Metacinema The Form and Content of Filmic Reference and Reflexivity

When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of artDLeither by reference to itself or to other worksDLwe have become accustomed to calling this move "meta." While scholars and critics have, for decades, acknowledged reflexivity in films, it is only in Metacinema, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists join to enthusiastically debate the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In new essays on generative films, including Rear Window, 8 1/2, Holy Motors, Funny Games, Fight Club, and Clouds of Sils Maria, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What results is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise-en-ab^ime, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual and intermedial traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study found in Metacinema.

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or co-editor of twelve books, including The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, The Philosophy of Documentary Film, The Philosophy of War Films, and The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman. He has contributed book chapters on Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Casey Affleck, Kelly Reichardt, Errol Morris, Rithy Panh, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton, and Charlie Kaufman. His articles have appeared in Afterimage, Conversations, Epoché, Estetica, Liminalities, Post Script, Transactions, Film and Philosophy, The Senses and Society, The Midwest Quarterly, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and edited six features in The Intellectual Portrait Series, directed Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes, and codirected New York Photographer: Jill Freedman in the City. He was Harvard's Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom and participated in an NEH Institute, a workshop with Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, and Vanderbilt.