2023/1 - #Ports

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Girls will be boys in German silent cinema
Horak, Laura (2023) , S. 231-256
The popularity and availability of Ernst Lubitsch’s cross-dressing comedy Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918) sometimes creates the impression that it is a unique example of female-to-male cross-dressing in silent cinema. Likewise, attention to the gender and sexual play of Weimar-era (1918-1933) German cinema often eclipses cinema of the Wilhelmine era (1895-1918). This article asks: how does Ich möchte kein Mann sein fit into the wider ecology of German films featuring cross-dressed women, during both the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras? How are the cross-dressed women of German silent cinema similar to and different from silent films in other countries? After examining more than 47 German silent films featuring cross-dressed women, I argue that German films adapted transnational cross-dressing performance traditions to fit local contexts, offering audiences deliberately contradictory experiences of female masculinity and same-sex desire. Though scholars have focused on Weimar cinema as offering new possibilities for gender and sexuality, Wilhelmine cinema also offered varied visions of female masculinity – especially in Danish actress Asta Nielsen’s creative takes on cross-dressing traditions. Weimar films continued these traditions while making more explicit reference to real life lesbian and gay subcultures. Attending to the complexities of female-to-male cross-dressing allows us to see how popular culture envisions alternative gender and sexual scenarios while maintaining its popularity and, for the most part, dodging the censors’ scissors.
Experiencing Cinema / Ephemeral Cinema
Barber, Sian (2023) , S. 323-330
Desire lines: An interview on the sociality of film with B. Ruby Rich
Brunow, Dagmar; Loist, Skadi (2023) , S. 257-275
A conversation with B. Ruby Rich, one of the most prolific film critics in the world. For decades she has been involved in film culture as a curator, film critic, professor, and journal editor. In this interview, Skadi Loist and Dagmar Brunow talk with Rich about her inspirations, her international encounters, and her take on film culture and criticism. Above all, this conversation highlights the importance of looking at the social relations that make film culture happen.
From cloudy logic to logistical system: Algorimages, black boxes, and the socio-technical infrastructure of platforms
Hansson Nilson, Leo (2023) , S. 152-169
This article argues that the critical study of algorithms must shift its focus from solving the problem of the ‘black box’ to seeing the structures that surround and pose it as a problematic in the first place. By mapping the movements of what I call algorimages, and the socio-technical infrastructures through which they circulate, the apparently ‘hidden’ imperatives of algorithms are made visible. Through the case study of Twitter, this article undertakes a critical, materialist analysis of algorimages as logistics, excavating their technical substrates and social conditions of emergence within transformations of the capitalist mode of production since the 1970s.
An infinite exhibition fills the nave: Laurent Grasso’s ANIMA
Chefranova, Oksana (2023) , S. 339-348
Desktop documentary as scholarly subjectivity: Five approaches
Lee, Kevin B.; Avissar, Ariel (2023) , S. 276-280
Desktop documentary has gained increasing prominence both within and beyond cinema and media scholarly practice. The recent ascendance of desktop filmmaking prompts an occasion to reflect on the current state of the practice. The five original desktop videos presented in this section offer such an occasion for reflection, particularly with regard to the distinguishing qualities and affordances of desktop documentary and desktop subjectivities for cinema and media scholarship.
Editorial NECSUS – Spring 2023_#Ports
Beugnet, Martine; de Cuir Jr, Greg; Keilbach, Judith; Loist, Skadi; Pape, Toni; Vidal, Belén; Virginás, Andrea (2023) , S. 1-4
National film festivals circuits in the Latin American sphere: Discussing film canon, film culture, and cinephilia
González Itier, Sebastián (2023) , S. 212-230
Film festivals have been understood as part of a global network where each event acts as a node. Their position depends on their relevance and hierarchies within the circuit. However, this notion of a network does not necessarily reflect the establishment of national or local circuits linked to small nations and cinemas. Therefore, this article discusses the creation of local film festival circuits in Latin America based on film culture and cinephilia. I use the water cycle as a reference in order to identify that national circuits in Latin America work around a small group of festivals that act as condensers of resources, which are distributed to the rest of the circuit through different relationships: sublimation and deposition (film historiography); runoff (influence on smaller and local festivals); infiltration (film education); and evaporation, where the processed and transformed resources bring new films and new filmmakers to nurture the condenser film festivals to start this cycle all over again.
