Research

Books

2021. Material Media-Making in the Digital Age. Intellect.

Features a foreword, ‘Cherish the Thought’, written by critic and professor Adrian Martin.

Can we take things that are already mind-numbing clichés in the mainstream industry – like the ubiquitous drone shot mapping out the grid of a big city at night – and turn them into more mind-boggling propositions concerning the relation of sight to feeling, humanity to landscape, space to time? This is just what Chantal Akerman or Jean-Luc Godard did from their very first short film exercises: playfully interrogate the tool, the technique, the technology, the second-hand form or convention – and, in the process, bend it right out of shape until it becomes expressive of a new idea, a new sensation, a new emotion. Material Media-Making in the Digital Age offers many helpful hints as to how to kickstart such a process.

Adrian Martin, film critic and Adjunct Professor at Monash University

Being a crossover theory-practice book, Material Media-Making in the Digital Age is quite unique. Most ‘how to’ books/production manuals have next to no theoretical content whatsoever, while most practitioners who engage with theory relate it in general only to their own practice. That is the case here, too, but it aims to expand and to apply theory to workable exercises that will help young filmmakers in their own filmmaking practice, in particular by encouraging both to experiment and to reflect intellectually on that practice.

William Brown, scholar and filmmaker; author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age and Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude.
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2017. The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq. Intellect.

Genre analysis, as Robert Stam warned, is always in danger of narrowness, normativism, monolithic definitions and biologism. Daniel Binns’ The Hollywood War Film has avoided such pitfalls by offering a reading of the genre that captures its shifting nature across time and forms, starting with the grand narratives of Hollywood to more recent video games. . . . The Hollywood War Film is a significant contribution to the study of cinematic genres and will appeal to both specialists in the field of film studies and students.

Iqbal Barkat, Macquarie University, Global Media Journal: Australian Edition

 

Journal articles and book chapters

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About Me

Daniel Binns is a media-maker and theorist of media and screen cultures. He is the author of The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq (2017), and Material Media-Making in the Digital Age (2021), and has published work on Netflix documentaries, drone cinematography, and film genres. Long walks on the beach are fine, but I much prefer cabins in the woods, board games, RPGs, and movies.


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