2022/1 - #Rumors
Recent Submissions
- Article#Rumors: A Roundtable Discussion with Mladen Dolar, Richard Dyer, Alexandra Juhasz, Tavia Nyong’o, Marc Siegel, and Patricia TurnerBaer, Nicholas W.; Hennefeld, Maggie (2022)Unverified beliefs and truth-claims have been topics of enduring fascination for scholars of media and culture, gaining renewed urgency with the viral spread of fake news via social media and the bitter attacks on scientific knowledge amid the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. In this roundtable discussion, we gather six distinguished thinkers to help us understand rumors, gossip, and the broader allure and danger of unsubstantiated information. With their wide-ranging expertise, our six panelists address the ramifications of rumors and gossip for queer underground cinema, political allegory, star and celebrity cultures, AIDS and Covid media activism, racialised belief systems, and the status of truth and logos in our time.
- ArticleAgainst the tyranny of the fact: Autofabulation as a queer strategy of resistanceLoiseau, Benoît (2022)Queerness has always had a particularly vexed relationship to evidence. Because the latter has historically served to discipline the former, José Esteban Muñoz suggests that anecdotes can become queer acts of resistance against the ‘potential tyranny of the fact’. Drawing on this argument, this article examines the ways in which American artist, filmmaker, and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz uses autofabulation to destabilise evidential discourses in his performance practice. Specifically, it looks at ‘Some Styles of Masculinity’ (2017-ongoing), a series of anecdotal monologues in which Bordowitz reflects on the formation of his identity as a queer Jewish man living with HIV.
- ArticleAll the Rumors Are TrueBaer, Nicholas W.; Hennefeld, Maggie (2022)This introduction surveys the field of critical scholarship on rumors and gossip, making a case for their epistemological relevance in today’s global mediascape. While we take seriously the democratising potential of rumors and gossip as alternative forms of knowledge that empower minoritised voices, we also engage with the more sinister connotations of unverified beliefs and claims in the post-truth era. From feminist whisper networks and queer fabulations to virally proliferating misinformation, fake news, and conspiracies, we assess rumors and gossip across the vast landscape of contemporary media while previewing the essays and roundtable discussion featured in this special issue.
- ArticleAnger management, or the dream of a falsifiable film-historical pastAnderson, Mark Lynn (2022)The so-called ‘historical turn’ in Anglo-American film studies during the 1980s was an attempt to permanently derail what many influential scholars saw as the excesses of unfalsifiable theory. This widespread disciplinary intervention had the additional and relatively successful aim of delegitimising almost all previous published histories of Hollywood as prejudiced, unresearched, and, most damning of all, based on the repetition of popular legends and hearsay. Yet one such history has remained astonishingly useful to the successive iterations of the ‘new film history’, useful to the point of seeming indispensable for various scholarly and popular projects of correcting the historical record: Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. This essay takes Anger’s film-historical practice seriously as an enduring challenge to both historicism and historical positivism because of its queer powers of attraction that have established beyond any doubt that deviance, in its various modes and permutations, is inexorably part of Hollywood’s story. The repeated returns to Anger by present-day film historians, constituting a reception history of Hollywood Babylon, demonstrate how the logics of hetero- and homonormative salvation continue to underwrite our current historiography of early Hollywood.
- ArticleAnonymous, QAnon, Tik-tok teens, K-pop fansCho, Michelle (2022)This essay examines online rumors concerning K-pop fans’ transitioning group affinity from one of media fandom to one of progressive political organising against white supremacy and police brutality in the US context. Rather than aiming to confirm or debunk these rumors, I instead argue that they are worthy of attention in their own right, as a window into the importance of social media rumor as ‘improvised public opinion’ in today’s media environments. I assert that one particular set of rumors – comparing K-pop fans and Anonymous – promotes timely reflection on anonymity’s affordances for the politics of fandom and processes of knowledge production in transnational media ecosystems. Doing so, I argue, confirms anonymity’s importance toward building solidarity, while also revealing the key epistemological function of rumor on Twitter.
