2023/2 - #Cycles
Browsing 2023/2 - #Cycles by Issue Date
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- ArticleCreativity, passion, and community: The rise of India’s transnational producersBhatia, Neha (2023) , S. 272-291Producers are commonly associated with managing finances and budgets, but the work of a producer primarily involves managing emotions and people. They invest emotional labour in the projects, which remains a largely neglected, invisible and hidden aspect of their work. Recent scholarship on film and media industries is increasingly paying attention to the lived experiences of media makers, their cultures, and the emotional qualities of their creative work. In this light, this article focuses on the working world of emerging creative producers involved in supporting Indian independent cinema through international film festival funding and co-production schemes transnationally. This article borrows insights from media industry studies and affective scholarship, as well as incorporates in-depth interviews with transnational producers themselves. It examines the producer’s labour and work, involving extensive human interactions, community-building, and emotional management to make it in the industry. In doing so, the producers become entwined in the transnational capitalist film industry.
- Article(Dis)orientation in net art: Disrupting the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivitiesBăcăran, Mihai (2023) , S. 84-102This paper examines instances of (dis)orientation instantiated by net art works which challenge, deconstruct, and remodel our embodied relationship with digital maps. I argue that such (dis)orientation can be framed as a tactical media practice that disrupts the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivities by: 1. bringing into focus aspects of lived experience that do not fit the ‘truth’ of the cartographic representation, and at the same time underlining the ways in which representations participate in the (de)construction of lived experience; 2. challenging the attention economy and opening attention towards otherness and towards the intertwined shifting realities (grounds) of contemporary cultures; 3. questioning the imperative of usefulness inherent in mainstream applications of digital mapping. The paper contends that such (dis)orienting gestures can be understood as a practice of care towards radical otherness.
- ArticleClose CircuitTripot (2023) , S. 226-229
- ArticleSurveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The LobsterEscobar, Cristóbal (2023) , S. 254-271Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure ⎯ a Pythagorean theorem ⎯ is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. By mapping this system of relations, I seek to connect the normalising powers of society in the film with the issue of surveillance as developed by both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary modernity and Gilles Deleuze’s subsequent paradigm of information. In a second section, and thinking about the tactics that the film’s characters employ to mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations, I draw on the notion of resistance as an act that defies the city-Law as well as on the politics of love as a reciprocal law that goes beyond any other law; one that remains hidden, or blinded, for characters to see, for as Shakespeare suggests: ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.
- ArticleScreening the financial crisis: A case study for ontology-based film analytical video annotationsBakels, Jan-Hendrik; Grotkopp, Matthias; Scherer, Thomas J.J.; Stratil, Jasper (2023) , S. 386-407This paper presents a dataset of fine-grained film analytical annotations (Melgar & Estrada & Koolen 2018) for a corpus study of feature films, documentaries, and television news on the Global Financial Crisis (2007-), generated by the research group Affektrhetoriken des Audiovisuellen (Freie Universität Berlin and Hasso-Plattner-Institute Potsdam, 2016-2021, see Bakels et. al. 2020a). The semantic video annotations are based on the AdA Filmontology (v1.8), which consists of eight annotation levels, 78 annotation types, and 501 annotation values (Bakels et. al. 2020b). Each level, type, and value has a unique resource identifier (URI) as well as an English and German name and description. In our paper, we reflect on the specific challenges of capturing film-analytical claims of embodied viewing experiences in an ontology-based taxonomy. We further critically discuss aspects such as intercoder-reliability, consistency, as well as the requirements of training and synchronising expert annotators. The dataset contains more than 92,000 manual and semi-automatic annotations authored in the open-source-software Advene (Aubert/Prié 2005) by expert annotators, as well as more than 400,000 automatically-generated annotations for wider corpus exploration. The annotations are published as Linked Open Data under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence and available as rdf triples in ttl files and in Advene’s non-proprietary azp-file format, which allows instant access through the graphical interface of the software. Via a web application all annotations can be downloaded, queried, and visualised in conjunction with password-protected access to the source video files (Agt-Rickauer 2022). This dataset is of interest for research on the financial crisis discourse or the specific films and broadcasts; also, the dataset serves as a proof of concept for ontology-based video annotation and as a provider of training data on film analytical concepts such as shot length, camera movements, or affective tonalities.
