2022/1 - #Rumors

Browsing 2022/1 - #Rumors by Issue Date

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  • Review
    Enfin le Cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France 1833-1907
    Louis, Stéphanie (2022) , S. 376-384
  • Review
    RIDM 2021: Act local, think global
    Pignato, Justine (2022) , S. 351-359
  • Review
    Monument Palimpsest: Excavating the visions of the empire
    Miranda, Madalena (2022) , S. 385-393
  • Article
  • Article
    Synced
    Binotto, Johannes (2022) , S. 304-308
  • Review
  • Article
    All the Rumors Are True
    Baer, Nicholas W.; Hennefeld, Maggie (2022) , S. 5-17
    This introduction surveys the field of critical scholarship on rumors and gossip, making a case for their epistemological relevance in today’s global mediascape. While we take seriously the democratising potential of rumors and gossip as alternative forms of knowledge that empower minoritised voices, we also engage with the more sinister connotations of unverified beliefs and claims in the post-truth era. From feminist whisper networks and queer fabulations to virally proliferating misinformation, fake news, and conspiracies, we assess rumors and gossip across the vast landscape of contemporary media while previewing the essays and roundtable discussion featured in this special issue.
  • Review
  • Article
    Le Plaisir: Voices and viewpoints
    Gibbs, John; Pye, Douglas (2022) , S. 315-318
  • Article
    The machine that makes gossip: Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Marcel Duchamp
    Ahern, Mal (2022) , S. 88-110
    This essay positions Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests alongside a range of rumors about their production. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and photographic documentation, I reconstruct the proliferation of gossip surrounding the 1966 shoot of Marcel Duchamp. The rumors that circulated about this event – namely, that Warhol persuaded a young woman to caress Duchamp flirtatiously just out of frame – eventually made it into the ‘official’ historical record, appearing in popular biography and museum exhibition texts. Rather than asserting what truly happened during the making of this film, my analysis instead focuses on the reasons this rumor seemed credible. The minimal form of the Screen Tests, along with the casual terms of production and exhibition in Warhol’s Factory studio, encouraged the proliferation of unverifiable discourse about them. Using the Duchamp film as an example, I argue that we can view the Screen Tests as a body of work that generates and sustains gossip.
  • Article
    Editorial NECSUS
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2022) , S. 1-3
  • Article
    Inhabited stories: An enactive media archaeology of virtual reality storytelling
    Gatti, Giuseppe (2022) , S. 231-257
    What makes a story designed for (and experienced via) real or imaginary VR systems so different from other stories and storyworlds? Through an enactivist perspective on media archaeology, I will address the issue by discussing the notion of virtual reality storytelling (VRS) as the art of crafting ‘inhabited stories’ and a discursive frame where VR narrativity has been articulated. In fact, narratives of and for VR identify a recurring discourse, or ‘topos’, that circulated from medium to medium during Western media history. After discussing theoretical notions such as that of ‘virtual reality’, ‘storyworld’, and ‘presence’, I will address the historical and cognitive relationship between VR space design and narrative of environmental storytelling by exploring different examples from peep media tradition, gaming, and VR cinema. Second, I will propose a media archaeology of ‘human enhancement’, a recursive topos in real and imaginary VR and haptic technologies. In doing so, I will highlight some recurring narrative strategies at the basis of VRS: the illusion of non-narration, i.e. the ability to direct the story-making activity of the virtual user without his/her awareness; the craftsmanship of paths of ‘attentional matching’ made of haptic responses and spatialised stories; and the design of new senses which can disclose enhanced processes of world- and story-making.
