2020/2 – #Method

Browsing 2020/2 – #Method by Issue Date

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  • Article
    Teaching writing with images: The role of authorship and self-reflexivity in audiovisual essay pedagogy
    Letizi, Roberto; Troon, Simon (2020) , S. 181-202
    Methodologies for teaching audiovisual essays often map the discipline-specific objectives of the form and the practical and philosophical advantages it offers as a mode of assessment. However, a particular division has emerged between the kind of work created by students and the professional audiovisual criticism circulated by critics and scholars that is considered exemplary of contemporary practice. In this context, the role of the author as a self-reflexive agent can be seen as a link not only between students’ expectations of traditional written assessment and the fundamentally different imperatives of the audiovisual essay as a subjective mode of creative research, but also between audiovisual essay criticism and historical iterations of the essay form. This article explores the extensive redevelopment of a capstone undergraduate subject on audiovisual film criticism, undertaken via a fellowship awarded to develop teaching innovation and enhance curriculum design. We detail major pedagogical interventions, including a return to writing, examine key motivations in the development of course content, and establish the critical significance of encouraging students to think of themselves as authors – that is, to consider their own agency in the ways they encounter, interpret, and utilise images. Reflecting on some outcomes of the redeveloped subject, we pose it as a test case for a pedagogy that encourages students to think ambitiously with images, dissolving divisions between professional audiovisual criticism and audiovisual essays as a method of assessment. We argue that when thinking with images in this manner is embraced as a component of pedagogical methodology, students’ competencies with images can be leveraged to enable work that is academically rigorous, critically sophisticated, and evinces highly subjective authorial agency.
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  • Review
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    Encounters and affinities: Exchanges through the essay form
    Guha, Malini (2020) , S. 159-180
    The term interdisciplinary has achieved ‘buzzword’ status across academic channels in recent years. Interdisciplinary methods of research are often carried out as a matter of import and export; terminology is borrowed from across disciplines by scholars and is then applied in an analytical fashion to whatever case study is at hand. In this article, I will present two case studies that position the essay form and especially the essay film, as privileged sites of interdisciplinarity as praxis. The first example centres on the relationship between illustrious cultural geographer Doreen Massey and filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The second case study focuses on the longstanding relationship between cultural studies luminary Stuart Hall and filmmaker John Akomfrah, before and after his tenure as co-founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998). These case studies illustrate the intellectual promise of interdiscipinary exchange as praxis, shaped by relations of affinity, reciprocity and duration.
  • Article
    Towards an understanding of children’s screen genres in the streaming video era: Reflecting on shifting intersections between digital media and screen studies
    Balanzategui, Jessica (2020) , S. 249-272
    On-demand streaming video services, including the video-sharing platform YouTube and the subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) service Netflix, have replaced television to become the most popular means of accessing video content amongst children in a number of countries. These streaming video platforms have introduced new generic paradigms into the domain of children’s media, and children’s genres form, circulate, and are consumed on these platforms in ways that differ from legacy media (film and television). The streaming video ecology thus poses new challenges for studies of children’s screen genres and media consumption. This article offers a methodological provocation, contending that this context calls for the integration of traditions in screen studies – namely audience research and genre analysis – with approaches to platform analysis drawn from digital media studies. Such an interdisciplinary methodology promises to illuminate how new children’s genres have formed in the streaming video ecology, and how these genres circulate culturally, including how children engage with these content types.
  • Article
    Talking [Heads] About Whitney
    Kooijman, Jaap (2020) , S. 445-448
  • Article
    On #Method: A roundtable with the NECSUS editorial board
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2020) , S. 93-115
    In October 2020 the editorial board of NECSUS held an online roundtable discussion to address the special section topic #Method. The initial prompt came from an editorial written by board member Toni Pape. What follows is an edited transcript of the recording of the online roundtable on this topic.
