5 minute read
Caboose
October 2021 184 pages, 7 x 10, 141 color photos, 7 b&w illus., 2 maps, 5 charts 978-0-253-05823-2 $60.00 £47.00 cl Also available as an e-book William W. Morgan
Collector’s Guide to Fort Payne Crinoids and Blastoids is the first comprehensive guide for identifying the fossils of echinoderms from hundreds of millions of years ago, when North America was covered by a warm, equatorial sea.
Crinoids and blastoids, echinoderms (the same family of marine animals to include starfish, sea urchins, and sand dollars) from the Fort Payne Formation in Kentucky, are rarely seen at gem, mineral, and fossil shows, nor are they regularly displayed at major museums. By combining high-quality color photographs and an accompanying descriptive text, William W. Morgan provides the first comprehensive identification guide to these fascinating fossils.
Collector’s Guide to Fort Payne Crinoids and Blastoids features photographs, often offering more than one view, of the best-quality specimens curated in the Smithsonian and other prominent invertebrate fossil museums. Morgan includes photographs that are unlabeled so that readers can test themselves to see whether they can differentiate some of the more subtle features that may be necessary for accurate identification.
William W. Morgan is a professor emeritus in the Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy at UT Health San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of Collector’s Guide to Crawfordsville Crinoids and Collector’s Guide to Texas Cretaceous Echinoids.
LIFE OF THE PAST
THOMAS HOLTZ, EDITOR
“With beautiful images, clear descriptions, and impressive attention to detail, this remarkable book presents a comprehensive summary of fossil crinoids and blastoids from the spectacular Fort Payne Formation. Thoughtful summaries of the anatomy and evolution of fossil crinoids and blastoids enhance the volume, making it an approachable introduction to these complex and fascinating fossils. This book will unquestionably be a popular and invaluable resource for professionals, students, and avocational paleontologists for years to come.”
—Selina Cole, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History
December 2021 341 pages, 6 x 9 978-1-927852-31-6 $90.00 £70.99 e-book Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen Garrett Stewart
In this profusely illustrated meditation on the phenomenon of “museum cinema,” the screening of films in art museums, Garrett Stewart explores the aesthetic and formal issues raised by the proliferation of screens and films in museums in the digital era. Taking up dozens of screen artifacts over the last six decades, from 16mm loops to CCTV montage, Cinesthesia investigates in exemplary depth an array of landmark innovations from the 1960s down through the latest conceptualist exhibitions. Probing and comparative at once, it is the first study to place individual works under close formal and cultural analysis, and in steady dialogue with each other, not just as intrinsic experimental ventures but as medial challenges: challenges both to their parent forms and genres (theatrical film, broadcast TV) and to the contemplative aesthetic of museum looking. The kinetics of watching are found in this way, repeatedly and often ironically, to reroute or even derange – and ultimately to reform – the apprehending gaze.
Cinesthesia includes 44 full-page color illustrations by nearly 30 artists, including Christian Marclay, Tacita Dean, John Akomfrah, Rodney Graham, Eve Sussman and Matej Kren.
“How is it – by what aesthetic criteria – that we, in ticketed public space, go to see film without going to the movies? What happens, that is, when screening times are replaced by the intermittent and elective time of transient viewing in sectored zones of a gallery layout? What new (audio-) visual parameters, in other words, are set in place when moving-image work finds itself welcomed into the environs of the proverbial ‘fine’ (or plastic) arts?” — Garrett Stewart
Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa and a member, since 2010, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Along with many books on cinema as well as prose fiction, he has published extensively on art history, most recently Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (University of Chicago Press, 2018), a study that converges with Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method in prompting his current treatment of moving images in museum culture.
—Michael Fried, author of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
caboose
Available 74 pages, 6 x 9 978-1-927852-21-7$17.99 £14.99 e-book
Jacques Aumont Translated by Timothy Barnard
Describing editing as cinema’s formal and aesthetic soul because of its ability to represent time, in this wide-ranging essay Jacques Aumont surveys the theory and practice of editing and montage from early cinema to the digital era. Aumont addresses the Soviet filmmaker-theorists of the 1920s, of course – he is a translator of Eisenstein and the author of a book on Eisenstein’s montage – but also brings into the discussion contemporary directors such as Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Aleksandr Sokurov, Kathryn Bigelow and Lisandro Alonso, with stops along the way for the ideas of André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
This original essay is essential reading by one of the leading film scholars at work in the world today and a rare opportunity for English speakers to enjoy his work. This expanded and revised edition adds a dozen pages to the original volume.
“We have entered into a period in which the reign of vision has become contested by that of the image, with the result that editing has changed nature, because its job is no longer to regulate a succession of shots as much as it is to regulate a succession of images. And while the shot has a responsibility towards reality, the image is responsible only to itself.”
—Jacques Aumont
Jacques Aumont taught cinema and aesthetics for forty years in Paris universities. His work has focused on three related fields: (1) theoretical problems around representation and the aesthetics of visual art; (2) the relationship of film and fiction; and (3) film analysis, its methodology and related concepts. He is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books, including in English Montage Eisenstein, The Image and Aesthetics of Film. In 2019, he received the prestigious Balzan Prize for his career in film studies.
“As lively as it is concise, Montage will prove very useful in the classroom. Jacques Aumont packs a surprisingly wide range of theorists and examples into this book, from Lumière and the Soviets to classical Hollywood and even global cinema today. Montage demonstrates anew Aumont’s expertise in the functions of montage and editing for film theory as well as practice.”
—Richard Neupert, University of Georgia
