Secular Magic and the Moving Image - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Secular Magic and the Moving Image write by Max Sexton. This book was released on 2017-12-14. Secular Magic and the Moving Image available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather, it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet, shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with the contemporary world has led to television developing many different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization. The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the key to understanding secular magic on television and film and exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006 films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further questions about entertainment and how the relations between the program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of inter-medial relations.
Secular Magic and the Moving Image
Secular Magic and the Moving Image - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Secular Magic and the Moving Image write by Max Sexton. This book was released on 2017-12-14. Secular Magic and the Moving Image available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The convergence of film and television and the tension between the unmediated ‘reality’ of the moving image and the enchantment and illusion offered by magic suggests new ways of thinking about the interstices between film and television.
Modern Enchantments
Modern Enchantments - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Modern Enchantments write by Simon During. This book was released on 2009-06-30. Modern Enchantments available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly). Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During’s superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society’s image of itself. Praise for ModernEnchantment “During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice “A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times “During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914
Moving Images
Moving Images - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Moving Images write by Helen Groth. This book was released on 2013-08-23. Moving Images available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book examines how the interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind.
The Moving Image as Public Art
The Moving Image as Public Art - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Moving Image as Public Art write by Annie Dell'Aria. This book was released on 2021-05-08. The Moving Image as Public Art available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.
