Daniel Binns

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.

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

• 2021. Attuning to the environment through media: Escape and incorporation through fire, plague, and video game development software. Journal of Environmental Media, 2(1), pp. 117-130.
• 2019. Dronopoetics: Unmanned Aerial Cinematography and Ivan Sen’s Goldstone. Journal of Asia Pacific Pop Culture, 4(1), pp. 26-41.
• 2018. The Netflix documentary house style: Streaming TV and slow media. Fusion Journal, 14.
• 2018. Even You Can Break: Jessica Jones as femme fatale. In Jessica Jones: Scarred Superhero. Ed. Tim Rayborn & Abigail Keyes. McFarland & Co.
• 2017. The semiotics of strategy: A preliminary structuralist assessment of the battle-map in Patton (1970) and Midway (1976). (Co-authored with Paul Ryder). M/C Journal, 20(4). 
• 2016. You Can’t Stop Her: Elektra Re-Configured. In Marvel Comics into Film. Ed. Matthew McEniry, Rob Weiner. McFarland & Co.
• 2016. Conflict/image/narrative: Hollywood in the Middle East. Southern Semiotic Review, 6.
• 2015. Re-viewing D-Day: The cinematography of the Normandy landings from the Signal Corps to Saving Private Ryan. (Co authored with Paul Ryder). Media, War and Conflict, 8(1), pp. 86-99.
• 2014, July. Hit / miss: Evolving narratives and the semiotics of the blockbuster. Southern Semiotic Review, 4.
• 2014. War games: Discourses of war, cinema, and videogames. Transmedia practice: A collective approach. Oxford, UK: ID Press, pp. 153-161.
• 2013. Myth and nostalgia in cinematic representations of World War II. The London film and media reader 2. London, UK: London Symposium, pp. 249-256.