2015/2 – #Vintage

Now showing 1 - 20 of 25

Locating vintage
Knowles, Kim (2015) , S. 73-84
Few issues are as pertinent today as the relationship between old and new, past and present, obsolescence and progress. Contemporary culture is increasingly characterised by a heightened awareness of the past through a revaluing of old styles, artifacts, and aesthetics. From vinyl records and super 8 cameras to iPhone apps and second-hand clothes, vintage and retro increasingly permeate our collective conscious. But how can we parse and understand these overlapping practices of looking back? This introductory essay acknowledges the ambiguous terrain of vintage and the blurred distinction between authentic appreciation and stylistic appropriation. It locates the vintage phenomenon within Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, arguing that current artistic engagements with outmoded technology might be seen as productively activating the past in the present and exploring the new in the old. However, the simultaneous explosion of vintage into mainstream consumer habits requires a broad examination of the term in order to draw out its contradictions and complexities.
Artists’ Film Biennial, ICA 2014
Satchell-Baeza, Sophia (2015) , S. 284-293
Retro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks back
Baschiera, Stefano; Caoduro, Elena (2015) , S. 143-163
This article explores the definition of ‘vintage cinema’ and specifically re-evaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: faux-vintage, retro and anachronistic; by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism. It furthermore unravels the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).
Richard Serra: Sculpture, television, and the status quo
Spampinato, Francesco (2015) , S. 31-49
While he is appreciated primarily as a sculptor, Richard Serra also made several films and videos in the 1960s and 1970s which have a pivotal role in both the history of avant-garde film and the development of early video art. This article takes into account this ‘collateral’ production, suggesting that Serra’s work is not merely formalist or materialist. Rather, as his video work suggests, his larger sculptural works and conceptual approach require a re-interpretation as commentaries on social and political issues. This essay focuses on the artist’s videos, reading them as an extension of both his films and his sculptural production, but which takes a more explicit stance than either. The essay will also take into account the similarities between Serra’s stance and that of the contemporary Guerrilla Television movement, trying to position them within the articulated history of the relationships between contemporary art and mass media.
The Lumière Galaxy
Pitassio, Francesco (2015) , S. 217-222
Editorial NECSUS
NECSUS Editorial Board (2015) , S. 1-2
Cinema of the Swimming Pool / Cinema as Weather
O'Brien, Adam (2015) , S. 228-234
Learning from popular genres – with help from the audiovisual essay
Álvarez López, Cristina; Martin, Adrian (2015) , S. 209-213
A theoretical approach to vintage: From oenology to media
Niemeyer, Katharina (2015) , S. 85-102
The term ‘vintage’ is common in our modern-day vocabulary. The concept to which it refers is familiar in the fields of oenology and fashion studies but has also, more recently, appeared in those of media and cultural studies. However, a theoretical and historical exploration of its evolution prior to the 20th century is still missing from much literature. This article is a first attempt to fill this gap by discussing patterns of vintage in contrast to retro and kitsch (notions with which it is often blurred). Vintage and its relationship with nostalgia and media are then analysed as part of the discourses and practices that engage with contemporary obsessions with the past. An examination of historical and more recent vintage patterns also leads us to discuss the uses and production of analogue and digital vintage objects. On a more general level this reflection on vintage within media studies might also be inspiring for other research or professional domains.
A note on COMEDY VITTI STYLE (2015)
Iannone, Pasquale (2015) , S. 215-216
Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of TELEVISUALITY
Stauff, Markus; Caldwell, John T. (2015) , S. 51-70
In 1995, John Caldwell’s TELEVISUALITY: STYLE, CRISIS AND AUTHORITY in American Television familiarised media studies with a heterodox methodology, mixing formal analysis and technical insights with work floor knowledge with elaborate theorising. In this interview Caldwell describes how this approach emerged from a conjuncture of practices as different as art school, farm labor, and high theory. Instead of defining the theoretical essence of the medium this combination of approaches allowed for a recursive mapping and drilling of television’s dynamics. Caldwell claims the ‘commercial media industrial systems’ can neither be understood nor effectively criticised with a one-size-fits-all approach; rather, only if we seriously take into account the changing concepts and practices that emerge within these systems. This also requires a pedagogy which does not teach a well-defined model of analysis but rather makes room for collaborative, open-ended research.