  • Review
    The Queer Fantasies of the American Sitcom / Queering Gender
    Chairetis, Spyridon (2020) , S. 367-374
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    The International Labour Film Festival in Turkey
    Ozgen-Tuncer, Asli (2020) , S. 303-311
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    SXSW, Amazon, and the difficulty of staging an exclusive event online
    Hobbins-White, Phil; Limov, Brad (2020) , S. 329-338
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    The Origins of the Film Star System / George Clooney
    Polley, Sarah (2020) , S. 375-382
  • Article
    Method unchained: To new adventures of ideas
    Pape, Toni (2020) , S. 77-91
    This position piece defends an understanding of method as a process of creative invention. The opening section distinguishes between method and methodology in order to problematise the relation between the two. In light of this distinction, the piece then assesses the general value of method’s repetitive operational chains, for instance for purposes of learning and knowledge transmission. Ultimately, the argument affirms the need for a radical openness of creative practices, including research. This is first done through an engagement with Henri Bergson’s method of intuition and then, in the final section, through the notion of metamodeling.
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    Editorial NECSUS
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2020) , S. 1-4
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    Disciplinary itineraries and digital methods: Examining the Kinomatics collaboration networks
    Verhoeven, Deb; Moore, Paul S.; Coles, Amanda; Coate, Bronwyn; Zemaityte, Vejune; Musial, Katarzyna; Prommer, Elizabeth; Mantsio, Michelle; Taylor, Sarah; Eltham, Ben; Loist, Skadi; Davidson, Alwyn (2020) , S. 273-298
    The Kinomatics project () is an international, interdisciplinary project applying innovative digital practices to study creative industries, particularly the film industry. Kinomatics uses data-driven tools and methods to examine the social, cultural, and economic ‘relationality’ of film distribution as a complex, overlapping, co-constituting media infrastructure. What is unique to this project is the way we apply the same methods for the study of film circulation to evaluate our own collaboration networks and determine future research opportunities. We produce both research tools and analysis that is focused on intervening in, rather than just describing, the creative industries. Kinomatics derives this recursive approach to method from digital humanities. This article conceptualises our approach with a critical social network analysis of how our own collaborations are structured and open to being reshaped. Being mindful of our multi-disciplinary methods as dispersed ‘teams of teams’ emphasises the relational dimensions of our work. These connections represent a significant interpersonal investment that is not always evident in the formal measurement of academic success, such as co-authorship for example. In researching how cinema operates as a global cultural industry, Kinomatics team members aim to collaborate on a ‘global’ scale themselves, across geographic and disciplinary boundaries. This article will show how our migration across specialities in inter-team collaboration and co-authorship has contributed to new approaches and collaboration dynamics.
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    Film studies and the experimental method
    Slugan, Mario (2020) , S. 203-224
    Kuleshov’s montage experiments have arguably been a key impetus for inauguration of film theory. Yet, although cognitivists – and even some continental film philosophers – have long appreciated the importance of neurological and psychological studies for understanding film, they rarely undertake experiments themselves. Instead, the work is primarily done by psychologists with special interest in film. This paper advocates for a deeper engagement with the experimental method in film studies, through design and/or criticism of specific experiments. First, to dispel the longstanding disciplinary skepticism against the method, I propose that arguments against cognitivism as methodologically imperialistic conflate the methods of analytic philosophy and scientific experiment. I then retort to strong (D.N. Rodowick) and moderate skepticism (Malcolm Turvey) about the experimental method. Against the former I argue that 1) some questions in film studies demand experimental answers, and 2) these experiments do not transform film studies into a science of film, and 3) inferences drawn from experiments are not incommensurable with humanistic inquiry. In the latter case I point out that although there is a difference between humanistic and natural phenomena and the principles behind them, there are some principles behind humanistic phenomena which are discoverable through experimental method. Second, to illustrate the importance of the experimental method I draw attention to the fact that a key assumption in film studies – that fiction films change our beliefs about the actual world – is an empirical claim still awaiting experimental proof. I specify how one experiment (co-developed with Ed Tan) testing this assumption might look. I also pay special attention to problems of replicability and representativeness at the crux of the current crisis in psychology. In conclusion, I invite film scholars to a close reading of the proposed experimental design as a way of coming to grips with challenges, opportunities, and the potential blind spots of experimental work.