2014/1 – #Traces

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Animated maps and the power of the trace
Fidotta, Giuseppe (2014) , S. 267-298
The animated map, a generally overlooked rhetorical device, is questioned throughout this essay as a meaningful and useful case for rethinking the notion of the trace in the analysis of documentary films. Drawing on the debate led by critical cartography since the 1980s the essay discusses the relation between maps, ideology, and propaganda specifically with regard to fascist documentaries made between 1939 and 1942 that are entirely composed with animated maps. Through the notion of the ‘power of the trace’ ‐ the construct warranting the perfect correspondence of image and world ‐ the essay interrogates the misleading use of animated maps in documentary as evidence, informational images, and faithful reproductions of the territory. By looking at the roles played by space, time, materiality, and narrative in animated maps I instead propose an examination of the trace, taking into account the possibilities offered to visual-oriented analysis.
Assembling traces, or the conservation of net art
Dekker, Annet (2014) , S. 171-193
Net art is built and distributed through a complex, intricate, and interrelated system of networks that presents an assemblage of art, technology, politics, and social relations ‐ all merged and related to form a variable entity. In the last decade a discussion on how to conserve net art emerged in museums of contemporary art. Nevertheless, many net art projects from the 1990s have long disappeared ‐ their server payments lapsed, software was not kept up-to-date, or artists felt the concept was no longer appropriate in a changed context. The project mouchette.org is an exception in that the artist has kept the website up and running since it began. In this article I will show that net artworks are inherently assemblages that evolve over time. These works are distributed and ensured by networks of people; their continuation happens through multiple authors and caretakers. All together these actors signify and give meaning to the works. Therefore, instead of thinking of a ‘freeze frame’ the presentation and conservation of net art should focus on variability. This opens up different paths and options, making for conservation strategies akin to assembling traces.
The beauty of the act – Figuring film and the delirious baroque in HOLY MOTORS
Walton, Saige (2014) , S. 245-265
Leos Carax’s metamorphic Holy Motors (2012) has been received as evading conceptual, physical, and cinematic coherence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold and Nicole Brenez’s work on the figural powers of the cinema, this article argues that Carax’s film reprises the aesthetics of a delirious baroque. Re-evaluating the relevance of the baroque for Carax and for cinema, it identifies the delirious baroque as an embodied aesthetics of movement, materiality, and multiplicity as well as vision.
The biennale as a device – 4th Athens Biennale
Fotiadi, Eva (2014) , S. 391-398
Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos
Gilbert, Ana (2014) , S. 359-364
Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Papadimitriou, Lydia (2014) , S. 364-371
The cinema of Béla Tarr – The circle closes
Kiss, Miklós (2014) , S. 337-344
Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2014) , S. 1-3
Empire is out there!? The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film UP
Meinel, Dietmar (2014) , S. 69-87
The animated feature Up (Pete Docter, 2009) tells the story of wilderness explorer Charles Muntz in search of a rare species of bird in the South American valley of Paradise Falls and widower Carl Frederickson hoping to mend the pain of losing his wife by fulfilling their lifelong dream of traveling to the same valley. Both men pursue their fantasies of adventure in South America. I situate this narrative within discourses of imperialism and the Monroe Doctrine. Whereas Charles has usurped Paradise Falls in his zealous decades-long hunt the film offers an alternative to his imperial fixation by portraying the redemptive experience of Carl during his travels. As the latter learns to define adventure as a spiritual endeavor, Carl sheds his imperial obsession and rescues his South American friends from Charles. I argue that Up attempts to critique the damaging effects of imperialism ‐ and by extension the ‘War on Terror’ ‐ through the figure of the fallen hero Charles but disavows the ‘informal’ qualities of U.S. empire embodied by Carl. This disavowal of the informal features of (U.S.) imperialism in Up allows me to explore the persistence of the ‘tenacious grasp’ of U.S. exceptionalism, while the imagery of a queer, transnational community also suggests alteration in the tropes of U.S. imperialism.
Enhanced echoes – Digitisation and new perspectives on film sound
Aalbers, Jasper (2014) , S. 299-317
To say that sound has long been a neglected subject in film studies has become something of a commonplace ‐ yet this is no longer true. Starting in the 1980s with a special edition of the journal Yale French Studies film scholars have increasingly paid attention to a wide range of issues concerning film sound: dialogue, music, effects, sound design, and silent cinema. Surprisingly however, the processes of digitisation that have radically transformed film production, distribution, and exhibition in the last 20 years have hardly been the subject of attention for scholars specialising in film sound. In this article I will argue that the lack of attention to digitisation in film sound theory is a direct result of the fact that the copy vs. representation debate was already more or less settled before digitisation garnered academic interest. I will introduce the metaphor of the ‘enhanced echo’ as a different take on the relationship between an original sound and its representation. More specifically, I will use the metaphor of the echo to allow for a new appreciation of the role of the original sound in the transformative process of film sound recording, distribution, and exhibition.
