Titles in the popular, top-shelf caboose short essay series Kino-Agora, some in expanded editions, are now available in electronic library editions on the Proquest platform and in inexpensive Kindle versions for consumers as the series, temporarily at least as a result of the pandemic, makes the shift to an electronic only format. There is no other short essay series in film studies with Kino-Agora’s prestige and scholarly bona fides, all in readable prose.

Expanded second editions with new material are now available for Girish Shambu’s popular and perennial The New Cinephilia, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s foundational The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems, and Jacques Aumont’s aesthetic and philosophical essay on Montage. (Expanded versions of the Kino-Agora volumes Mise en scène by Frank Kessler and Découpage by Timothy Barnard are now available in the three-part volume Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form.)

Perfect as textbooks for undergraduate courses, and for cinephiles outside the academy keeping up with scholarly work in film via brief, affordable, readable books, these 25,000 to 30,000-word essays by a diverse group of authors delve into topics as varied as “thing theory” (Lesley Stern’s Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing) and film authorship (Sarah Kozloff’s The Life of the Author), along with, in addition to the titles on cinephilia, montage and the “kinematic turn” mentioned above, an essential and never before translated text by Sergei Eisenstein on Mise en jeu and Mise en geste, about whose translation by Sergey Levchin the Soviet film scholar Richard Taylor remarks that it “has rendered the Russian text as clearly and intelligibly as could possibly be done so that it reads (what higher praise could there be?!) as if it had been written in English in the original”, rare praise indeed for any translation of Eisenstein. For the new electronic edition we have restored the idiosyncratic paragraph style in Eisenstein’s original text, written weeks before his death.

Libraries: Kino-Agora titles are now available from Proquest under single or unlimited user acquisition licences. Students and professors: ask your librarian about consulting the Proquest PDF editions of Kino-Agora titles via your library catalogue. And please recommend the Kino-Agora series for permanent electronic acquisition. Individuals: Kindle versions of Kino-Agora titles are available for $6 to $8 USD each (Amazon will adjust the price to your currency). Note that Kindle is now a free app, available from Amazon; no special device is needed to purchase or read the book.