An award-winning and highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual art
Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, winner of the 1993 Katherine Singer Kovacs prize for the best book in film studies, Public Intimacy and Surface.
A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film,
architecture, and the body. We think of film as a predominantly
visual medium, but Bruno insists that it is as much about the
positioning and movement of the body in space-hence that is, as she
puts it, 'haptic'. This adventurous book will be of interest to
anyone concerned with what we might call 'mobility studies': the
attempt to understand cultural performances not as the
manifestation of fixed structures but as the expression of restless
energies.
*Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University*
Bruno's endlessly provocative narrative weaves film and
architecture so tightly together that they swap identities.
Buildings melt into fluid emotions while flickering images become
astonishingly solid. Traditional disciplinary limits dissolve to
reveal a completely different kind of map, a psychogeography of
cultural life. In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported
across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new
understanding of spatial experience. Essential reading for
architects in love with the elusiveness of their own field.
*Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University*
This is a journey into and an inventory of the alchemist lab, or
Hexenkuche, out of which the Western infatuation with re-created
spaces, places and motions has operated in the past 400 years-a
vast continent of mimetic obsessions, now uncovered and
cartographed with Latin lucidity, Neapolitan lavish, and a pinch of
feminist stregoneria ... . Bruno's atlas/book teaches the reader
many things: among them, the meaning of topophilia, and how to
never again mindlessly speak or write of something taking
place..
*Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey*
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