The Seeing Century

Book excerpt: The twentieth century, with all its turbulence and change, its conflicts and its discoveries was, perhaps above all, the century of cinema, and The Seeing Century offers an innovative, international, and interdisciplinary exploration of the role cinema plays in contemporary life and culture, and the complex and fascinating relationship between screen images and our changing concepts of personal and national identity. Rejecting the compartmentalisation that has traditionally marked film studies, and confronting an impressively eclectic range of material, fifteen essays by leading academics from around the world cut across ‘divergent’ cultures, languages, and genres: mainstream Hollywood rubs shoulders with low-budget Icelandic or Sicilian cinema, and the popular and the esoteric feature alongside each other. In this way, the reader is offered a stimulating overview which directly addresses the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the relationship between film and identity, and reveals the vibrancy of contemporary film debate, to which The Seeing Century makes an important and thought-provoking contribution.