  • Article
    Screen decorum: Silent Hollywood and neoclassical concepts of acting
    Galili, Doron (2022) , S. 285-301
    This article revisits the debates around the notion of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ in order to call attention to how various traits of neoclassical aesthetics characterised discourses on film acting in American cinema of the silent era. Drawing on a host of film acting manuals, how-to guidebooks, magazine advice columns, and interviews with actors from the 1910s and 1920s, the article demonstrates that besides film’s indebtedness to melodrama, pantomime, and other contemporary theatrical practices, variants of neoclassical aesthetic ideas came to play an important role in informing how silent-era Hollywood reflected on ideal forms of screen acting. By placing the early discussions on silent film acting in the context of the American renewed interest in the classics during the early twentieth century, the article makes a case for the importance of classical ideas in Hollywood cinema, alongside – and indeed often in conflict with – the prominent demand for realism.
  • Article
    ‘I’m not a racist . . . but’: Conservative media and the plasticities of color-blind racism
    Krzych, Scott (2022) , S. 150-168
    This essay examines the role of color-blind racism and rumors in contemporary political media, especially as racial rumors circulate in right-wing political discourse and on the conservative cable news network Fox News. Analysing a variety of examples in which rumors proliferate and contribute to the policing of communities of color, the article surveys Catherine Malabou’s deconstruction of self-sovereignty, treating Malabou’s work as a useful theoretical supplement to relevant critiques of systemic racism as developed by scholars working in Black studies and critical race theory. Ultimately, the article argues that the emphasis on representation alone in media studies is inadequate to the study of race, rumor, and political media.
  • Article
  • Article
    Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s ‘Undine’
    Nguyen, Mai; Greenhill, Pauline (2022) , S. 211-230
    We examine uses of sound in German director Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020), based on the story of a water sprite who marries a human and acquires a soul. We employ the concepts of ‘acousmatic sound’ and ‘the acousmêtre’ to suggest that the film’s uncanny soundscape invites a mode of listening that challenges and transforms habitual perception. While Undine largely adheres to cinematic realism, its sound design evokes intrusion by the preternatural and fantastical. By auditory allusions to the mysterious and uncanny, Undine asserts the significance of fairy tales and storytelling for perceiving and understanding reality and for imagining alternatives.
  • Article
    Anger management, or the dream of a falsifiable film-historical past
    Anderson, Mark Lynn (2022) , S. 67-87
    The so-called ‘historical turn’ in Anglo-American film studies during the 1980s was an attempt to permanently derail what many influential scholars saw as the excesses of unfalsifiable theory. This widespread disciplinary intervention had the additional and relatively successful aim of delegitimising almost all previous published histories of Hollywood as prejudiced, unresearched, and, most damning of all, based on the repetition of popular legends and hearsay. Yet one such history has remained astonishingly useful to the successive iterations of the ‘new film history’, useful to the point of seeming indispensable for various scholarly and popular projects of correcting the historical record: Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. This essay takes Anger’s film-historical practice seriously as an enduring challenge to both historicism and historical positivism because of its queer powers of attraction that have established beyond any doubt that deviance, in its various modes and permutations, is inexorably part of Hollywood’s story. The repeated returns to Anger by present-day film historians, constituting a reception history of Hollywood Babylon, demonstrate how the logics of hetero- and homonormative salvation continue to underwrite our current historiography of early Hollywood.
  • Article
  • Article
    Truth and truths-to-come: Investigating viral rumors in ‘Q: Into the Storm’
    Pastel, Renée; Dalebout, Michael (2022) , S. 128-149
    This article interrogates how Q: Into the Storm (HBO, 2021) pursues the conspiratorial thinking of QAnon adherents in two ways: first, as an investigative docuseries into the world of rumors, mapping the phenomenon for a wider audience, and second, as filmmaker Cullen Hoback’s entrance into QAnon as an alternative reality game (ARG), interacting with the sociotechnical network underpinning it. Both modes train viewers to anticipate truths-to-come, key to enjoying both media forms. Taking rumor-tellers seriously, Hoback intervenes in QAnon’s effects while indulging viewers’ prurient interest in the conspiratorial logic the series characterises as socially harmful. Considered in light of Bernard Stiegler’s concerns about the contemporary industrialisation of consciousness, the series fails as a consciousness-raising endeavor. We view Storm ambivalently as both an effective usurpation of such thinking and a reinstantiation of it.
  • Article