2012/2 – #Tangibility

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The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival – Seeking the social in the virtual
Dillard, Sarah (2012) , S. 305-312
There are 11 days in September when the world’s cinematic community turns to Canada for the glitz and glamour of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The streets are flooded with both lay and professional attendees taking in movies, meetings, and the charms of this North American metropolis. However, while there are thousands of people attending the festival, they are a small portion of the millions of people who can now access the glamour of the festival through countless virtual venues online. Whether it is a popular media outlet that posts reviews and tweets headlines to its followers or an individual film fan who posts a picture of himself on the red carpet for all his friends and family to envy, online platforms and social media have had a major impact on festival structure and experience.
‘The Angels’ Share’ at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival
Archibald, David (2012) , S. 299-305
Subverting the usual touristic signifiers of Scottishness – tartanry, whisky, and so on – THE ANGELS‘ SHARE (Loach, 2012) follows four young people from Glasgow’s impoverished East End as they embark on what might be considered a victimless crime in the north of Scotland. Predominantly comic in tone, the film was shot in 2011 and received its world premiere at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. I attended the festival as part of a research project tracking the film’s journey from initial concept and screenplay through the production process and into exhibition, distribution, and reception.
Beyond cognitive estrangement – The future of science fiction cinema
Zepke, Stephen (2012) , S. 91-113
Science fiction is about the future. This is an obvious thing to say, though its obviousness conceals a debate that has perhaps not yet taken place – a debate over the nature of this future. Science fiction generally takes the future to be self-evident; the future is ‘the day after tomorrow,’ or another day more distant, but in any case a day on which the human struggle continues. As we will see, science fiction futures in this sense express our utopian hopes and dystopian nightmares, distilling in often spectacular visions what we see as best and worst about our present.
Cinema and experience – Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno
Hagener, Malte (2012) , S. 333-337
I first encountered the work of Miriam Hansen as a graduate student in the mid-1990s when her book BABEL AND BABYLON was the talk of the (at that time still fairly modest) film studies town – even though it was sitting somewhat uneasily on the fence. In fact, it was this position beyond the canonical that made the book so attractive in the first place. It did not fit into the raging debate of that time between psychosemiotics and neo-formalism, nor did it offer the (often too schematic and naive) way out within the cultural studies paradigm of empowering the individual or sub-culturally constituted groups.
Early cinema’s touch(able) screens – From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou
Strauven, Wanda (2012) , S. 155-176
Last spring a ‘magic moment’ happened at an afternoon screening of Martin Scorsese’s 3D film HUGO (2011). When the end credits were scrolling across the huge screen-wall and the audience was leaving the auditorium, a little girl ran to the front. At first a bit hesitant, she reached up and touched the screen. Then she ran to her father who was waiting for her back at the entrance. Is this the ‘return of the rube in the digital age’, Malte Hagener wondered when he posted the anecdote on Facebook? Why did this little girl want to touch the screen? Was it indeed to find out ‘the location of the images’, as Hagener suggests?
Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2012) , S. 1-3
In the second part of the much celebrated recent novel 2666 (Roberto Bolaño, 2004), a Chilean philosopher with an Italian surname teaching in a Northern Mexico university unexpectedly finds a book in his library: Testamento geométrico, a treatise on geometry written by a poet named Rafael Dieste. Amalfitano (the name of the philosopher) cannot recall having bought or borrowed the mysterious book. This presence deeply unsettles him, and he finds relief through a rather Duchampian gesture: he hangs the volume on a line in his backyard, exposing the treatise and its linear speculation to the action of the weather.
European nightmares – Horror cinema in Europe since 1945
Di Chiara, Francesco (2012) , S. 328-333
Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley’s edited collection EUROPEAN NIGHTMARES: HORROR CINEMA IN EUROPE SINCE 1945 (New York-Chichester: Columbia University Press/Wallflower Press, 2012) is a book with roots that go back to a conference organised by the editors at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2006. As Allmer, Brick, and Huxley state in their introduction, horror films produced in Europe during the past decade have proven to be very popular and successful at the box office, while at the same time the horror genre has become a flourishing field of investigation. Although a number of books have been published about the Hollywood horror film or about specific national cinemas, a comprehensive analysis of European horror cinema is still lacking. This is the gap that this book intends to fill.
From subject-effect to presence-effect – A deictic approach to the cinematic
Hesselberth, Pepita (2012) , S. 241-267
The late 1990s and first decade of the 21st century saw the release of a number of films that are decidedly self-referential about time and invoke a sophisticated media-literacy on the part of the viewer. In these films past, present, and future are often portrayed as highly mutable domains that can easily be accessed, erased, (re)designed, or modified. Examples include: SOURCE CODE (Duncan Jones, 2011), INCEPTION (Christopher Nolan, 2010), SHERLOCK HOLMES (Guy Ritchie, 2009), NEXT (Lee Tamahori, 2007), DÉJÀ VU (Tony Scott, 2006), THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (Eric Bress; J. Mackye Gruber, 2004), PAYCHECK (John Woo, 2003), ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004), MINORITY REPORT (Steven Spielberg, 2002), DONNIE DARKO (Richard Kelly, 2001), and many more. As theoretical objects, these cases stand out for the ways they deploy their own artistic potential to foreground, articulate, and conjure critical thought about their own temporality and the modes of existence they afford. These films can be called post-classical to the extent that they resist classical modes of cinematic storytelling in favor of what Warren Buckland has called ‘puzzle plots’ – i.e., they are films in which the ‘arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated and perplexing’.
The relocation of cinema
Casetti, Francesco (2012) , S. 5-34
In October 2011, the British artist Tacita Dean presented her work FILM at the Tate Modern in London. Dean’s installation is a film short projected in a continuous loop onto a large screen in a dark space furnished with seats for visitors. The written explication at the entrance to the room draws attention to the presence of all these elements: ‘35mm colour and black and white portrait format anamorphic film with hand tinted sequences, mute, continuous loop, 11 minutes. Large front projection; projection booth; free standing screen; loop system; seating.’ In her article in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins described FILM as ‘pay[ing] homage to a dying medium’. In addition, FILM is undoubtedly an act in defense of film stock – that same film stock which Kodak announced (on 22 June 2009) it would cease to manufacture after 74 years of production, due to a steep decline in sales.

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