2018/2 – #Mapping

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NECSUS Editorial
NECSUS Editorial Board (2018) , S. 1-2
Earth networks: ‘The Human Surge’ and cognitive mapping
de Luca, Tiago (2018) , S. 121-140
This article explores the way in which the global can be imagined in the cinema by taking up the concept of cognitive mapping as proposed by Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. It contends that the totalising remit of the concept offers an especially productive avenue through which to assess how the world has been mapped out in contemporary genres as disparate as the global network film and the world symphony. In particular, the article proposes that the film THE HUMAN SURGE (2016), by the Argentinean Eduardo Williams, updates an aesthetics of cognitive mapping in revealing ways – one that is as attuned to the phenomenology of lived experience and the topology of an elusive world system as it is to the earth as both the ground and planet we share with other human and nonhuman beings.
Digital maps and fan discourse: Moving between heuristics and interpretation
Boni, Marta (2018) , S. 141-160
When considering media from the point of view of their ‘impulse’ to map the world, cartography emerges as a dynamic concept. Often compared to the moving image, it is a flexible and ever-evolving gesture. Maps are therefore forms of knowledge, linked to connections between the body, emotions, and space. Apparently opposite to this impulse are GIS tools that can be used to map the mass of a media world, in a landscape of media spreadability, also highlighting the relevance of affects and fragile components of media. Focusing on a map’s capacity to make nodes visible, and paying particular attention to the digital space and world building practices, in this article I will consider the case of geolocalising fan discourses, in order to study the specificities of cartography as a tool for film and television studies in the digital era.
Embodied cartographies of the unscene: A feminist approach to (geo)visualising film and television production
Sharp, Laura (2018) , S. 161-181
As cinema scholars continue turning to cartography and GIS to uncover new dimensions of an old media, they risk repeating the static and top-down approach to maps castigated by feminist and poststructural geographers since the 1990s. Here, I propose that cinematic cartographers strive to bring contradictory positionalities to bear on the cinematic map, a cyborg epistemology that privileges neither the view from above or the view from below. To demonstrate this approach, I detail my own methodology and techniques using GPS tracking and ESRI Story Maps to explore the daily activities of a film location scout in Los Angeles, California.
Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations
Remy, Lola (2018) , S. 183-203
This essay looks at indigenous mapping initiatives from the prism of documentary cinema and its activist potential. It starts from the assumption that critical geographers as well as film studies scholars have seldom focused on cinematic cartography in relation to indigenous land claims. Whether funded by national institutions, or individual initiatives of Indigenous artists, moving images – and animation in particular – are means to historicise and complicate the notions of borders and land ownership. The essay is two-fold: focusing first on the reappropriations and subversion of official state maps by Indigenous films; then on alternatives to Western cartographic representations, using cognitive mapping to formulate a more embodied conception of space and the land.
Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II
Wickberg, Adam (2018) , S. 205-227
This article studies the mapping of American natureculture in early Spanish colonial history by focusing on the critical aspects of media and anthropogenic altering of natural habitats as a discursive practice. The case of Francisco Hernández, General Physician of The Indies and director of the first scientific expedition 1570-1577, provides the base for a critical discussion of the onto-epistemology of the mapping impulse in early modern media. Hernández was sent out by Philip II to produce a natural history of the new world which resulted in over 20 volumes of text and illustrations. He also sent back a large number of plants and animals across the Atlantic. Simultaneously, the cosmographers at the Casa de Contratación in Seville were working on the same mapping project from a distance, using surveys to gather quantified data known as Relaciones geográficas. The decade of 1570-1580 in particular saw an intense activity of media practices of mapping the new world under the rule of Philip II, who became known as the paper king. He adopted the motto ‘Plus ultra’, meaning ‘further still’ in Latin, as an emblem of his transatlantic empire that came to reach over to the Pacific and the Philippines. The article draws on recent developments of media theory and environmental humanities and discusses how the colonial enterprise processed the geobotanical intervention associated with resource exploitation. It analyses the process, storage, and transmission of information and its material underpinnings and also draws on discussions of coloniality.
Media mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story
Walker, Janet (2018) , S. 229-251
Written from the perspective of spatial media and ecomedia studies and influenced by human geography, critical cartography, and critical environmental justice, this article nominates the situated film as such, identifies its kinship with other geolocational media (from historical maps to aerial scans), and demonstrates how these media together co-constitute the environments they may seem only to sense, scan, photograph, map, mark, snake through, or hover over. Taking mapping as generative, the article experiments with fieldwork practice and a cartographic analytic to deepen our understanding of the ‘production of space’ as social, positional, material, and mediated. Objects of analysis include: written and photographic evidence of the production locations of LOUISIANA STORY (Robert Flaherty, 1948) and BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Benh Zeitlin, 2012), historical maps for oil and gas prospecting in the same area, and satellite and kite and balloon mapping in the aftermath of the BP oil spill of 2010. Benefiting from the knowledge of local interlocutors, the article particularises the entanglement of film and media with oil infrastructures on the Louisiana Gulf Coast of the United States, the mutuality of their ardent forces, the losses these formations have induced, and the need for treading lightly in this exquisite landscape.
