2012/2 – #Tangibility

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The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival – Seeking the social in the virtual
Dillard, Sarah (2012)
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)
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.
Aporias of the touchscreen – On the promises and perils of a ubiquitous technology
Kaerlein, Timo (2012)
We may debate whether our society is a society of spectacle or of simulation, but, undoubtedly, it is a society of the screen. – Lev Manovich
Beyond cognitive estrangement – The future of science fiction cinema
Zepke, Stephen (2012)
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.
Can you see yourself living here? Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television
Zborowski, James (2012)
As part of her ‘attempt to establish the specificity of contemporary [lifestyle] programmes’ on British television, Charlotte Brunsdon identifies ‘a changing grammar of the close-up’ as an important element of what she argues is a tendency for these programmes to offer melodrama rather than realism. Brunsdon argues that in the preceding ‘hobby’ genre, close-ups are ‘governed by the logic of exposition’ and instruction. However, in more recent programmes, ‘[i]nstead of focusing on operations, the camera focuses on reactions: the climax of GROUND FORCE [BBC, 1998-2005] is the close-up on the face of the garden owner, not the garden’. These close-up ‘reveals’ are a key part of the ‘after’ phase of the ‘before and after’ identified by Rachel Moseley as a constitutive trope of makeover television – a prominent subspecies of contemporary lifestyle programming.
The care for opacity – On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture
Bordeleau, Erik (2012)
A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. – Vladimir Nabokov, TRANSPARENT THINGS
Cinema and experience – Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno
Hagener, Malte (2012)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Exhibition Reviews
Biserna, Elena (2012)
The observer must become a participant, because that is the only way he can have the double experience of being the observer, and being the observed. – Marina Abramović
From subject-effect to presence-effect – A deictic approach to the cinematic
Hesselberth, Pepita (2012)
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 good, the beautiful and the sublime
Behpoor, Bavand (2012)
No…don’t come to me! There is more allure / In waiting with sweet apprehension, fear. / Just while seeking out everything is pure; / It’s nicer when just foreboding is near. – Desanka Maksimovic
The intangible ground – A neurophenomenology of the film experience
D'Aloia, Adriano (2012)
The constitution of a spatial level is simply one means of constituting an integrated world: my body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Investigatory art – Real-time systems and network culture
Shanken, Edward A. (2012)
[A]rtists are ‘deviation amplifying’ systems, or individuals who, because of psychological makeup, are compelled to reveal psychic truths at the expense of the existing societal homeostasis. With increasing aggressiveness, one of the artist’s functions […] is to specify how technology uses us. – Jack Burnham
‘The Last Ray of the Dying Sun’ – Tacita Dean’s commitment to analogue media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM
Smith, Caylin (2012)
Regarding FILM, an installation that took place from 11 October 2011 to 11 March 2012 as part of Tate Modern’s Unilever Series, the artist Tacita Dean remarks that ‘it is a platform for me to say let’s protect film’. Dean’s simple, bold statement will allow me to expand upon the importance of this work and FLOH – her earlier artist’s book of collected photographs – in regard to her crusade to illustrate the importance of analogue film technology. Whereas issues of memory and preservation are heavily articulated throughout Dean’s entire oeuvre, my discussion will be restricted primarily to these works, since they allow great insight into two analogue mediums and how viewers engage with such material.
Material properties of historical film in the digital age
Flückiger, Barbara (2012)
In his landmark study THE VIRTUAL LIFE OF FILM, David N. Rodowick rephrases André Bazin’s famous question ‘what is cinema?’ using the past tense: ‘what was cinema?’ He notes that, paradoxically, film studies is dealing with an object that no longer exists; it ceased existing as an object of study in the 1970s when ‘cinema’ as ‘the projection of a photographically recorded filmstrip in a theatrical setting’ was replaced by various other means of presentation, such as video cassettes and later video discs.
Meeting reports
Kranjc, Maja (2012)
Alternative Film/Video Belgrade began as a festival of Yugoslav alternative film and video production, with the aim to document and define trends in film theory as well as to identify the values and new creative possibilities in the field. The themes of the festival often set a mandate for exploring various aspects of the term ‘alternative’. This term has been included as the name of the festival since its founding in 1982. In this aspect, ‘alternative’ included many kinds of alternative modes – from experimental, art, short, and radical film, to film reflection and other forms.
MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics – Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess
Kustritz, Anne (2012)
Lady Gaga’s rise to fame in the wake of the global financial crisis highlights the contradictions of late late capitalism in both the financial sector and the music industry. Both Gaga and second level economic units like derivatives rely on deferral, parody, and an ever-widening gap between the material and the figurative, the signifier and the signified, the locus of value and the exchange of money. Both thereby also offer the public a hidden opportunity to clearly see the disjuncture between the common belief in capitalism as a natural system and the reality of its social construction.
A multiplied medium – Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions
Stauff, Markus (2012)
In recent research on academic knowledge production there are intimations that a certain fuzziness of the investigated object, even a somewhat vague set of questions, are not the worst starting points for scholarship. These points often lead to exciting insights. This might explain why, for some time now, various academic engagements with television have provoked discussions and created conceptual tools that are of interest to media studies in general. Media studies seems to be a field (fortunately, it still cannot be considered a proper discipline) that is more dependent on the on-going transformations of its main object than other academic areas of inquiry. What constitutes a medium and how different media relate to each other are discussed on a theoretical level, but they are usually defined in relation to the dominant media constellation at hand.

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