Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Part I Sublime Spectatorship -- 1 Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View -- Sublime spectatorship -- The emergence of the scenic -- Notes -- 2 Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime -- Moving machines -- Sites of beauty -- Famous train wrecks -- Notes -- Part II Staging Sublimity: "Presenting the Unpresentable" -- 3 Between Preservation and Disintegration in Decayed Cinema: The Uncanny and the Weird of the Sublime Archival Image in Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) and Bill Morrison's Decasia -- Introduction: The uncanny, the weird and the sublime archive -- (nostalgia) -- Decasia -- Terrors of bringing back to life: Between the death drive and the archive drive in Decasia -- Fetishizing the decay: The uncanny and the weird in Decasia -- Terrors of rising from the ashes: The death drive, the archive drive, and the weird in (nostalgia) -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- 4 Negative Epiphanies and Sublime Emotion in Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence -- Spielberg and the sublime -- A mecha child's negative epiphanies -- The horrors of misrecognition -- Breaking down -- Notes -- Part III Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments -- 5 Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Historical Sublime -- The sublime and history -- The postmodern sublime: Lyotard -- The historical sublime: Hayden White -- Lanzmann's film -- Notes -- 6 Jerry Lewis's Holocaust and the Limits of Invisibility -- Notes -- Part IV The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes -- 7 A Short History of the Long Take: Digital Cinema and the "Infinite Cut" -- Digital cinema and auteur theory: Down the rabbit hole -- "Everybody loves a montage"29. Sublime aesthetics: Presenting the unpresentable -- Single-shot films and sublime aesthetics -- Conclusion: sublime auteurs -- Postscript: "There and back again"89 -- Notes -- 8 Stalking the Sublime: Nature and Affect in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker -- Entering the sublime zone -- Cinematic materialism and the sublime open image -- Towards an immanent sublime-The Deleuzian sublime -- Immanent transcendence-The Tarkovskian sublime -- Notes -- Part V The Limits of Light: The Other(s) -- 9 Sublime Abject or Abject Sublime: Sublimation and Jouissance in Andrzej Żuławski's Szamanka -- The sublime, the abject, and jouissance -- Excess, transgression, suffering -- Science, (she)shaman, and the sacred -- Abjection and the potential of art -- Notes -- 10 The Fear of Beauty and the Beauty of Fear: The Sublime in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin -- Introduction -- The sublimity of contact: Theorizing sublimity as clash/amalgam of antipodal states -- The sublimity of the killing alien, the sublime tragedy of the feeling alien -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Notes on the Contributors -- Index.
An academic reader bridging the disciplines of aesthetics and film studies by focusing on cinematic sublimity. Original essays by contemporary film scholars and philosophers with topics and case studies ranging from early cinema and classical Hollywood to avant-garde film and contemporary digital cinema.