2014/1 – #Traces

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Representation or misrepresentation? British media and Japanese popular
Hinton, Perry (2014) , S. 89-108
For thirty years products of Japanese popular culture, including comics and animated films, have been very popular in the West. This essay examines the British social representations of the Japanese and Japanese cultural products and contrasts them with the Japanese context in which they have been produced along with the Japanese representations within them. The British representations are shown to be based on a view of the Japanese as the cultural ‘other’ and Japanese cultural products as both different and at times transgressive. This contrasts with the Japanese representations within their media output that deal with issues of youth and gender within their society. Thus, the British interpretation provides an explanation for the social representation of the Japanese as a cultural ‘other’ and for the limited range of Japanese popular culture, such as anime, shown on mainstream British television.
Empire is out there!? The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film UP
Meinel, Dietmar (2014) , S. 69-87
The animated feature Up (Pete Docter, 2009) tells the story of wilderness explorer Charles Muntz in search of a rare species of bird in the South American valley of Paradise Falls and widower Carl Frederickson hoping to mend the pain of losing his wife by fulfilling their lifelong dream of traveling to the same valley. Both men pursue their fantasies of adventure in South America. I situate this narrative within discourses of imperialism and the Monroe Doctrine. Whereas Charles has usurped Paradise Falls in his zealous decades-long hunt the film offers an alternative to his imperial fixation by portraying the redemptive experience of Carl during his travels. As the latter learns to define adventure as a spiritual endeavor, Carl sheds his imperial obsession and rescues his South American friends from Charles. I argue that Up attempts to critique the damaging effects of imperialism ‐ and by extension the ‘War on Terror’ ‐ through the figure of the fallen hero Charles but disavows the ‘informal’ qualities of U.S. empire embodied by Carl. This disavowal of the informal features of (U.S.) imperialism in Up allows me to explore the persistence of the ‘tenacious grasp’ of U.S. exceptionalism, while the imagery of a queer, transnational community also suggests alteration in the tropes of U.S. imperialism.
Mapping the rise of the iPhone – Between phones and mobile media
Verstraete, Ginette (2014) , S. 21-41
This article discusses a cluster of specific technologies and practices in the history of the mobile phone in the U.S. and Europe that have been crucial for the success of Apple’s iPhone. It argues that Apple has integrated these developments along three major strategies: all-in-one, customization, and location-awareness. Unraveling these histories and strategies allows us to circumvent the blind spot created by looking at the iPhone solely as a magic object catering to the personal needs of the mobile user. What lies between the object and the subject is a complex assemblage of technologies, actors, and space-bound practices that situate the product and the consumer in an expansive, commodified, and increasingly modulated environment at the heart of which lies the entanglement of user agency and corporate control.
Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities
Elsaesser, Thomas (2014) , S. 5-20
Seen from today’s vantage point, Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960) envisages the possibility that the cinema may turn out to have been a historical phenomenon whose technological specifications as well as aesthetic properties are contingent, but whose ‘ontology’ speaks to such broad concerns as ‘history’ and ‘life’. Kracauer poses affinities between photography and the cinema which can be understood not only in the context of a phenomenologically-inflected aesthetics of realism or as a covert manifesto supporting the modern cinema of the time-image, but they can also provide a foil for the moving image in its current condition, where art and life tend to change places and where the contingent, the endless, and the indeterminate have become the basis for extracting from images ‘useful’ information and ‘usable’ data.
Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos
Gilbert, Ana (2014) , S. 359-364
The navigational gesture – Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface
Verhoeff, Nanna; Cooley, Heidi Rae (2014) , S. 111-128
The touchscreen interface is a threshold between site-specific data overlays and one’s fingers that touch, swipe, and pinch to access information about one’s surroundings and, in the process, leave traces ‐ fingerprints ‐ on the screen. The navigational ‘gesture’ is central to the process of making meaning in two forms of deictic transaction: the gesture of raising and pointing a mobile device (e.g. in the case of the augmented reality) and the finger’s pressing on the touchscreen (activating data overlays) ‐ both of which require pointing and touching. The former is future-oriented, pointing toward some destination; the latter is past-oriented, accruing not only traces of where one has been but also the residue of touching the screen. Gesture and touch intersect in the tracing-tracking that transpires in the present and that holds both past (‘where I’ve been’) and future (‘where I’m headed’). Extending arguments we have made elsewhere about the way navigation shapes and determines how, today, we understand and perform space, time, and subjectivity, in this article we explore how the navigational gesture as a cultural form is related to a deeper cultural logic of indexicality. We consider the relation between the physical use of the mobile micro screen and the haptic experience that this interaction brings about. We address how various traces produced at the intersection of technology and practice function to inscribe time in space. Ultimately we argue that navigation by means of locative (media) technologies proceeds according to a specifically deictic indexicality that opens onto a layeredness that characterised the mobile present.
