Peter J. Bloom is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been focused on film and media studies with a regional focus on West Africa, North Africa and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on Belgian, British and French colonial media, and is currently preparing a monograph under the title, Radio-Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire. Dominique Jullien is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She publishes on reception and translation studies, East-West dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Her current book project explores technologies of optical mediation, illusionism and secular magic in contemporary fiction.
The film screen has been neglected for decades by film theorists. After all, doesn't the screen seem to disappear when a movie begins? In this unique and important anthology scholars from a range of backgrounds probe not only the screen, but the conditions of illusion in cinema, uncovering its links to the uncanny.-- ""Tom Gunning, Professor Emeritus University of Chicago"" The contributors to this probing and various essay collection explore how optical toys reveal the limits of our sense perceptions, while new techniques of representation continue to augment what we see and how we see it. Yet, as the editors of Screens and Illusionism are keen to emphasise, the effects of new media are not all ominous, but the delightful fruits of human ingenuity, playfulness, and an unimpeachable pursuit of pleasure. This rich collection enhances our ways of seeing; it places within the reader's grasp powerful new instruments of understanding and perception.-- ""Marina Warner, author of Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media""