Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (2010)
Paula Amad

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory. (from amazon.com)

World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2009)
Edited by Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman

The standard analytical category of "national cinema" has increasingly been called into question by the category of the "transnational." This anthology examines the premises and consequences of the coexistence of these two categories and the parameters of historiographical approaches that cross the borders of nation-states.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008 - English, 2013 - French)
Steven Ungar

Ungar provides a close reading of the film Cléo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda’s classic work of 1962, and situates it in its social, political and cinematic context, tracing Varda’s early career as a student of art history and a photographer, the history of post-war French film, and the lengthy Algerian war to which Cléo’s health concerns and ambitions to become a pop singer make her more or less oblivious. His study is the first to set a reading of Cléo’s formal and technical complexity alongside an analysis of its status as a document of a specific historical moment.

Reinventing the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas (2008)
Brian Gollnick

Before massive deforestation began in the 1960s, the Lacandón jungle, which lies on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, was part of the largest tropical rain forest north of the Amazon. The destruction of the Lacandón occurred with little attention from the international press—until January 1, 1994, when a group of armed Maya rebels led by a charismatic spokesperson who called himself Subcomandante Marcos emerged from jungle communities and briefly occupied several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. These rebels, known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, became front-page news around the globe, and they used their notoriety to issue rhetorically powerful communiqués that denounced political corruption, the Mexican government's treatment of indigenous peoples, and the negative impact of globalization. As Brian Gollnick reveals, the Zapatista communiqués had deeper roots in the Mayan rain forest than Westerners realized—and he points out that the very idea of the jungle is also deeply rooted, though in different ways, in the Western imagination. Gollnick draws on theoretical innovations offered by subaltern studies to discover "oral traces" left by indigenous inhabitants in dominant cultural productions. He explores both how the jungle region and its inhabitants have been represented in literary writings from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present and how the indigenous people have represented themselves in such works, including post-colonial and anti-colonial narratives, poetry, video, and photography. His goal is to show how popular and elite cultures have interacted in creating depictions of life in the rain forest and to offer new critical vocabularies for analyzing forms of cross-cultural expression.

Agency of Time (part 1d) (2008)
Leighton Pierce

Leighton Pierce works with perceptual and emotional interfaces in architectural space. His multichannel and single channel video/sound installations explore the collision and intermixing that occurs between multiple images and sound over time, across space, and within the associative mind of the viewer. He developed "Agency of Time [part 1d]" for "Outside In" at  LaViolaBank Gallery, New York, NY.

A Theory of Narrative (2008)
Rick Altman

A Theory of Narrative is a close study of narrative's nature, its variation in different contexts, and the method through which it makes meaning. Altman's approach breaks away from traditional forms of analysis, identifying three basic strategies: single-focus, dual-focus, and multiple-focus. Unpacking an intentionally diverse selection of texts, Altman demonstrates how these strategies function in context and illustrates their theoretical and practical applications in terms of textual analysis, literary and film history, social organization, religion, and politics.

Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia (2007)
Edited by Corey K. Creekmur and Mark Sidel

This book crosses the conventional border between the analysis of on-screen and off-screen intersections of law and cinema. It not only addresses the representation of law on screen (for example, through discussions of how lawyers, police, and prisons are depicted, or how courtroom sequences function as narratives), but also focuses on how the state shapes and regulates cinema.  The volume addresses the distinct contexts of China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam, along with an integrative introduction that puts the essays and themes into context.

Dada: Themes and Movements (2006)
Edited by Rudolf Kuenzli

Eminent scholar Rudolf Kuenzli presents a rich selection of the Dadas' experimental visual and literary works to give a lively, accessible and comprehensive assessment. This book incorporates all aspects of Dada activity—visual arts, documented performance and writing in works by artists such as Max Ernst, Francis Picabia and Marcell Duchamp; it covers not only Western Europe and America but also Central and Eastern Europe and Japan, plus Neo-Dada worldwide.

Traditions in World Cinema (2006)
Edited by Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider

Traditions in World Cinema brings together a colorful and wide ranging collection of world cinematic traditions—national, regional, and global—all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. The movements described range from well-known traditions such as German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French, British, and Czech new wave, and new Hollywood cinema to those of emerging significance, such as Danish Dogma, postcommunist cinema, Brazilian post–Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-independence African film traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pian melodrama, Japanese horror, and global found-footage cinema. Corey K. Creekmur composed the chapter "Popular Hindi Cinema and the Film Song." 

Because of the Rain: An Anthology of Korean Zen Poems (2005)
Translated by Won-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill

Buddhism was introduced to Korea via China in the fifth century, and similar to China and Japan, a long tradition of Zen poetry developed. This collection spans 1,500 years of this tradition with a selection of the key poets and teachers starting with Great Master Wonhyo, the founder of Korean Zen Buddhism. (from christophermerrillbooks.com)

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005)
Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar

In this book, Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film—technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.

Silent Film Sound (2004)
Rick Altman

Silent Film Sound reconsiders all aspects of sound practices during the entire silent film period. Based on extensive original research and accompanied by gorgeous illustrations, the book challenges the assumptions of earlier histories of this period in film and reveals the complexity and swiftly changing nature of American silent cinema.