Cinema and Counter-History [Paperback]

Despite claims about the end of history and the death of cinema, visual media continue to contribute to our understanding of history and history-making. In this book, Marcia Landy argues that rethinking history and memory must take into account shifting conceptions of visual and aural technologies. With the assistance of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, Cinema and Counter-History examines writings and films that challenge prevailing notions of history in order to explore the philosophic, aesthetic, and political stakes of activating the past. Marshaling evidence across European, African, and Asian cinema, Landy engages in a counter-historical project that calls into question the certainty of visual representations and unmoors notions of a history firmly anchored in truth.

A very ambitious book! The range of Marcia Landys scholarship and knowledge of film is impressive.

Marcia Landy is Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies, with a Secondary Appointment in French and Italian, at University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (IUP, 2008).

Once again, Marcia Landy impressively, masterfully, combines her well-known talents for broad critical reflection for trenchant close reading of individual films to produce ground-breaking theorization of cinemas powers to both make and remake historical meaning and to counter dominant cultural representations. ?A far-reaching study with major insights at every turn.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Crisis of the Movement-Image and Counter-history
2. History Growling at the Door: Horror and Naturalism
3. Comedy, Theatricality, and Counter-history
4. Minoritarian Cinematic Forms as Counter-history
5. Memory, the Powers of the False, and Becoming
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy edited by D. N. Rodowick (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). ISBls+