- ArticleA genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival BerlinHeberer, Feng-Mei (2023) , S. 197-219The first film festival of its kind in Germany, the Asian Film Festival Berlin (AFFB), was run by multiple generations of Asian German organisers from 2007-2017. In 2020, the festival came to a halt due to lack of resources. The recent disruption of the AFFB leads us back to the festival’s roots in migrant labor organising by South Korean guest workers in 1970s West Germany. This harbinger labor movement sparked by migrant women inspired the creation of two important diasporic Asian grassroots collectives based in Germany, each of which would respectively host the AFFB: the Koreanische Frauengruppe and korientation. To excavate these genealogical connections is to document an interconnected history of community organising that remains overlooked in official postwar history, and that highlights the unique cyclicality of the AFFB as part of ever-evolving minoritarian movements that positively advance documentation, inclusion, and social justice.
- ArticleVoices from the debris: An interview with Mila Turajlić on unearthing anti-colonial solidaritiesBirdsall, Carolyn; Denić, Nadica (2023) , S. 237-253This interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić discusses her ongoing artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels, which consists of two feature-length films that premiered in 2022, along with performance lectures, installations, exhibitions, research articles, and online content. The interview begins with a discussion of the scopes and aims of the project, which engages with the largely-forgotten collections of Yugoslav Newsreels in Belgrade (Serbia), unearthing the cinematic and political collaborations that were at the heart of the Non-Aligned Movement. The interview further explores the project’s reactivation of the archive and cultural memory, the relationship between politics and cinema, and the continuing importance of a ‘third’ way.
- ArticleEditorial NECSUS – Autumn 2023_#CyclesBeugnet, Martine; de Cuir Jr, Greg; Keilbach, Judith; Loist, Skadi; Pape, Toni; Vidal, Belén; Virginás, Andrea (2023) , S. 1-3
- ArticleAccessing film culture and community at the 2023 Melbourne International Film FestivalDebinski, Anna (2023) , S. 292-300
- ArticleOn the habitus of festival-going: Digital anxiety and urban aspects of post-COVID BerlinaleCampos Rabadán, Minerva (2023) , S. 301-310
- ArticleOn Operational ImagesGimenez, Alba (2023) , S. 332-337
- ArticlePublic lantern lectures in the Netherlands 1880-1940: A dataset based on historical newspaper advertisementsda Rocha Gonçalves, Dulce (2023) , S. 368-385The media history research project Projecting Knowledge aimed to investigate the use of the magic lantern in science communication and knowledge transmission in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1940. For my research within this project, I conducted a survey of digitised historical newspapers based on the expression met lichtbeelden, the phrase that was most used to describe the use of projection in public lectures. My goal was to understand the reach and prevalence of this phenomenon. This paper discusses the dataset I created from this survey. Using newspaper advertisements as a primary source enabled me to extract information systematically such as date, location, venue, speaker, title of lecture, and organiser. The dataset contains a total of 4,638 entries between 1880 and 1926, and a comparison sample of 83 entries between 1927 and 1940.The dataset provides evidence of the versatility of public lantern lecture in the Netherlands. From concert halls to countryside pubs, academics, celebrity speakers, and popular lecturers discussed not only scientific developments or pioneering expeditions but also mundane topics such as ‘How can one keep chickens and make a profit?’ Moreover, this paper underlines how structured data can be an important resource to historical research.
- ArticleSplit Screen as Hermeneutic Tool: Recursivity and Crosstalk in ‘Better Call Saul’Marañón, Nicolás Medina; Kiss, Miklós (2023) , S. 223-225
- ArticleExperimenting in circles: Agfa, amateur cinema, and the art of R&DDe Rosa, Miriam; Mariani, Andrea (2023) , S. 176-195This article moves from small-gauge film technology manufacturing and experimental film practices to develop a twofold exploration of film and camera conceptually interlinked in a mutual cycle of experimentation. Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi’s city symphonies provide an illustrative example: active in the early 1930s as an independent filmmaker, between 1930 and 1933 he produced five films sponsored by Agfa, which was expanding its market in Italy. Magnaghi’s experimental films were thought to stress the material resistance of cameras (an Agfa Movex 30) and the film stock (Agfa Isopan reverse). The article will shed light on the affordances offered to the filmmaker regarding the film stock’s specificities and the camera involved in the manufacturing process. Such a virtuous cycle connecting manufacturing and creativity is metaphorically reinforced on the level of aesthetics in Magnaghi’s film Symphony of Life and Work (1933), characterised by a reiterated circling camera movement. Inspired by this, we aim to craft a study that assembles the various components of the filmmaker’s work in a rounded film experience, underlining the nature of small-gauge cinema as a non-neutral yet empowering practice able to create a complex room for critical analysis eliciting new ways of looking, problematising, and therefore thinking reality.
