2022/2 - #Materiality
Recent Submissions
- ArticleNECSUS Editorial Autumn 2022NECSUS Editorial Board (2022) , S. 1-4
- ArticlePreserving the now! Mediating memories and archiving experiences in UkraineShumylovych, Bohdan; Makhanets, Oleksandr; Nazaruk, Taras; Otrishchenko, Natalia; Brunow, Dagmar (2022) , S. 126-149Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022. Everyone in the country experienced this and the afterward moments in their own way. All of us have learned what the shock of invasion is, mobilisation and how to resist it, and the steps to be followed during a bombing. We all had to take care of close ones, help strangers, evacuate, and volunteer with transfers, food, and medicine. All these experiences appear in various forms: taking pictures, noting reflections, discussing our feelings and emotions with others, following the news, warfare updates, and air raid alerts. The situation was so dynamic and those experiences were so ephemeral that as academics we found it important to capture the moment. We have developed our capacity and expertise to document such experience as historical and/or legal evidence, but also as a way to withstand the invasion
- ArticleThe past is always changing: An interview with Tom GunningHagener, Malte; van den Oever, Annie (2022) , S. 150-174Tom Gunning is one of the most influential and widely cited film historians in the world with over 150 essays and publications on early cinema, the avant-garde, and film genres. He has published extensively on questions of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture, and on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. In his seminal studies of the ‘cinema of attractions’, the concept he famously proposed, he set a new research agenda for early cinema studies by relating the development of cinema to other forces besides storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, the relation between cinema and technology, and an emerging modern visual culture. Film culture, the avant-garde movements, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism, and the spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work. In this interview, Malte Hagener and Annie van den Oever talk with Gunning about his writing process and his inspirations, the people he considers his mentors (Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, Eileen Bowser, and David Francis), the legendary 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, and the future of film studies.
- ArticleRealism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’Pesch, Katrin (2022) , S. 175-200Grounded in Dakar’s elemental properties as much as manifestations of immaterial and virtual presence, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019) embodies what Thomas Elsaesser has described as a post-photographic realism of world cinema. In this article, I show how Atlantics collapses divisions between the evidentiary and the ghostly within the same realist impulse to create a reparative postcolonial aesthetic. Furthermore, as seen in the lucid depiction of Dakar’s clairvoyant nights, the ontological unrest of the film’s post-photographic realism also happens at the level of image aesthetics.
- ArticleDistant reading televised public information: The communication of Swedish government agencies, 1978- 2020Stjernholm, Emil (2022) , S. 201-225This study focuses on the Swedish public information programme Anslagstavlan, a unique audiovisual communication tool for Swedish government agencies since 1972 and an important part of Sweden’s audiovisual cultural heritage. Whereas digital research methodologies for data-driven text analysis have been developed and established over the last decades, the use of digital tools in the analysis of audiovisual sources has only recently gained increased attention. In this article, automatic speech recognition algorithms are used to extract the speech from a large sample of spoken messages in Anslagstavlan (1978-2020) which are then explored using digital methods for text analysis. The article argues that automatic speech recognition and corpus analysis should be viewed as a useful tool to gain an overview of a larger corpus of audiovisual media and to notice patterns and trends that would not be visible by close reading alone.
- ArticleDani Gal’s cinematic and activist engagements with Israel/Palestine in GermanyZelnick, Sharon (2022) , S. 226-248This essay contributes to current debates about the problematic conflation of support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on the cinematic and activist work of Dani Gal, an Israeli migrant in Berlin. Gal’s film, White City (2018), deals with intersections between memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba by reformatting archival materials – namely, a Nazi propaganda postcard and Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin’s diary – in ways that rethink migrations of architectural aesthetics and racist practices. By upending the expectation to document the past, the photographic stills in White City instead performatively reimagine historical and contemporary predicaments around ethnic discrimination in Germany and Israel/Palestine. By bringing together the proximal victimisation Jews and Palestinians suffered from the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as the linked perpetrator pasts of some Zionists and Nazis, White City inspires us to understand the power of ‘multidirectional memory’ and ‘cocitizenship’ anew.
- ArticleSymbolic misery and digital media: How NFTs reproduce culture industriesBocquillon, Rémy; van Loon, Joost (2022) , S. 24-45This contribution will attempt to propose a critical and philosophical engagement with the discussion around NFTs by focusing on the articulation of materialisms and digital media in artistic practices. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that culture industries led to the formation of a symbolic misery, disrupting aesthetic experience through the creation and imposition of practices of consumption;[2] a process reinforced by the technological reproduction of works of art. In recent years, the discussion around Web 3.0, blockchain technologies, and their implementation through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also reformulates the question of digital reproduction and distribution of works of art.[3] Indeed, in a market dominated by centralised streaming platforms such as Spotify, many artists see in NFTs a way to regain control over their own works and tools, by creating a form of artificial scarcity, mimicking the limited quantity and binding ownership of physical artefacts, as a kind of magical individuation, to paraphrase Simondon.[4] The authors ask to which extent those technologies, although often posited as a liberation from corporate giants, might lead to an exacerbation of the process of proletarianisation which is at the core of Stiegler’s thesis on symbolic misery, even if they are being procured in an ethos of social justice and responsibility, thereby functioning as what Michel Serres called a virtual object.[5] Moreover, it will be argued that by trying to reproduce an artificial idea of scarcity, NFTs also tend to reduce materiality to the object being sold and possessed, consequently reproducing the constitution of ‘art’ as a market, where new practices of consumption and competition are being championed as commodities at the expense of aesthetic experience.
- ArticleThe impersonal essay, or Montage as memory of the worldTorlasco, Domietta (2022) , S. 249-256The audiovisual essay has been conventionally associated with the subjective and the personal. On the other hand, this introduction makes a case for the adoption of an ‘impersonal’ voice or viewpoint as a tactical response to the overvaluation of the self that pervades our current media economy.
- ArticleSong for Earth and FolkSmith, Cauleen (2022) , S. 257-258
- ArticleSecond SightedStratman, Deborah (2022) , S. 259-260
- ArticleParallax DashTorlasco, Domietta (2022) , S. 261-262
- ArticleMost Fabulous PlaceMaamoun, Maha (2022) , S. 263-264
- ArticleGli anniFgaier, Sara (2022) , S. 265-266
- ReviewOn greening film festivals: The environmental impact of film festivals and their future design and operationde Valck, Marijke; Zielinski, Ger (2022) , S. 267-287This roundtable brings together several film festival organisers and scholars to compare notes on the general impact of film festivals on the environment and to anticipate future directions for greening the sector. The event was hosted by The Creative School Catalyst, Toronto Metropolitan University. This is an edited transcript of the roundtable that took place on 13 January 2022 via Zoom.
- ReviewThe post-pandemic festival: Identity, crisis, and curation at Sheffield DocFest 2022Vallejo, Aida; Moore, Andy (2022) , S. 288-300
- ReviewEmbracing hybridity beyond the pandemic: The contrasting cases of PÖFF and SGIFFPapadopoulou Melea, Eleni (2022) , S. 301-309
- ReviewAbsence in CinemaShilina-Conte, Tanya (2022) , S. 310-318
- ReviewHow to Win at Photography: Image-Making and PlayBuse, Peter (2022) , S. 319-326
- ReviewThe Milk Of Dreams, or The Lukewarm Cup That Puts Commons to SleepBaravalle, Marco (2022) , S. 327-339
- ReviewDocumenta Fifteen and Berlin Biennale 12: A comparative reviewMergler, Agata (2022) , S. 340-358