Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics

Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics offers an exciting conversational journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics. At once scholarly and entertaining, the book combines a major statement on subversive aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a comprehensive lexicon of concepts.

Keywords defines, creates, and illustrates over a thousand terms and concept, drawing its examples from a wide range of media. Moving beyond political modernism, the book dramatically expands the definition of political cinema at a time when radical film might not mean a feature or a documentary but rather a music video, a Colbert episode, or a digital mash–up. Each chapter explores a different current within the broad range of alternative aesthetics, covering an Aesthetic of the Commons; the Carnivalesque and Festive–revolutionary Practices; Political Modernism and post–Brechtian Performance; the Transmogrification of the Negative, the Hybridization of Documentary and fiction; and the Fractured Chronotope, and the Musicalization of Cinema.

An invaluable text for anyone interested in contemporary politics, aesthetics, and the media, Keywords offers a cornucopia of old and new strategies available for use by critics as well as by artists.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: An Aesthetic of the Commons

The Aesthetic Commons

From Columbus to Indigenous Media

First Peoples, First Features

The Storytelling Commons

Revisionist Adaptation and the Literary Commons

Cultural Indigenization

The Archival Commons and the Ab–original Musical

Chapter Two: The Upside Down World of the Carnivalesque

The People s Second Life

Sacred Parody

Festive–Revolutionary Practices

Unruly Women

Polymorphous Celebrations

Stand–up Comedy and Nuclear Catastrophe

Contemporary Fools

Pedagogic Provocations

Tropes of Inversion

Offside Cinema

Chapter Three: Political Modernism and its Discontents

The Two Avant–Gardes

The Brechtian Legacy

Beyond Brecht

The Affective–Corporeal Turn

The Rediscovery of Pleasure

The Legacy of the V–Effect

Political Cinema in the Age of the Posts

Chapter Four: The Transmogrification of the Negative

An Aesthetic of Mistakes

Third Cinema: From Hunger to Garbage

Sublime Detritus

The Recombinant Sublime

Anthropophagic Modernism

Situationist Detournement

Culture Jamming

Neo–Situationism and the Aesthetics of Failure

Media Jiujitsu

The New Kino–Eye: Vision Machines

Chapter Five: Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme

The Fiction–Documentary Continuum

Murderous Reenactments

The Mediatic Spectrum

From Representation to Self–Presentation

The Strategic Advantages of Hybridization

Performative Films

The Essay Film and Mockumentaries

Chapter Six: Hollywood Aristotelianism, the Fractured Chronotope, and the Musicalization of Cinema

Hollywood Aristotelianism: the Orthodox Chronotope

Alternatives to Aristotle: the Menippean Strain

Pop Culture Anachronism and the Chronotope of the Road

Baroque Modernism and the Marvelous American Real

Trance–Modernism

Contrapuntal Variations

Transformative Becomings

The Shape–Shiftings of Popular Culture

Metaphysical Cine–Poetry

Chapter Seven: Aesthetic/Political Innovation in the Digital Age

The Interface Effect

Beyond Accelerationism: Digital Montage and Duration

Interactivity and Digital Détournement

IRL Subversions: Tactical Media/Digital Materialism

In Guise of a Conclusion

Index of Terms

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. He has authored, co–authored and edited 17 books on film, cultural theory, national cinema, and postcolonial studies. His books include  Francois Truffaut and Friends (2006), Literature through Film (2005),  Film Theory: An Introduction (2000), and Tropical Multiculturalism (1997). He is co–author, with Ella Shohat, of Race in Translation (2012), Flagging Patriotism (2006), and  Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994).

Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) and editor of Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (2009) . One of the editors of Cineaste magazine, his work on film has appeared in Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound, and The Daily Beast.

Leo Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the Film Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.