2013/1 – #Green

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Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2013) , S. 1-3
‘Lively, radiant, lush…’ This is how colour authority Pantone Inc. describes emerald green (Pantone code 17-5641), the colour of the year for 2013. Welcome to NECSUS #3_Spring 2013 with a special section on ‘Green’. While springtime is normally an ideal season to evoke the greening of nature, our aim in this special section is to present ‘Greenness’ in a broader pallet of media-related issues, from sustainable media production to the use of the colour green in a variety of films. Emerald City comes to mind in THE WIZARD OF OZ (Victor Fleming, 1939), an iconic rendering of a brilliant Technicolor green forever linked with the annus mirabilis of classical Hollywood cinema. More recently, Isabella Rosselini made it clear that we do not just think of a lush, radiant paradise when thinking about the colour green. In GREEN PORNO (2008-present), a series of short environmental films distributed online (YouTube) and made in the spirit of George Méliès, Rosselini playfully performs as an earthworm, a firefly, a whale, and a shrimp as she guides us through the fascinating (and hilarious) variations on animal reproduction while raising critical awareness of the eco-systems of the earth. ‘Green’ has many connotations. What we offer in the special section of this new issue of NECSUS is a full spectrum of ‘green’ concerns, including a series of explorations of the many different ways in which media and ecology are entangled in our world today, fully acknowledging that media users and the media themselves are in many ways actors against nature on a planetary scale.
Go east by southeast – 13th Festival of Central and Eastern European Film Wiesbaden
de Cuir Jr, Greg (2013) , S. 274-280
The Festival of Central and Eastern European Film Wiesbaden, also known as ‘goEast’, is a key event on the German film festival calendar. This is perhaps in no small part due to the fact that the festival is organised by the Deutsches Filminstitut, also because it enjoys a dedicated following among enthusiasts of the larger, general festival community. GoEast is structured by a modestly-sized feature film competition section which also includes documentaries. The total number of titles in this section in 2013 was 17. There are a number of smaller special programs at the festival, including a retrospective homage to a master cineaste and a multi-part symposium.
Greenface – Exploring green skin in contemporary Hollywood cinema
Hammond, Brady (2013) , S. 213-232
In the natural world human skin color has a limited range of pigments varying from dark brown to light pink. Still, even this small spectrum has been enough to fuel countless histories of prejudice where skin color has provided the justification for hate and violence. In the Western world where whiteness is presented as the norm this has often manifested itself as prejudice against those who are not white. However, given the primacy of whiteness in certain cultures authors such as Richard Dyer have argued that whiteness itself is invisible and is thus itself not perceived as a color. This invisibility has led others to develop further theories regarding color in visual media. For instance, in CHROMOPHOBIA David Batchelor states that ‘color has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture’. This prejudice, he argues, manifests itself by either dismissing color outright as ‘superficial’ or by denigrating it and ‘[making it] out to be the property of some “foreign” body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological’. In this formulation white is safe and color is dangerous. Throughout color cinema in the 20th century there have been numerous instances which illustrate this point.
Painting the town green – From urban teleology to urban ecology in New York cinema, 1960-present
Fletcher, Brady; Rankin, Cortland (2013) , S. 113-144
New York City is perhaps the most iconic manifestation of urbanity in the 20th century. While the Manhattan skyline dominates the New York imaginary American cinema has also consistently qualified and complicated this architecturally-determined perspective by re-imagining the city in ecological terms. Over the past half-century many films set and largely produced in New York have deployed the imagery and metaphoricity of ecology to articulate urbanity, although in two distinct ways. We begin by tracing what we call an ‘urban teleology’ in which filmmakers re-envision the city in terms of the environmental conceits of wilderness and garden but from ideologically normative perspectives that privilege the managed urban sphere as the epitome of sociality. In contrast to this teleological model are cinematic experimentations that ‘re-inhabit’ urban space by foregrounding New York’s ‘urban ecology’. As such the second part of our article is concerned with how certain modes of cinema can re-orient or ‘queer’ notions of urbanity through the critical lens of ecology, thus cinematically ‘greening’ the city.
Screen dynamics – Mapping the borders of cinema
Brydon, Lavinia (2013) , S. 262-267
As the title of Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler’s edited collection SCREEN DYNAMICS: MAPPING THE BORDER OF CINEMA (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2012) suggests, this volume provides an energetic, enthusiastic, and engaging journey through the particularities (and peculiarities) of cinema. Due attention is given to questions of cinematic spectatorship, the issue of cinema’s specificity, the relationship between the cinematic image and other screen images, as well as the impact that new technologies have on these images. Appropriate to the ‘volatile situation’ (p. 6) under discussion is the lively approach adopted by each of the 12 contributors. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that this collection is largely based on talks given at a conference in 2010, with the vigour and value of that initial debate nicely evidenced through shared beliefs, overlapping concerns, and recurring points of reference (for example, the concept of cinema as a utopian or heterotopian space appears several times).

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