A married couple takes an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences.

A couple's relationship breaks down along with the images, which in its second half takes a dog's-eye view of the world. It is a meditation on history and illusion, figures merging and weaving across the screen along with the film's ideas about romantic love and being-in-the-world.

Carol White is an L.A. housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what cannot be seen.

• La jetée (1963, 27 min., b&w) / Argos-Films présente avec la participation du Service de la recherche de la R.T.F. ; un photo-roman de Chris Marker
• Bez solnt͡sa = Sunless = Sans Soleil (1983, 103 min., b&w and col.) / Anatole Dauman proposes ; conception and editing, Chris Marker.

La Jetée: An unnamed man experiments with time travel, in hopes of finding a solutions to the problems of his post-apocalyptic home era. Narrated almost entirely using black-and-white still photographs.
Sans soleil: Actress Alexandra Stewart (English version) reads and comments on the letters she receives from (fictional) Sandor Krasna, a world-traveling freelance cameraman. Explores the immense diversity of the human species and its differing societies.

• [v. 1] Koyaanisqatsi / Francis Ford Coppola presents ; an IRE presentation ; produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio ; scenario Ron Fricke ... [et al.] (86 min., 1983, 1.85:1)
• [v. 2.] Powaqqatsi / a Golan-Globus production ; a Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas presentation ; directed by Godfrey Reggio ; produced by Mel Lawrence, Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub ; written by Godfrey Reggio and Ken Richards (99 min., 1988, 1.85:1)
• [v. 3.] Naqoyqatsi / Miramax Films and Steven Soderbergh present ; writer and director, Godfrey Reggio ; producer, Joe Beirne, Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub (89 min., 2002, 1.78:1).

"Astonishingly photographed, and featuring unforgettable, cascading scores by Philip Glass, these are immersive sensory experiences that meditate on the havoc humankind's obsession with technological advancement has wreaked on our world"--Container.

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. "Critical Terms for Media Studies" defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, and featuring a team of distinguished contributors - including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker, and Bernard Stiegler - "Critical Terms for Media Studies" offers diverse opportunities for students to understand the language that underpins much of new media. The essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, not only emphasize the ways in which technology changes our understanding of mediation, but also help to articulate issues important to media practitioners, such as the obsolescence of the body and the changing role of memory. Mitchell and Hansen have organized these essays into three interrelated groups: 'Aesthetics' engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, 'Technology' offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and 'Society' invites inquiry into language that describes the systems that allow a medium to function. A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, "Critical Terms for Media Studies" will engage and deepen anyone's knowledge of one of our most important new fields.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which - maybe ina more fundamental way than financial speculation - leads the world economy to the abyss. This essayistic, political documentary follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, an those marginalized by the global transport system. We discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. As he struggles to unearth the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation.

A vampire terrorizes the countryside in his search for human blood.

Tampering with life and death, Dr. Frankenstein pieces together salvaged body parts to create a human monster.

• Part 1: Introduction 1. Medium Is the Message 2. Media Hot and Cold 3. Reversal of the Overheated Medium 4. The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis 5. Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 6. Media as Translators 7. Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity
• Part 2: 8. The Spoken Word: Flower or Evil? 9. The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear 10. Roads and Paper Routes 11. Number: Profile of the Crowd 12. Clothing: Our Extended Skin 13. Housing: New Look and New Outlook 14. Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card 15. Clocks: The Scent of Time 16. The Print: How to Dig It 17. Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV 18. The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism 19. Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane 20. The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls 21. Press: Government by News Leak 22. Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride 23. Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses 24. Games: The Extensions of Man 25. Telegraph: The Social Hormone 26. The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim 27. The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol? 28. The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest 29. Movies: The Reel World 30. Radio: the Tribal Drum 31. Television: The Timid Giant 32. Weapons: War of the Icons 33. Automation: Learning a Living.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message" in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A thrilling post-MTV, roller-coaster ride about two star-crossed lovers who have only minutes to change the course of their lives. Time is running out: Lola has just received a frantic call from her boyfriend Manni, who's accidentally lost a small fortune he was to deliver to his mobster boss. If they cannot find a way to replace the money within twenty minutes, Manni will surely suffer severe consequences.

• Preface Introduction: Entry Level
• 1. From Garden to Earth
• 2. Technology and the Lifeworld
• 3. Lifeworld: Praxis and Perception HeideggerOs Hammer HusserlOs Galileo Merleau-PontyOs Father
• 4. Adam and Galileo Lifeworld Technics: Time Perception Lifeworld Technics: Space Perception Artifacts and Technofacts
• 5. Program One: A Phenomenology of Technics Technics Embodied Hermeneutic Technics Alterity Relations Background Relations Horizontal Phenomena Eve and the Spaceship Dreams of Totalization
• 6. Program Two: Cultural Hermeneutics Technology Transfer: Technologies as Cultural Instruments Neocolonialism as the Failure of Tranfer OControllingO Technology Techology-Culture Embeddedness as Multistable The Varieties of Technological Experience Adam and EveOs Culinary Revolution
• 7. Program Three: Lifeworld Shapes Pluriculturality Decisional Burden Materializing the Conceptual Oscillatory Phenomena
• 8. Epilogue: The Earth Inherited Stwardship Recommendations for the Inherited Earth To Conserve the Earth Demythologizing (and Demasculinizing) Technological Science Galileo in the Kitchen Concluding Postscript on Technological Science Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The role of tools and instruments in our relation to the earth and the ways in which technologies are culturally embedded provide the foci of this thought-provoking book.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)