2021/1 - #Solidarity

Browsing 2021/1 - #Solidarity by Title

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  • Review
  • Article
    Co-creation as im/mediate/d caring and sharing in times of crises: Reflections on collaborative interactive documentary as an agile response to community needs
    Gaudenzi, Sandra; Kermanchi, Jasmin; Wiehl, Anna (2021-05-24)
    During the COVID-19 lockdown the community experimented with alternative forms of doing documentary, e.g. social media ini-tiatives with a documentary impetus and collaborative web projects. Apart from the participants’ urge to document and share their ex-periences in unprecedented times, these platforms were created to feel connected and to self-reflexively cope with a confined lifestyle. This article takes the Corona Haikus project as a case study to discuss co-creation as a form of care. As a way for ‘im/mediate/d caring and sharing’ the project goes beyond the mere act of documenting but combines creativity with connectivity and connectiveness.
  • Review
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    Desktop documentary: From artefact to artist(ic) emotions
    Kiss, Miklós (2021-05-16)
    One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop docu-mentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explana-torily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performa-tivity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
  • Article
    Editorial NECSUS
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2021-06-08)
  • Article
    Gentrification by genre? The Berlin rom-com
    Wilkins, Kim (2021-05-24)
    Over the past few decades, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people relocating to Berlin. This influx is most of-ten viewed as a response to rebranding the reunified German capi-tal as a creative city – a tactic that foregrounded Berlin’s longstand-ing reputation for cheap rent, liberal attitudes, artistic culture, and vibrant nightlife. The housing market responded as vacancies plummeted while rent prices skyrocketed. Alongside the widely lamented changing face of the reunified capital, the spike in rent prices is one tangible outcome of Berlin’s rapid gentrification. This essay examines the aesthetics of gentrifying Berlin through an ex-amination of a genre commonly associated with the imperatives of gentrification: the romantic comedy. Unlike other cinema tradi-tions associated with urban space, the romcom is commonly un-derstood as a genre that frames the city as a site of aspirational af-fluence and consumerism. This framing has, to date, overwhelm-ingly referred to romcoms produced in the American context. Through analyses of three romcoms set in Berlin – Germany’s highest grossing romcom to date KEINOHRHASEN (‘Rabbit With-out Ears’, Schweiger, 2007); the 2019 installment in Emmanuel Benbihy’s ‘City of Love’ anthology film series, BERLIN, I LOVE YOU and Doris Dörrie’s GLÜCK (‘Bliss’, 2012) this essay interro-gates whether romcoms set in Berlin can be, as has been claimed of their US counterparts, understood as a genre of gentrification.
  • Review
    The Human Rights Film Network: Festival resilience in the time of Covid-19
    Grassilli, Mariagiulia; Colta, Alexandra-Maria (2021-06-08)
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    Live-streaming for frontline and distant witnessing: A case study exploring mediated human rights experience, immersive witnessing, action, and solidarity in the Mobil-Eyes Us project
    Gregory, Sam (2021-06-06)
    Rhetoric around live-streaming and immersive media and tech-nologies often focus on their ability to mobilise solidarity. Mobil-Eyes Us (2016-19) was a project focused on live-streamed witness-ing and meaningful solidarity in collaboration between the human rights organisation WITNESS and favela-based activists in Brazil. Contextualised in human rights witnessing and live-streaming re-search, this paper analyses usages of live-streams for human rights and learnings around the relationship between frontline and dis-tant witnesses. It discusses how relevant and structured live-streamed experiences as well as opportunities for action move viewers to appropriate solidarity. Data included over 100 live-streams by frontline witnesses, as well as project experimentation with content and strategies. Key research questions focused on more equitable relationships of ‘mediating distant suffering’ and asserting the agency of frontline community journalists and activ-ists, and on strategies for confronting patterns of denial that rights violations were occurring or patterns of audiences joining only for live-streamed violence. Understanding livestreaming also as a form of immersive witnessing, the project focused on avoiding perpetuating voyeuristic ‘improper distance’ between viewers and the streamers or neglecting intra-community participants joining via live-stream. The paper assesses how curation and intentional narrative arcs rather than singular events or a reliance on sponta-neity and simultaneity, as well as the inclusion of experiences of ordinary life and joy, help facilitate connection and solidarity. Fi-nally, it notes challenges encountered managing live-streamed simultaneity with escalating risks, and the opportunities for further research into co-present witnessing in new media formats.