Made in Peru: Lima Film Festival comes of age
Barrow, Sarah (2015) , S. 246-251
Arab Pop: Whose Gaze is it Anyway?
Harvey-Davitt, James (2015) , S. 277-283
Construction of a Heist (2014)
Lindenberger, Henrike (2015) , S. 214-214
Agamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of life
Harbord, Janet (2015) , S. 13-30
Agamben’s essay on gesture is perhaps his most influential piece of work for film studies, in which he argues that cinema at its inception captures the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures, manifest in a crisis of communicability. Comparing the traces of the gesticulating bodies of Gilles de la Tourette’s patients with those in the proto-cinematic series of photographs taken by Eadward Muybridge, Agamben suggests that these are the twin processes of a biopolitical production of life; respectively, the body as the site of investigation and the exemplary body put to work. Yet the ethico-political implications of Agamben’s essay on gesture and the biopolitical production of life are relatively under-developed. This article pursues not only cinema’s relation to biopolitical capture but also the way in which cinema came to compensate for such a reductive version of corporeality by constructing the concept of an individual located as complex interiority. When gestural communication declines at the close of the 19th century meaning is relocated to the internal space within the human body; commensurate with this production of human interiority as a site of truth, cinema becomes a machine whose task is to decipher the turmoil of the inside, a process reproduced as narrative explication.
The way we watched: Vintage television programmes, memories, and memorabilia
Piper, Helen (2015) , S. 123-142
This paper explores television viewing memories of a kind that have rarely been acknowledged, whether in formal histories of television or by the ubiquitous archive ‘clip show’. Much of the academic work that explicitly addresses questions of television and memory has been disproportionately preoccupied with viewers’ recall of historical events. Here, the author draws on a viewer reminiscence project to emphasise how favourite entertainment shows once integral to family life in the 1960s and 1970s are today bound up with the more complex and diffuse emotions that surround the everyday past. The author also uses the idea of ‘vintage’, specifically as a designation for something that ‘belongs’ to a certain period, to contemplate the connections between memories of programmes and the sentiments evoked by the vestiges of television-related material culture (including ‘the box’ itself and other items of memorabilia). Both reminiscence and the acquisition of vintage goods are ways of constructing the cultural past, and both differ markedly in form and outcome from the re-consumption of the television archive that is routinely promoted by broadcasters and DVD distributors. The paper will conclude that as critical re-engagement with the extant moving image text is a poor substitute for the original performance, reminiscence and vintage material culture might offer more effective insight into past engagement with television. For similar reasons the study of both memory and materiality may provide appropriate intellectual contexts to complement the study of old programmes in text-centred critical/aesthetic discourse.
Temps mort: Speaking about Chantal Akerman (1950-2015)
de Kuyper, Eric; van den Oever, Annie (2015) , S. 3-12
Strong positioning on the international festival circuit: An interview with Diana Iljine of Filmfest München
Krainhöfer, Tanja C. (2015) , S. 252-260
Technostalgia of the present: From technologies of memory to a memory of technologies
van der Heijden, Tim (2015) , S. 103-121
This article reflects on today’s ‘technostalgic’ trend in media culture by examining the various ways in which Super 8 film as a media technology from the past is re-appropriated and remediated in contemporary memory practices. By looking specifically at restorative and reflective forms of technostalgia manifest in the project BYE BYE SUPER 8 – IN LOVING MEMORY OF KODACHROME (2011) and the digital smartphone app iSupr8 (2011), the author explores how in contemporary memory practices media technologies not only construct and mediate memories but have also become the objects of memory themselves. While analysing this double mnemonic process – accounting for both the memory construction by the media technology and the reminiscence of the media technology itself – it is argued that we currently witness a new kind of memory practice enforcing an attentive shift from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies.
Beautiful Data / The Democratic Surround
Hagener, Malte (2015) , S. 223-227

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