The pioneers of what has been labelled New Queer Cinema laid the foundation for a Queer Post-Cinema — a movement in which artists experiment with technology in innovative ways. Through original readings of Todd Haynes’s early films, Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana’s videos and installations, Su Friedrich’s digital video Seeing Red, Charlie Prodgers’s iPhone film Bridgit, and Claire Denis’s science-fiction film Highlife, this monograph shows how artists are creating a new form of resistance in the time of the digital image and generative AI.

This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how ‘tropicalized’ tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more ‘worlded’ art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.

Practically anything can be a model of or for something else. What characterizes models is rather their specific reductive relationality, which often promotes understanding but is always generative rather than merely representational. The essays in Breaking and Making Models engage with the normative and performative qualities of models, their aesthetic and political dimensions, and their world-making potentials. Bringing such perspectives into a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, this book explores ways to work creatively with models.

This book examines the European component of Slow cinema, a strand of contemporary cinema that makes extensive use of distended durations and the ‘dead time’ of quotidian activities. I trace the development of the two notions that form its core — time and the everyday — in order to situate it both in film history and contemporary culture. My aim is to interpret the momentum that this particular approach to filmmaking has gained in recent decades, by examining it in relation to developments in philosophical thought, film theory, technology, the film industry, and the specificity of the contemporary socio-political situation of late capitalism. I conclude that the phenomenon is aided, on the one hand, by its ties to an established tradition in durational filmmaking. Since duration is a quality adopted by both realist and modernist discourses, the trend’s consolidation in criticism has been aided by its alignment with both categories in recent work. On the other hand, the tendency towards slowness in cinema coincides with a contemporary social movement opting for deceleration, and a concomitant politics of time in which representations of alternative temporalities and the quotidian become political gestures. At the same time, Slow cinema has to be understood in relation to the institutional field of forces that sustain and promote it, such as the festival circuit and discourses around art cinema and cinephilia. In this light, the trend is seen as being immediately reappropriated by the temporalities of late capitalism and subject to conservative notions regarding quality and taste. Twenty-first-century durational cinema is thus shown to be an amalgam of retrogressive and radical qualities, both reacting against the dominant socio-political structures as well as participating in and perpetuating them.