postmillennial innovations in digital cinema and digital culture which prompted its publication have today become commonplace to the point of invisibility. This development ironically evokes memories of the classic Hollywood continuity system, a structure designed to close off space for the discussion of politics, identity or history. Thus, the original contributions in this new volume seek to illuminate those larger historical and global contexts which the emergence of digital cinema highlights in the process of its erasure. Chapters cover everything from digital spectacles of the US Civil Rights movement to the cinephiliac politics of Wong Kar-Wai, from the transnational cinephilia of Bernardo Bertolucci and Adrian Lyne to the cultural politics of race and media transition in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind. Also included are sustained discussions of what the digital age will mean in the long term for the critical and academic study of film.

Contributors include Chris Cagle, David Church, Susan Felleman, Kristi McKim, Adrian Martin, James Morrison, Ted Pigeon, Catherine Russell, Greg Singh and Steve Spence.

Scott Balcerzak is an Assistant Professor of Film and Literature in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. He has published articles on film and performance for such journals as Camera Obscura and Post Script.

Jason Sperb is lecturer of film and media studies at Northwestern University. He is a member of the editorial board at Film Criticism and the author of A Frown Upside Down: Race, Convergence and the Hidden Histories of Disney’s Song of the South (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012).