Fassbinder Frankfurt
Siewert, Senta (2014) , S. 384-390
Globalisation and television formats
Kooijman, Jaap (2014) , S. 319-325
Impossible dreams: EUROPE AND LOVE IN CINEMA
Handyside, Fiona (2014) , S. 344-351
Initiating regional talents – 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival
Velisavljević, Ivan (2014) , S. 371-377
Mapping the rise of the iPhone – Between phones and mobile media
Verstraete, Ginette (2014) , S. 21-41
This article discusses a cluster of specific technologies and practices in the history of the mobile phone in the U.S. and Europe that have been crucial for the success of Apple’s iPhone. It argues that Apple has integrated these developments along three major strategies: all-in-one, customization, and location-awareness. Unraveling these histories and strategies allows us to circumvent the blind spot created by looking at the iPhone solely as a magic object catering to the personal needs of the mobile user. What lies between the object and the subject is a complex assemblage of technologies, actors, and space-bound practices that situate the product and the consumer in an expansive, commodified, and increasingly modulated environment at the heart of which lies the entanglement of user agency and corporate control.
Microphysics of a rationalist utopia – Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary
Mariani, Andrea (2014) , S. 219-243
In 1934, Giuseppe Terragni, the father of Italian architectural Rationalism, planned and directed the renovation work of the city of Como. Retracing this utopian project ‐ definitively withdrawn after some years and never completed ‐ the article points out the singular relationship between the Terragni Studio and the young comrades of the University Fascist Film Club of Como: the ‘Cineguf’. The Cineguf were a complex network of film clubs spread all over the country; they were fostered and equipped by the National Fascist Party in order to create a new generation of filmmakers for the new fascist cinema. In these groups the avant-garde culture of the cine-clubs and the official aesthetic debates about a genuine realism found an original and controversial solution. The focus here is on the short film realised by the Cineguf which was commissioned by the Terragni Studio and financed by the Urban Office of the Municipality: Renovation of the Quarter ‘La Cortesella’. I proceed by taking into account different degrees of conceptualisation of the ‘trace’, presenting a reflection on the complexity of the historiographical operation, including the ways in which the historical traces of these filmmakers’ experience of modernity are identifiable in the text.
The navigational gesture – Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface
Verhoeff, Nanna; Cooley, Heidi Rae (2014) , S. 111-128
The touchscreen interface is a threshold between site-specific data overlays and one’s fingers that touch, swipe, and pinch to access information about one’s surroundings and, in the process, leave traces ‐ fingerprints ‐ on the screen. The navigational ‘gesture’ is central to the process of making meaning in two forms of deictic transaction: the gesture of raising and pointing a mobile device (e.g. in the case of the augmented reality) and the finger’s pressing on the touchscreen (activating data overlays) ‐ both of which require pointing and touching. The former is future-oriented, pointing toward some destination; the latter is past-oriented, accruing not only traces of where one has been but also the residue of touching the screen. Gesture and touch intersect in the tracing-tracking that transpires in the present and that holds both past (‘where I’ve been’) and future (‘where I’m headed’). Extending arguments we have made elsewhere about the way navigation shapes and determines how, today, we understand and perform space, time, and subjectivity, in this article we explore how the navigational gesture as a cultural form is related to a deeper cultural logic of indexicality. We consider the relation between the physical use of the mobile micro screen and the haptic experience that this interaction brings about. We address how various traces produced at the intersection of technology and practice function to inscribe time in space. Ultimately we argue that navigation by means of locative (media) technologies proceeds according to a specifically deictic indexicality that opens onto a layeredness that characterised the mobile present.
Oberhausen: An interview with Lars Henrik Gass
Camporesi, Enrico (2014) , S. 352-359
Past memories for a new future – The 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia
Vannucci, Enrico (2014) , S. 377-383
Poetics and politics of the trace – Notes on surveillance practices through Harun Farocki’s work
De Rosa, Miriam (2014) , S. 129-149
The article presents an interpretation of the discourse of surveillance after its shift from a discipline model to a control one, adopting the notion of the trace as a key concept. In this perspective Harun Farocki’s latest production works as an analytic device used by the author to explore the facets of the contemporary surveillance scenario and to couple it with a reflection on the ontology of the cinematic image. Through the prism of the director’s camera three strategies for thinking surveillance (represent, replicate, sublimate) are discussed, simultaneously suggesting a meta-cinematographic reflection on the filmic image.

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