Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film

Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them--tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations--Projections of Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: "The Era of the Image Has Arrived" Chapter 2: Towards the Temenos - Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios Chapter 3: "We Are No Longer Innocent" - The Long Form Aesthetic of Jacques Rivette Chapter 4: The Sense of an Ending - Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma Conclusion

About the Author :
Richard I. Suchenski is Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts and Director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College. Suchenski has a joint Ph.D. in History of Art and Film Studies from Yale University, and is a film curator. He is the editor of Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Review :
"Projections of Memory is a thoroughly impressive book--highly ambitious, well researched, and lucidly written. Suchenski travels a considerable distance in putting film history into conversation with the history of music, art, theater, and literature, specifically in relation to long-form works." --Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition "Richard Suchenski opens a totally innovative perspective regarding relations between film length, editing, memory, poetry and reality. This groundbreaking work enlightens the resources, and the significance, of the use of a very long format by some specific filmmakers in some specific conditions. It is at the same time perfectly clear about the implication of such an approach, way beyond the 'monuments of the history of cinema' it explicitly focuses on. The sensible quality of Suchenski's writing about specific sequences, scenes, images, or historical and technical components of the filmmaking process provides an understanding and an emotional proximity toward major filmic works, should they be already well-known by the reader or, on the opposite, revealed thanks to this book." --Jean-Michel Frodon, author of Le Cinéma français and editor of Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century "Projections of Memory shrewdly places the films' achievements within the larger contexts of 19th-century Romanticism, 20th-century modernism, and 21st-century multimedia. Suchenski's writing is always clear, sharp, and insightful; his 92 pages of notes are rich in scholarship; and the 80 illustrations, most in color, beautifully enhance the text. Summing Up: Recommended." -- CHOICE