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Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture. Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the “queering” of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the “North American” attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the “European” perspectives of Pedro Almodóvar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. This text describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, it presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line.

Korean writers and filmmakers crossed literary and visual cultures in multilayered ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. This book begins by unpacking the relations among literature, film, and art in Korea's colonial period, paying particular attention to the emerging proletarian movement, literary modernism, nativism, and wartime mobilization. It then demonstrates how these developments informed the efforts of post-1945 writers and filmmakers as they confronted the aftershocks of colonialism and the formation of separate regimes in North and South Korea. The book puts neglected Korean literary texts, art, and film into conversation with studies on Japanese imperialism and Korea's colonial history. At the same time, it locates post-1945 South Korean cultural production within the transnational circulation of texts, ideas, and images that took place in the first three decades of the Cold War. The incorporation of the Korean Peninsula into the global Cold War order, the book argues, must be understood through the politics of the visual.

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, as well as the New German Cinema to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society, how it repositions audiences with respect to their reality as participants in political communities. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of “thinking in images” to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. He thus defines “cinematic realism” as an interplay and fusion between the world of film and the world of the spectator as though the audience participated with the film in a shared reality. This process comprises a perceiving, feeling, and thinking activity that is organized by the rules of the poetic, the rules of fantasy and creation. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.

This volume focuses on postmodern film aesthetics, thinking through ways in which it challenges the aesthetic paradigms currently dominating analyses of Hollywood cinema. The first chapter explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, post-classical/new Hollywood, and their construction as a linear history of style in which postmodernism forms a debatable final act. This history is challenged by using Jean-François Lyotard’s non-linear conception of postmodernism in order to view postmodern aesthetics as a paradigm that can occur across the history of Hollywood. Chapter 2 explores famous 'nihilistic' theorists of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, addressing the ways in which their work impacts on reading Hollywood films. Within Film Studies, writing on postmodernism and Hollywood cinema has drawn on the more negative aspects of Jameson’s work. Postmodern films are seen as expressions of the logic of late capitalism, and thus incapable of offering political critique, while their relentless utilisation of past styles is reflective of aesthetic bankruptcy. In contrast, the final chapter argues in favor of taking up the work of 'affirmative' postmodern theorists, notably Linda Hutcheon, in order to set up nuanced and positive variants of postmodern film aesthetics. For Hutcheon, postmodern art is characterized by paradox, due to its simultaneous re-inscription and deconstruction of past art forms. This doubled movement of both evoking and dismantling convention underpins its political potential, namely the de-naturalisation of a history of representation. The range, diversity and critical potential of postmodern aesthetic strategies are demonstrated by detailed readings of four film texts.

This book reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—the book argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, it theorizes a way of reading spirals, responding to their dual-directionality as well as their affective power. The sensations associated with spirals—flying, falling, drowning, being smothered—reflect the anxieties of limits tested or breached, and the book charts these limits as they widen from the local to the global and recoil back. Chapters mix literary and art history to explore 'pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, “Concentrisme,” minimalism, and entropic earth art; a coda considers the work of novelist W. G. Sebald and contemporary artist William Kentridge.