Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? - Hardcover

"Elegiac and anxious, critical and poetic, Film After Film surveys the current seismic shifts in movies and considers their effect on the cinematic imagination ... [Hoberman's] prose shines without qualification, and the selections remind us that his tenure at the Voice was, simply put, one of the greatest ever by an American film critic, influencing as it did an entire generation of writers."--Bookforum "A brilliant, patchwork statement about the future of the cinema--spoiler alert: there is a future--in the face of reports of its imminent demise...Hoberman's book is a broadly accessible errand in the articulation of how we might imagine digital cinema to reflect twenty-first century culture."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Spirited, thought-provoking and popping with fresh perspectives."--Wall Street Journal "[Film After Film] does what Hoberman does best: use movies and movie culture as a prism for understanding political events--and vice versa."--Film Comment "J. Hoberman is probably the most acute political analyst of cinema among the medium's regular commentators. You won't find a closer reading of how films made in the first decade or so of the twenty-first century intermeshed with the issues of their day than this volume." Nick James, Sight and Sound "Hoberman wittily traces the interlocking of political reality and moviemaking fantasies, to often disturbing effect." Financial Times "A dense, fascinating assemblage ... by turns jocular and brilliantly reflective." Cineaste

In this sly and thought-provoking essay, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman suggests that it's possible to speak of a distinctive twenty-first century cinema, only a decade into the new millennium. The advent of a new digital technology has led to the displacement of the medium of film - and of the real, as digital image-making ends the necessity of having an actual world, let alone the need for a camera. The future history of motion pictures, Hoberman asserts, will be the history of animation. Meanwhile, the 2000 American presidential election and the trauma of 9/11 have reshaped the movies politically. The two events have combined to create a rupture in film history, perhaps presaging, as Susan Sontag forlornly predicted at the close of the century, the death of cinema, or at least cinephilia. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorist/critics like Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, expands on a much-discussed article by Hoberman from Artforum and includes considerations of global cinema's most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar, and Inception.