Janine Marchessault

Kim Sawchuk

Wild Science investigates the world-wide boom in 'health culture'. While self-help health books and medical dramas are popular around the globe, we are bombarded with daily media images of DNA research, and news reports about cloning, the fight against AIDS, cancer and depression. With popular culture now the principal means through which the non-scientific population encounters science why do certain images of science get promoted above others? Contributors examine the public meanings of science, revealing the frictions and contradictions within popular representations of what medicine can and should do. Focusing on the visual culture of medicine, they show how representations of science have a direct impact on popular perceptions of the limits of science, and ultimately on health education, funding and research, and examine the belief that media literacy in popular representations of medicine makes an ethical public discourse on the aims of science possible. With sections addressing the new visual technologies which make the human body into a virtual territory, the diagnostic and medical practices centered around women's bodies, and popular debates around genetics and identity, Wild Science argues that science is a practice bound in values and institutions, and argues for a responsible engagement with the public cultures of science and health.

Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media

Wild Science

When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen's “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau's underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller's geoscope. janine

Media, Utopias, Ecologies

Ecstatic Worlds

Will Straw

The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema present a rich, diverse overview of Canadian cinema. Responding to the latest developments in Canadian film studies, this volume takes into account the variety of artistic voices, media technologies, and places which have marked cinema in Canada throughout its history. Drawing on a range of established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume will be useful to teachers, scholars, and to a general readership interested in cinema in Canada. Moving beyond the director-focused approach of much previous scholarship, this book is concerned with communities, institutions, and audiences for Canadian cinema at both national and international levels. The choice of subjects covered ranges from popular, genre cinema to the most experimental of artistic interventions. Canadian cinema is seen in its interaction with other forms of art-making and media production in Canada and at the international level. Particular attention has been paid to the work of Indigenous filmmakers, members of diasporic communities and feminist and LGBTQ artists. The result is a book attentive to the complex social and institutional contexts in which Canadian cinema is made and consumed.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema

Wild Science investigates the world-wide boom in 'health culture'. It argues that science is a practice bound in values and institutions, and argues for a responsible engagement with the public cultures of science and health.

Reading Feminism, Medicine, and the Media

Scott MacKenzie

Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective. Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema – unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film – with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States. Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.

Handmade Film in the Digital Age

Process Cinema

Why is McLuhan important? What use can we make of his approach to the media today? In this insightful critical introduction, McLuhan's contribution is carefully explained and his reputation reassessed. The book: explains McLuhan's key ideas; engages with critical issues in media and contemporary art; demonstrates the relevance of his work for students of media and communications; addresses his methodological contribution; revises our understanding of his place in the history of ideas.

Marshall McLuhan

Susan Lord

As a medium, film is constantly evolving both in form and in content. Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema considers the shift from traditional cinema to new frontiers of interactive, performative, and networked media. Using the theories of Marshall McLuhan and Gilles Deleuze as a starting point, renowned scholars from the fields of film theory, communication studies, cultural studies, and new media theory explore the ways in which digital technology is transforming contemporary visual culture. The essays consider a series of questions: What constitutes the "new" in new media? How are digital aesthetics different from film aesthetics? What new forms of spectatorship and storytelling, political community, and commodity production are being enabled through the digital media? Using Gene Youngblood's 1970 book Expanded Cinema as an anchor for the volume, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema understands the digital not simply as a technological form, but also as an experience of space and time that is tied to capitalism. This important collection is unique in framing a range of social justice issues with aesthetic theories of new digital screen culture that will appeal to scholars and multimedia artists prepared to break new ground.

Janine Marchessault

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