  • Article
    Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare
    Wiens, Brianna; MacDonald, Shana (2021-06-05)
    This article argues that one of the many ways that white supremacy functions within digital culture is to obscure the realities of social inequity via neoliberal dictums for self-improvement and individ-ualist calls to live our ‘best lives’. For decades Black feminists have been advocating for self-care as preservation and community building. This article highlights the need for self-care to return to its roots in Black feminism and to distinguish itself from popular feminist enactments of self-care. To do so, we critically analyse ex-amples of postfeminist enactments of #selfcare on Instagram to highlight how they exacerbate societal inequities. We first explore the relationship between #selfcare and Instagram itself, outlining the effects of Instagram’s affordances on its users to demonstrate how both users and the platform shape each other. Next, we inter-rogate #selfcare as a space of #solidarity, arguing that current itera-tions privilege white upper-class frameworks that benefit from various oppressions. Last, we closely analyse The Nap Ministry, an Instagram account that highlights Black feminist self-care princi-ples that intervene into prevailing white frameworks and, in doing so, co-opts the platform affordances of Instagram to model forms of action and offer frameworks we need for the present. In sum, this article suggests that genuine #solidarity through #selfcare must decenter whiteness and take up a more intersectional feminist lens.
  • Article
    Narrating the 'Eternal City' in LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (2013)
    Trifonova, Temenuga (2021-05-16)
    Early city films undermined the association of the city with social and technological progress by showing what Siegfried Kracauer termed ‘a hidden modernity’ – a spatial mapping of social/ideological structures and values that provided a critique of modernity precisely though focusing on its ‘surface’ aspects. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘pedestrian speech acts’ this essay explores the ways in which Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and Sorrentino’s homage LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (2013) – both of which paint a picture of a decadent society, the consumer society emerging in Italy during the postwar economic boom, and a morally decadent neoliberal Italy – ‘narrate’ the Eternal City through their flâneur protagonists, in order to illuminate the two filmmakers’ different critical engagement with history and with Rome’s ‘decadence’.emporary interdisciplinary methodologies in the humanities, from.
  • Review
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    Queering film festival studies
    Berry, Chris (2021-05-16)
  • Article
    Sensations and solidarity: Affect, ambience, and politics in digital literary narratives
    Khilnani, Shweta (2021-06-05)
    This article studies the literary, affective, and political possibilities generated by digital literary micro-narratives published on Terri-bly Tiny Tales, a popular micro-blogging platform in India. More specifically, it will study the narratives which relate to the theme of gender politics, rape culture, patriarchy, misogyny, etc. within the contextual framework of a change in the nature of public discourse in Indian digital spaces after the brutal rape and murder of a young resident of New Delhi in 2012. This article argues that the peculiar digital and affective poetics of micro-narratives combined with their modality of circulation and the infrastructure of digital media platforms produces a form of ambient politics, characterised by its sensory and mundane qualities.
  • Article
    Shot and never seen again: Videotapes as waste and merchandise in post-socialist Romania
    Larcher, Jonathan (2021-06-08)
    What if videotapes were considered as either waste or commodity – to be forgotten, or sold and reused and re-recorded? This is the question raised by this text, which gives an account of a multi-sited ethnographic project that follows the human and material circulation of amateur analogue video technologies in Romania since the mid-1980s. At the intersection of anthropology and media archaeology, this text aims to show how videotapes have been an important part of a post-socialist Romanian media infrastructure, that distributed pirated media, home movies, and local television productions.
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    Tokyo drifters: The negotiation and regulation of generational precarity in TERRACE HOUSE
    Mercier, Faye (2021-05-16)
    As reality television has shifted steadily in the direction of scandal, drama, and high-stakes emotionality, the Japanese reality series TERRACE HOUSE is notable precisely because of the ordinariness of its content; hinging on the observation of young working individuals as they live together and get to know one another. This article aims to explore the significance of this series, particularly in terms of the growing precarity of younger generations in Japan, demonstrating how TERRACE HOUSE cultivates a neoliberal subjecthood whose aim is to master the art of precarious living – both for the sake of the individual and the nation.