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The Off-Screen offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from Griffith to Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the general context of the arts of modernity. It does this by focusing on an element at the very heart not only of film but of modern art in general (meaning here the various artistic media of modernity as they have been developed from the Renaissance onward). This element is a new kind of frame, with which the modern work of art is fascinated, and around the investigation of which it organizes itself. Two main things characterize this frame. First, it decontextualizes, meaning a frame is achieved by creating a zone that cuts itself off from the continuity of the world, a zone constituting the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, the framed painting, the cinematic screen, the work of narrative fiction--all are modern framed-out zones. Second, the modern artistic frame, like any frame, creates a separation between “inside” and “outside,” yet the “outside” of the artistic frame is particularly mysterious and constitutes the main enigma of the work of art of the modern age. It is this “outside” of the artistic frame, a new kind of “outside,” that the book calls the “off” (as in off-stage, or off-screen). It is to the exploration of the historical and conceptual significance of this “off” that this book is dedicated.

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker, and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot’s experimental readings of “The Wasteland” and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to Modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

The Studios after the Studios retells the recent history of the Hollywood film industry with the studios, and their movies, at the center. Individual movies are at the heart of this story—not structures, not personalities, and not “tastes.” Someone is supposed to be paying attention to every aspect of a Hollywood film. The Studios takes that seriously, looking in the dark corners of the frame to tell the secret history of Hollywood domination. In Part I, the studios bring directors and agents to heel. They manage that by emphasizing design over storytelling, replacing seventies grittiness with “high-concept” sheen. The Conversation gives way to Top Gun. Still, the movies were only a small part of the new media conglomerates. In Part II, the studios exert outsized influence on their owners by refashioning themselves as the headquarters of corporate strategy, spinning wild tales of media synergy and conglomeration. It is the era of Jurassic Park. In Part III, there are no more worlds left to conquer. The center of the conglomerates migrates toward television; Vivendi Universal implodes; AOL TimeWarner takes the largest write-down in the history of capitalism; and the idea that the studios should tell their own stories seems less and less compelling. “Synergy is bullshit,” TimeWarner chief Jeff Bewkes declares. The glory days of Gladiator give way to the epic failure of Alexander.