Coffee with a canine: Caetlin Benson-Allott & Frisco

The current featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Caetlin Benson-Allott & Frisco.

The author, on whether Frisco does more to help or to hinder her scholarship:

Help! He sits on my lap and prevents me from leaving my desk. He also keeps me company while I am watching movies for work (although he tends to fall asleep)...[read on]

About Caetlin Benson-Allott's new book, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing, from the publisher:

Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

Learn more about Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Caetlin Benson-Allott & Frisco.

--Marshal Zeringue