Columbia Press: 2357 books
The Lumière Galaxy
Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2015
Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our...
by Gabriel Rockhill
Language: English
Release Date: July 15, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: July 15, 2014
Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation...
The Body Incantatory
Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2014
Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600–1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets...
Harmony and War
Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2010
Confucianism has shaped a certain perception of Chinese security strategy, symbolized by the defensive, nonaggressive Great Wall. Many believe China is antimilitary and reluctant to use force against its enemies. It practices pacifism and refrains from expanding its boundaries, even when nationally...
Electric Santería
Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2015
Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term "copresence" to capture...
Where Film Meets Philosophy
Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking
Language: English
Release Date: February 5, 2013
Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis...
When Movies Were Theater
Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film
Language: English
Release Date: May 24, 2016
There was a time when seeing a movie meant more than seeing a film. The theater itself shaped the very perception of events on screen. This multilayered history tells the story of American film through the evolution of theater architecture and the surprisingly varied ways movies were shown, ranging...
Consumed Nostalgia
Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2015
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age...
After the Red Army Faction
Gender, Culture, and Militancy
Language: English
Release Date: December 16, 2014
Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj iek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does...
I Speak, Therefore I Am
Seventeen Thoughts About Language
Language: English
Release Date: July 5, 2016
There are no men so dull and stupid, not even idiots, as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood.... On the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect or happily circumstanced which can do the...
Appetite for Innovation
Creativity and Change at elBulli
Language: English
Release Date: July 5, 2016
The name elBulli is synonymous with creativity and innovation. Located in Catalonia, Spain, the three-star Michelin restaurant led the world to "molecular" or "techno-emotional" cooking and made creations, such as pine-nut marshmallows, rose-scented mozzarella, liquid olives, and...
Hog and Hominy
Soul Food from Africa to America
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 2008
Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and...
by Patrick Keating
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role...
Speculative Taxidermy
Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2018
Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art, culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have...