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Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously.
Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Animating Film Theory: An Introduction / Karen Beckman 1
Part I: Time and Space
1. Animation and History / Esther Leslie 25
2. Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography / Tom Gunning 37
3. Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3-D Animation / Alexander G. Galloway 54
4. "A Living, Developing Egg Is Present before You": Animation, Scientific Visualization, Modeling / Oliver Gaycken 68
Part II. Cinema and Animation
5. André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for a History of Terms / Hervé Joubert-Laurencin; Translated by Lucy Swanson 85
6. "First Principles" of Animation / Alan Cholodenko 98
7. Animation, in Theory / Susanne Buchan 111
Part III: The Experiment
8. Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human Beings? / Gertrud Koch; Translated by Daniel Hendrickson 131
9. Frame Shot: Vertov's Ideologies of Animation / Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay 145
10. Signatures of Motion: Len Lye's Scratch Films and the Energy of the Line / Andrew R. Johnston 167
11. Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine, and Walter Benjamin / Yuriko Furuhata 181
12. Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s / Tess Takahashi 201
Part IV: Animation and the World
13. Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and Photography / Thomas LaMarre 221
14. African American Representation through the Combination of Live Action and Animation / Christopher P. Lehman 252
15. Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military Malaria Films (1942-1945) and the Pacific Theater / Bishnupriya Ghosh 264
16. Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan / Marc Steinberg 287
17. Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine / Scott Bukatman 301
Bibliography 317
Contributors 337
Index 343
About the author
Karen Beckman, ed.
Summary
Provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory.