Soundscapes, sound clash
Johnston, Nessa (2014) , S. 325-332
The Third Party Diary – Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites
van der Velden, Lonneke (2014) , S. 195-217
This article discusses how the browser plugin Ghostery contributes to a particular understanding of contemporary consumer surveillance by making Web tracking transparent. The Tracker Tracker is a digital methods tool that, by following Ghostery, detects trackers on specific sets of URLs. It was used to examine all the websites of the Government of the Netherlands on a regular basis. Ghostery also invokes a particular informational genre which has an effect on how we understand the issue of Web tracking. The use of such a tool therefore raises a question: what happens when we repurpose an ‘issue device’ as ‘research device’?
Animated maps and the power of the trace
Fidotta, Giuseppe (2014) , S. 267-298
The animated map, a generally overlooked rhetorical device, is questioned throughout this essay as a meaningful and useful case for rethinking the notion of the trace in the analysis of documentary films. Drawing on the debate led by critical cartography since the 1980s the essay discusses the relation between maps, ideology, and propaganda specifically with regard to fascist documentaries made between 1939 and 1942 that are entirely composed with animated maps. Through the notion of the ‘power of the trace’ ‐ the construct warranting the perfect correspondence of image and world ‐ the essay interrogates the misleading use of animated maps in documentary as evidence, informational images, and faithful reproductions of the territory. By looking at the roles played by space, time, materiality, and narrative in animated maps I instead propose an examination of the trace, taking into account the possibilities offered to visual-oriented analysis.
Webcams as cinematic medium – Creating chronotopes of the real
Albuquerque, Paula (2014) , S. 151-169
This article focuses on webcams as a cinematic medium. It proposes an approach to studying the specific affected ownership, temporality, and filmic potential of the webcam. The article begins by advancing a differentiation between CCTV and webcams. Next, it proposes a synthesis of the notions of cinematic time and network time to analyse the webcam’s real-time footage and conceptualise a third term: ‘realtime’. Furthermore, the article outlines the webcam’s potential to generate cinematic chronotopes owing to their specific form of temporality.
The cinema of Béla Tarr – The circle closes
Kiss, Miklós (2014) , S. 337-344
Fassbinder Frankfurt
Siewert, Senta (2014) , S. 384-390
Globalisation and television formats
Kooijman, Jaap (2014) , S. 319-325
Initiating regional talents – 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival
Velisavljević, Ivan (2014) , S. 371-377
Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Papadimitriou, Lydia (2014) , S. 364-371
Past memories for a new future – The 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia
Vannucci, Enrico (2014) , S. 377-383
Microphysics of a rationalist utopia – Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary
Mariani, Andrea (2014) , S. 219-243
In 1934, Giuseppe Terragni, the father of Italian architectural Rationalism, planned and directed the renovation work of the city of Como. Retracing this utopian project ‐ definitively withdrawn after some years and never completed ‐ the article points out the singular relationship between the Terragni Studio and the young comrades of the University Fascist Film Club of Como: the ‘Cineguf’. The Cineguf were a complex network of film clubs spread all over the country; they were fostered and equipped by the National Fascist Party in order to create a new generation of filmmakers for the new fascist cinema. In these groups the avant-garde culture of the cine-clubs and the official aesthetic debates about a genuine realism found an original and controversial solution. The focus here is on the short film realised by the Cineguf which was commissioned by the Terragni Studio and financed by the Urban Office of the Municipality: Renovation of the Quarter ‘La Cortesella’. I proceed by taking into account different degrees of conceptualisation of the ‘trace’, presenting a reflection on the complexity of the historiographical operation, including the ways in which the historical traces of these filmmakers’ experience of modernity are identifiable in the text.
Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2014) , S. 1-3
The beauty of the act – Figuring film and the delirious baroque in HOLY MOTORS
Walton, Saige (2014) , S. 245-265
Leos Carax’s metamorphic Holy Motors (2012) has been received as evading conceptual, physical, and cinematic coherence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold and Nicole Brenez’s work on the figural powers of the cinema, this article argues that Carax’s film reprises the aesthetics of a delirious baroque. Re-evaluating the relevance of the baroque for Carax and for cinema, it identifies the delirious baroque as an embodied aesthetics of movement, materiality, and multiplicity as well as vision.
Impossible dreams: EUROPE AND LOVE IN CINEMA
Handyside, Fiona (2014) , S. 344-351

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