Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Bu�uel, Salvador Dal�, Man Ray, Andr� Breton, Andr� Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.

Adam Lowenstein works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, the construction of national cinemas, and the politics of spectatorship, with particular attention to American, British, Canadian, French, and Japanese cases.