The playfulness of Ingmar Bergman: Screenwriting from notebooks to screenplays
Rossholm, Anna Sofia (2018) , S. 23-42
This article discusses the creative playfulness in the screenwriting process of Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking. The process of writing, from notes and drafts to finished screenplays, is examined from the perspective of genetic criticism in combination with perspectives on screenwriting as intermediate process across media and in stages. In this study, the notion of play refers both to Bergman’s method of creative writing and the playful dimension of the finished artwork, i.e. the films and screenplays. Play is understood in terms of transgression of fiction and the real on various levels. Most importantly, the study focuses on play in the ambivalence of agency in Bergman’s notebooks – that is transgressions between author, narrator, and character – that continues in the aesthetics of self-reflexivity and auto-fiction in the screenplays and in the films. The Ingmar Bergman archives, where the notes and screenplay drafts are collected and digitised, allow such an examination of the writing process. The archive consists of the donation of Bergman’s personal collection of notes, drafts, letters, and other documents – personal and professional – from his early career in the 1930s until the last productions in the early 2000s, across media and art forms.
A brief study of film festivals in Mexico: Consumption and historical evolution 2010-2016
Bañuelos, Jacob; Olmedo, Juan (2018) , S. 253-262
The Dutch film festival landscape: A walk-through
van Vliet, Harry (2018) , S. 263-272
Evidentiary aesthetics: Landscapes of violence at RIDM 2017
Smith, Patrick B. (2018) , S. 273-279
Codes of conflux: Collaborations between human and computer in MoMa’s ‘Thinking Machines’
Goldsmith, Leo (2018) , S. 281-287
Nothing stable under heaven at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Muchnick, Justin Ross (2018) , S. 289-299
Early cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, and film culture today: An interview with Ian Christie on new directions in film history
Hagener, Malte; van den Oever, Annie (2018) , S. 3-21
An interview with Ian Christie, conducted by Annie van den Oever and Malte Hagener, on his career and most important topics of research. The interview focuses mainly on his work on Eisenstein and early cinema. It discusses the diverse paradigms and different approaches that have been shifting over the decades. It also reflects on the changes in film studies since the 1970s.
Racial phantasmagoria: The demonisation of the other in Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’
Ramirez, Diego (2018) , S. 301-307
(Re)imagining African independence
Sanchez-Biosca, Vicente (2018) , S. 309-314
Form and feeling: Kinaesthetic Knowing / Artificial Darkness
Watter, Seth Barry (2018) , S. 315-322
Videographic scene analyses, part 2
Kiss, Miklós (2018) , S. 323-330
As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism. I aimed to inspire the making of videographic works that provide ‘straightforward close analyses of specific scenes of movies – […] focused, analytical, exploratory, and explanatory analyses that take advantage of the novel affordances of the audiovisual medium to clearly present, prove, and argue for their observations on a particular – perhaps key – moment of a film’. In this second part of the introduction, I delve into the components of my curating idea that have proven to be more problematic in providing clear guidelines to the invited contributors. These are the requirements of producing ‘autonomous’ and ‘scholarly’ videos.
Handmade films and artist-run labs: The chemical sites of film’s counterculture
Catanese, Rossella; Parikka, Jussi (2018) , S. 43-63
This article addresses handmade films and artist-run labs in particular as sites of hands-on film culture that reactivate moments and materials from media history. Drawing on existing research, discourses, and discussions with contemporary experimental filmmakers affiliated with labs or practicing their work in relation to film lab infrastructure, we focus on these sites of creation, preservation, and circulation of technical knowledge about analog film. But instead of reinforcing the binary of analog vs. digital, we argue that the various material practices from self-made apparatuses to photochemistry and film emulsions are ways of understanding the multiple materials and layered histories that define the post-digital culture of film. This focus links our discussion with some themes in media archaeology (experimental media archaeology as a practice) and to current discussions about labs as arts and humanities infrastructures for collective projects and practice-based methods.
Border crossings: Serial figures and the evolution of media
Denson, Shane; Mayer, Ruth (2018) , S. 65-84
This article identifies an important nexus in the serialised evolution of modern media, which we locate in the plurimedial beings that we term ‘serial figures’. Figures such as Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Fu Manchu, and others migrate across a variety of media, in the process becoming self-reflexive border-crossers that document the ongoing evolution of media. Ultimately, serial figures do more than simply thematise the formal logics of serialised media; they also enact, embody, and problematise the industrial and political logics of seriality that become pervasive in a globalising world.

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