Film Culture in Transition
About the Book Series
Film Culture in Transition is committed to a diverse range of approaches and to stimulating cutting-edge debates on the complex interdependence of cinema, other media and screen culture at large. While putting the emphasis on current work in film theory and media history, the series also feature studies on new forms of authorship, image politics and media art. With a strong tradition in European and North American cinema, we are welcoming innovative book projects on the diversity of film cultures in a global perspective.
Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection
1st Edition
By Ilka Brasch
January 09, 2026
Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through ...
Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933: Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
1st Edition
By Michael Cowan
January 09, 2026
This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed to assimilate and ...
Films That Work Harder: The Circulation of Industrial Film
1st Edition
Edited
By Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, Yvonne Zimmermann, Scott Anthony
January 09, 2026
What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape the world that we live in? Economists and economic historians variously point to innovations in logistics and trade, the emergence of a new set of business-friendly values and the emergence of new forms of applied knowledge in ...
How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses
1st Edition
Edited
By Malte Hagener, Yvonne Zimmermann
January 09, 2026
This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions...
Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project
1st Edition
Edited
By Roy Grundmann, Peter Schwartz, Gregory Williams
January 09, 2026
This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities ...
Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth
1st Edition
By Tiago de Luca
January 09, 2026
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It ...
Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema
1st Edition
By Lúcia Nagib
January 09, 2026
This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of ‘world cinema’ with the more substantive concept of ‘realist cinema’. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. ...
Improvising Cinema
1st Edition
By Gilles Mouëllic
December 31, 2025
This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as ...
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): 2-volume Set
1st Edition
By Daniel Fairfax
December 19, 2025
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by ...
A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon
1st Edition
By Paul Cuff
December 01, 2025
Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history. The struggle...
Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology
1st Edition
Edited
By Julia Vassilieva, Deane Williams
December 01, 2025
In the wake of the explosion in the production of essay films over the last 25 years and its subsequent theorization in scholarly literature, this volume seeks to historicize these intertwined developments within the 'long durée' of the 20th century and into the 21st. By raising the issue of '...
Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media
1st Edition
Edited
By Maria Tortajada, François van den Albera
December 01, 2025
This collection brings together a number of leading scholars in film studies to explore viewing and listening dispositives - the Foucauldian concept of a strategic and technical configuration of practices and discourses - from the emergence of film studies as a field in the 1960s to more recent ...