2023/2 - #Cycles

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Editorial NECSUS – Autumn 2023_#Cycles
Beugnet, Martine; de Cuir Jr, Greg; Keilbach, Judith; Loist, Skadi; Pape, Toni; Vidal, Belén; Virginás, Andrea (2023) , S. 1-3
Cybernetic subjectivities on a loop: From video feedback to generative AI
Boutet de Monvel, Violaine (2023) , S. 103-126
This paper raises an aesthetic bridge between pioneer video art and current machine learning art through the prism of instant feedback. It reinstates the former’s real-time processual practices as a pertinent origin to reflect on the resolutely looped construction of cybernetic subjectivities. Given the latest developments of artificial intelligence, it infers that these now include technological agency. The article proceeds to compare the room left for human mastery in the recursive operations of both closed-circuit video setups and generative AI models. Taking into account their synthetic power, it ultimately proposes two general definitions of the artist’s creative position within today’s networked landscape.
Rewind, recycle, revive! An investigation into nostalgia-driven sequel and requel practices in small European film industries: The case of Flanders
de Cock, Atalya; Cuelenaere, Eduard; Willems, Gertjan; Joye, Stijn (2023) , S. 127-149
In the last decade, nostalgia-driven imitative filmmaking – characterised by requels and ‘belated’ sequels – has become ubiquitous in commercial cinema globally. While the transgenerational appeal of nostalgia in Hollywood has been researched extensively, smaller European film industries like Flanders remain underexplored in this regard. This article focuses on three case studies to investigate how Flemish nostalgia-driven sequels and requels employ transgenerational nostalgia both within the films and in their marketing endeavours. Compared to Hollywood’s consistent 1980s nostalgia strategy, Flemish cinema employs nostalgia as a short-term commemorative tactic, celebrating Flemish pop culture artefacts of the recent past instead of the past itself.
From still to moving images and vice versa: Analysing technological cycles and the use of AI to study cinema history
Tadeo Fuica, Beatriz; Lezer, Arthur (2023) , S. 150-175
This article explores some possibilities that an artificial intelligence that retrieves objects offers to cinema historians by focusing on the deep exploration of the photogramme. Thus, it reflects on a technological cycle that begins when cinema put the instantaneous photograph into motion – a motion that hid the details that today are easily retrievable with the help of AI that needs to stop this motion to find them. Being able to identify similar objects in photogrammes of films that are part of a corpus, an object retrieval AI allows us to explore how elements from the mise-en-scène can transform the historical understanding of cinema. Our theoretical reflections are put into practice through the analysis of photogrammes containing wheels in a corpus of films conceived by members of the pioneer generation of cinema archivists in correspondence between Europe and Latin America, at the beginning of the 1950s. The ubiquity of wheels allows us to have a general perception of the kind of image that composes our corpus, while it also allows us to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of using an object retrieval AI for writing cinema history.
No more ego-spheres: An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological design
Pape, Toni; Gold, Riley (2023) , S. 16-33
A conversation about ecological design with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. Taking her books The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024) as starting points, we asked Kallipoliti to share her understanding of ecological design and trace the histories of ecological design thinking. In this context, the interview focuses on design projects of the 20th century which sought to create so-called ‘closed worlds’: habitats that could function as closed systems where all material resources are regenerated from recycled waste. In addition to explaining the motivations for these projects, Kallipoliti addresses their practical limitations and the theoretical conclusions we can draw from them. Kallipoliti furthermore reflects on the notions of mediation and scale in design thinking and on the politics of the cycle.
Experimenting in circles: Agfa, amateur cinema, and the art of R&D
De Rosa, Miriam; Mariani, Andrea (2023) , S. 176-195
This article moves from small-gauge film technology manufacturing and experimental film practices to develop a twofold exploration of film and camera conceptually interlinked in a mutual cycle of experimentation. Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi’s city symphonies provide an illustrative example: active in the early 1930s as an independent filmmaker, between 1930 and 1933 he produced five films sponsored by Agfa, which was expanding its market in Italy. Magnaghi’s experimental films were thought to stress the material resistance of cameras (an Agfa Movex 30) and the film stock (Agfa Isopan reverse). The article will shed light on the affordances offered to the filmmaker regarding the film stock’s specificities and the camera involved in the manufacturing process. Such a virtuous cycle connecting manufacturing and creativity is metaphorically reinforced on the level of aesthetics in Magnaghi’s film Symphony of Life and Work (1933), characterised by a reiterated circling camera movement. Inspired by this, we aim to craft a study that assembles the various components of the filmmaker’s work in a rounded film experience, underlining the nature of small-gauge cinema as a non-neutral yet empowering practice able to create a complex room for critical analysis eliciting new ways of looking, problematising, and therefore thinking reality.
A genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival Berlin
Heberer, Feng-Mei (2023) , S. 197-219
The first film festival of its kind in Germany, the Asian Film Festival Berlin (AFFB), was run by multiple generations of Asian German organisers from 2007-2017. In 2020, the festival came to a halt due to lack of resources. The recent disruption of the AFFB leads us back to the festival’s roots in migrant labor organising by South Korean guest workers in 1970s West Germany. This harbinger labor movement sparked by migrant women inspired the creation of two important diasporic Asian grassroots collectives based in Germany, each of which would respectively host the AFFB: the Koreanische Frauengruppe and korientation. To excavate these genealogical connections is to document an interconnected history of community organising that remains overlooked in official postwar history, and that highlights the unique cyclicality of the AFFB as part of ever-evolving minoritarian movements that positively advance documentation, inclusion, and social justice.
Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives
Hanáková, Veronika; Tremčinský, Martin; Anger, Jiří (2023) , S. 220-222
Split Screen as Hermeneutic Tool: Recursivity and Crosstalk in ‘Better Call Saul’
Marañón, Nicolás Medina; Kiss, Miklós (2023) , S. 223-225
Close Circuit
Tripot (2023) , S. 226-229
I foresee that I’m going to have known it
Vorozheikin, Yevhen (2023) , S. 230-233
The Time-Loop as Game Mechanic, Narrative Device and Cycle of Systemic Racism
O’Brien, Daniel (2023) , S. 234-236
Voices from the debris: An interview with Mila Turajlić on unearthing anti-colonial solidarities
Birdsall, Carolyn; Denić, Nadica (2023) , S. 237-253
This interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić discusses her ongoing artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels, which consists of two feature-length films that premiered in 2022, along with performance lectures, installations, exhibitions, research articles, and online content. The interview begins with a discussion of the scopes and aims of the project, which engages with the largely-forgotten collections of Yugoslav Newsreels in Belgrade (Serbia), unearthing the cinematic and political collaborations that were at the heart of the Non-Aligned Movement. The interview further explores the project’s reactivation of the archive and cultural memory, the relationship between politics and cinema, and the continuing importance of a ‘third’ way.
Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster
Escobar, Cristóbal (2023) , S. 254-271
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure ⎯ a Pythagorean theorem ⎯ is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. By mapping this system of relations, I seek to connect the normalising powers of society in the film with the issue of surveillance as developed by both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary modernity and Gilles Deleuze’s subsequent paradigm of information. In a second section, and thinking about the tactics that the film’s characters employ to mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations, I draw on the notion of resistance as an act that defies the city-Law as well as on the politics of love as a reciprocal law that goes beyond any other law; one that remains hidden, or blinded, for characters to see, for as Shakespeare suggests: ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.
Creativity, passion, and community: The rise of India’s transnational producers
Bhatia, Neha (2023) , S. 272-291
Producers are commonly associated with managing finances and budgets, but the work of a producer primarily involves managing emotions and people. They invest emotional labour in the projects, which remains a largely neglected, invisible and hidden aspect of their work. Recent scholarship on film and media industries is increasingly paying attention to the lived experiences of media makers, their cultures, and the emotional qualities of their creative work. In this light, this article focuses on the working world of emerging creative producers involved in supporting Indian independent cinema through international film festival funding and co-production schemes transnationally. This article borrows insights from media industry studies and affective scholarship, as well as incorporates in-depth interviews with transnational producers themselves. It examines the producer’s labour and work, involving extensive human interactions, community-building, and emotional management to make it in the industry. In doing so, the producers become entwined in the transnational capitalist film industry.
Accessing film culture and community at the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival
Debinski, Anna (2023) , S. 292-300
#Cycles: On circularity and recursivity in media culture
Pape, Toni (2023) , S. 3-15
This introduction provides three brief conceptual frames for the special section #Cycles: matter, history, and control. A first section on ‘cycles of matter’ problematises recycling discourse and its implications. The second section on ‘cycles of history’ revisits cyclical concepts of history and their contemporary re-evaluation to think about cyclical modes of (over)production. Finally, the section on ‘cycles of control’ briefly discusses cybernetic theories of feedback loops. It addresses how systemic processes of corrective feedback loops can lead to so-called cybernetic subjectivities. Each section highlights the contributions that speak to the respective conceptual frame. All contributions to the special section and audiovisual essay section are briefly introduced in the final two sections.
On the habitus of festival-going: Digital anxiety and urban aspects of post-COVID Berlinale
Campos Rabadán, Minerva (2023) , S. 301-310
Inside the archive of feelings: Experiencing Il Cinema Ritrovato
Vidal, Belén (2023) , S. 311-317
A monumental chronicle of ‘The Mother of All Film Festivals’
Iordanova, Dina (2023) , S. 318-325

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