- ArticleScale, infrastructure, and extractivism: An interview with Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag on their works in New Visions. The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New MediaSæther, Susanne Østby (2023) , S. 344-357In this interview, the Senior Curator of Photography and New Media at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter speaks with photographers and media artists Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag about their works commissioned for the New Visions triennial, presented at Henie Onstad in 2023. Vasylchenko and Virag explain how they work with contemporary image production and display technologies, such as synthetic aperture radar images and LED-screens and the perceptual politics associated with these technologies, as well as how they engage with organic materials as resources subject to extraction as well as material witnesses. The interview also addresses how the artists conceptually and practically tackle questions of image resolution and scale, and the artists’ extensive collaboration with scientific knowledge clusters and researchers.
- ArticleRewind, recycle, revive! An investigation into nostalgia-driven sequel and requel practices in small European film industries: The case of Flandersde Cock, Atalya; Cuelenaere, Eduard; Willems, Gertjan; Joye, Stijn (2023) , S. 127-149In the last decade, nostalgia-driven imitative filmmaking – characterised by requels and ‘belated’ sequels – has become ubiquitous in commercial cinema globally. While the transgenerational appeal of nostalgia in Hollywood has been researched extensively, smaller European film industries like Flanders remain underexplored in this regard. This article focuses on three case studies to investigate how Flemish nostalgia-driven sequels and requels employ transgenerational nostalgia both within the films and in their marketing endeavours. Compared to Hollywood’s consistent 1980s nostalgia strategy, Flemish cinema employs nostalgia as a short-term commemorative tactic, celebrating Flemish pop culture artefacts of the recent past instead of the past itself.
- ArticleCaught in the loops of digital agency panic: On NPCs and internet addictsMarkelj, Jernej; de Zeeuw, Daniël (2023) , S. 61-83This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agen-cy panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and ad-diction. According to Melley, agency panic concerns a set of anxieties linked to the diminished sense of agency, which he sees as escalating after the Second World War. Agency panic is, for him, rooted in the counterfactual expectation of full au-tonomy, a fantasy that is constantly undermined by the growing influence of glob-al networks of communication and capital. In our paper, we examine how an even more networked and distributed sense of agency panic manifests today by engag-ing with two different figures of contemporary digital culture: the non-playable character (NPC) and the internet addict. First, we look at how, in online conspira-cy discourse, the NPC is the product of a process of othering whereby the conspira-torial subject externalises its own sense of compromised agency in digital envi-ronments, allowing it to sustain the fantasy of its own autonomy and independ-ence from these environments. From there, we examine different discourses of ad-diction linked to online cultures as manifestations of digital agency panic. Through the language of addiction, and by promoting the ideal of autonomy as individual self-control, these discourses stigmatise and pathologise users’ various dependen-cies and interrelations with digital devices and services. Building on our analysis of NPC and addiction discourses, we then suggest that the panic-ridden fantasy of the liberal sovereign subject often serves as a pipeline to reactionary, misogynist, or neoliberal immunopolitical cultures set on policing the boundaries between the self and the inferior or unwanted other. We conclude by speculating on how a more distributed understanding of agential self might serve as an antidote to these im-munopolitical tendencies.
- ArticleI foresee that I’m going to have known itVorozheikin, Yevhen (2023) , S. 230-233
- ArticleNo more ego-spheres: An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological designPape, Toni; Gold, Riley (2023) , S. 16-33A conversation about ecological design with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. Taking her books The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024) as starting points, we asked Kallipoliti to share her understanding of ecological design and trace the histories of ecological design thinking. In this context, the interview focuses on design projects of the 20th century which sought to create so-called ‘closed worlds’: habitats that could function as closed systems where all material resources are regenerated from recycled waste. In addition to explaining the motivations for these projects, Kallipoliti addresses their practical limitations and the theoretical conclusions we can draw from them. Kallipoliti furthermore reflects on the notions of mediation and scale in design thinking and on the politics of the cycle.
- ArticleHow to Prevent Hair Loss, Kiat Kiat ProjectsMarie Sneijder, Lisa (2023) , S. 338-343