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Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality

Screens and IllusionismAlternative Teleologies of Mediation

Edited by Peter Bloom and Dominique Jullien

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£24.99

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About this book

Explores the effects of illusionism within media representation and contemporary aesthetics with a focus on the uncanny

  • Mediation and illusionism in literature and media
  • Pre-cinema and new media devices and entertainments
  • The optical uncanny as a site of ambivalence

Screens and Illusionism explores the effects of illusionism as foundational to contemporary acts of perception and aesthetics. Our point of departure is the acknowledgement that our sensory perception is fundamentally subject to mediation, through a class of objects, techniques, and technologies. We emphasize mediation to consider the loss of optical certainty, and explore illusionism within the register of the uncanny.

The volume is divided into three sections: Screens as Perceptual Vehicles (Part I), Mediation and its Avatars (Part II), and Alternative Teleologies of Media (Part III). Overall, the collection resonates with contemporary discussions of screen culture, media materiality and intermediality. It explores an array of pre- and post-cinematic devices and spectacular entertainments, forging links between “old” and “new” media, and across media formats.

Reviews

The contributors to this probing and various essay collection explore how optical toys reveal the limits of our sense perceptions, while new techniques of representation continue to augment what we see and how we see it. Yet, as the editors of Screens and Illusionism are keen to emphasise, the effects of new media are not all ominous, but the delightful fruits of human ingenuity, playfulness, and an unimpeachable pursuit of pleasure. This rich collection enhances our ways of seeing; it places within the reader’s grasp powerful new instruments of understanding and perception.
The film screen has been neglected for decades by film theorists. After all, doesn’t the screen seem to disappear when a movie begins? In this unique and important anthology scholars from a range of backgrounds probe not only the screen, but the conditions of illusion in cinema, uncovering its links to the uncanny.
Table of contents

1. Introduction - Peter J. Bloom and Dominique Jullien

Part I: Screens as perceptual vehicles

2. Does Size Matter? Screens, Illusions, and Moving Picture Dispositives - Erkki Huhtamo

3. Not Understanding Media: From Optical Toys to Artificial Intelligence - Tomáš Dvořák

4. From Eyes to Hands: Behind the Embrace of the “Screen-Free” Playscape - Meredith A. Bak

5. Wandering Eyes: A Meditation on Animated Deep Space Devices of Wonder - Colin Williamson

Part II: Mediation and its Avatars

6. Resurrections of the Dead. The Technological Uncanny of Ghost Production - Katharina Rein

7. Showing the Impossible: The Anatomy of a Cinematic Trick Image - Frank Kessler

8. The Flight of the Nightingale in the era of #BlackLivesMatter - Peter J. Bloom

9. No Strings Attached: Forms of Corruption - John Mowitt

10. Talking Furniture: Féeries for a Troubled Time in Proust, Ravel and Chomón - Dominique Jullien

Part III: Alternative Teleologies of Media

11. "Amid the moving pageant": Wordsworth’s Photographic Encounters - Claire Grandy

12. Waves from An Old Film: The Aging of Cinema and the Uncanny Earth - Herschel Farbman

About the contributors

Peter Bloom

Peter J. Bloom is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been focused on film and media studies with a regional focus on West Africa, North Africa and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on Belgian, British and French colonial media, and is currently preparing a monograph under the title, Radio-Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire. He is the co-editor of Screens and Illusionism (2024, EUP).

Dominique Jullien

Dominique Jullien is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She publishes on reception and translation studies, East-West dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Her current book project explores technologies of optical mediation, illusionism and secular magic in contemporary fiction. She is co-editor of Screens and Illusionism (2024, EUP).

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