Becoming Geological: Imagining an affirmative otherwise
Dolphijn, Rick; Jakubiec, Justyna (2023) , S. 349-358
The many stories of cinema and cinephilia in Pakistan
Masood, Syeda Momina (2023) , S. 331-338
Port of call: The eyeline of the logistical image
Turner, Stephen (2023) , S. 35-57
From the surface of the sea to a sea of data as a canvas of affective inscription, the port emerges as a calling card, constituted by the aggregate image of logistical media and its ‘looks’ and ‘likes’. The surface of software infrastructure encompasses and extends the operation of the port. Cross-weaving documentary (Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space [2010]), experimental and independent film (Jean Luc Godard’s Socialisme [2010], Philip Scheffner’s Havarie [2010]), reality television (Below Deck: Mediterranean, 2016-present), and Instagram, the port emerges as the para-site par excellence of floating capital, consumption, and waste.
First person war: Helmet cameras between testimony and performance
Selvini, Federico (2023) , S. 188-211
In the contemporary media landscape, the visual component of armed conflicts tends to be articulated in two distinct imaginaries. On one hand, we observe a ‘view from above’ generated by aircrafts, UAVs, and satellites; on the other, we encounter videos and photographs shot with consumer technologies by people on the ground such as regular soldiers, militiamen, guerrillas, NGOs, and civilians. Through the internet, these ‘low images’ have created a new imaginary. Among the devices that mark the iconography of the wars of the new millennium, a prominent place is occupied by minute-sized videographic instruments usually secured on the operator’s head, called helmet cameras. These devices are characterised by two elements: the first-person view and the prosthetic relationship with the human body. The machine vision hence presupposes a form of witnessing inextricably related to the subject’s mobility. Helmet cameras produce an embodied experience of war in which the visual perspective echoes the agency of a body at risk that is exposed to the stimuli and the dangers of the battlefield. Focusing primarily on the television docu-series Taking Fire (2016), the paper aims to explore all the elements that mark helmet cameras as a real topos of the contemporary war imagery, pointing to the relationship between vision, technical device, and body. The essay highlights recurring features of the images on both filmic and content levels, adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Starting from studies on point-of-view shots and documentary filmmaking, the essay demonstrates how helmet camera images are profoundly influenced by several trends shaping the contemporary media landscape, including the post-photographic approach, the videogame world, the aesthetics of extreme sports, and the social network culture.
Arquivo em Cartaz: Archival film festivals amid old and new challenges
Muylaert, Juliana (2023) , S. 295-304
Ports as nodes in film logistics: Swedish film agent Oscar Rosenberg in the years after the First World War
Björkin, Mats (2023) , S. 58-80
Ports make visible neglected details in the history of film distribution. The international shipment of film connected for more than half a century the main nodes in the network of film distribution. This article maps questions on port-related logistical challenges, based on the personal and corporate collections of Swedish film distributor Oscar Rosenberg (1874-1943) and his film agency from around 1916 to 1930, also the changing conditions for four Swedish ports in the years around 1920.
Indians from 1967: A Reaction
Kaushik, Ritika (2023) , S. 290-292
Ports: On the material and symbolic mediation of global capitalism
Vélez-Serna, María; Stauff, Markus (2023) , S. 5-15
Introducing and contextualising the contributions to the thematic section on ports, we discuss the conceptual and empirical productivity of the port for media research. As material infrastructures, ports mediate between land and sea, nature and culture, centres of power and colonised/extracted peripheries. As logistic nodes, ports connect transport and communication, technological innovation and revolutionary agency. Their ambivalent and managed visibility makes ports an intriguing motif of media representations that is harnessed for dramatic narratives, cognitive mapping of capitalism, or for city branding. As such ports help to rethink ideas about the relationship between material and symbolic aspects of mediation, between technological innovation and cultural heritage, between metaphorical and literal media ecologies.
With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive
Bird, Katie (2023) , S. 284-285
How to capture the festival network: Reflections on the Film Circulation datasets
Loist, Skadi; Samoilova, Evgenia (Zhenya) (2023) , S. 363-390
The Film Circulation project is the first quantitative research in film festival studies that analyses the complex network relations of the sector using festival run data. This paper provides a detailed account of the project’s dataset, including decisions on data model, collection, structuring, and enhancement. It also documents the dataset’s sources, structures, limitations, and potential, with the goal of making the project more accessible and encouraging further collaborations in festival-related data analytics.
‘The shipyard is dead’: Ports, memory, and left melancholy in contemporary French cinema
Scott, Ben (2023) , S. 104-124
This article examines the representation of ports and shipyards within contemporary French cinema, addressing three works whose narratives centre around port towns on France’s Mediterranean coast: L’Atelier (2017), La Ville est tranquille (2000), and Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro (2011). The analysis places theories of left melancholy in dialogue with these films in order to explore their representation of the relationship between the Fordist past, neoliberal present, and any possible beyond. Consequently, it makes a case for the importance of the port as a site through which fundamental questions pertaining to cultural, social, and economic changes are explored within contemporary work-oriented film.
Havana Film Festival New York 2022: A cultural bridge emerging from COVID-19
Farrell, Michelle (2023) , S. 316-322

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