- ArticleEditorial NECSUSNECSUS Editorial Board (2022)
- ReviewEnfin le Cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France 1833-1907Louis, Stéphanie (2022)
- ReviewFilm festivals and market intelligence: From audience surveys to data analytics?Smits, Roderik (2022)
- ArticleGossip’s ephemeral longevity: Power, circulation, and new mediaQualls, Bethany E. (2022)This essay argues that gossip reveals cultural networks that can support a range of functions, whether celebrity visibility, crowd-sourced anonymity, or anti-colonial revolt. Examining gossip through interdisciplinary scholarship in subaltern studies, psychology, literary criticism, media studies, and history, the essay elaborates its imbrication in these cultural networks along with its role in the creation of new media forms. The first part of the essay traces the semantic permutations of ‘gossip’ alongside related terms, elucidating gossip’s function as a network builder and didactic mode via new media. The second part offers a series of non-exhaustive case studies from the 1600s to the present that demonstrate gossip’s role in creating new connected publics, exerting social pressure, providing protection, and offering resistance against established institutions. This transhistorical perspective for considering gossip in relation to print and digital media brings together eighteenth-century periodicals, the #FreeBritney campaign for Britney Spears, the ‘Shitty Media Men’ spreadsheet, and slave revolts. By examining how ‘ephemeral’ gossip creates material outcomes, the essay shows how gossip works while illuminating its contradictory designations of trivial irrelevance and dangerous power.
- ArticleInhabited stories: An enactive media archaeology of virtual reality storytellingGatti, Giuseppe (2022)What makes a story designed for (and experienced via) real or imaginary VR systems so different from other stories and storyworlds? Through an enactivist perspective on media archaeology, I will address the issue by discussing the notion of virtual reality storytelling (VRS) as the art of crafting ‘inhabited stories’ and a discursive frame where VR narrativity has been articulated. In fact, narratives of and for VR identify a recurring discourse, or ‘topos’, that circulated from medium to medium during Western media history. After discussing theoretical notions such as that of ‘virtual reality’, ‘storyworld’, and ‘presence’, I will address the historical and cognitive relationship between VR space design and narrative of environmental storytelling by exploring different examples from peep media tradition, gaming, and VR cinema. Second, I will propose a media archaeology of ‘human enhancement’, a recursive topos in real and imaginary VR and haptic technologies. In doing so, I will highlight some recurring narrative strategies at the basis of VRS: the illusion of non-narration, i.e. the ability to direct the story-making activity of the virtual user without his/her awareness; the craftsmanship of paths of ‘attentional matching’ made of haptic responses and spatialised stories; and the design of new senses which can disclose enhanced processes of world- and story-making.
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- ReviewItineraries of walking and footwear on filmOzgen-Tuncer, Asli (2022)
- ArticleLe Plaisir: Voices and viewpointsGibbs, John; Pye, Douglas (2022)
- ReviewMirror, mirror on the wall: AKS International Minorities Festival Pakistan 2021Chadha, Siddart (2022)
- ReviewMonument Palimpsest: Excavating the visions of the empireMiranda, Madalena (2022)
- ReviewRIDM 2021: Act local, think globalPignato, Justine (2022)
- ArticleScreen decorum: Silent Hollywood and neoclassical concepts of actingGalili, Doron (2022)This article revisits the debates around the notion of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ in order to call attention to how various traits of neoclassical aesthetics characterised discourses on film acting in American cinema of the silent era. Drawing on a host of film acting manuals, how-to guidebooks, magazine advice columns, and interviews with actors from the 1910s and 1920s, the article demonstrates that besides film’s indebtedness to melodrama, pantomime, and other contemporary theatrical practices, variants of neoclassical aesthetic ideas came to play an important role in informing how silent-era Hollywood reflected on ideal forms of screen acting. By placing the early discussions on silent film acting in the context of the American renewed interest in the classics during the early twentieth century, the article makes a case for the importance of classical ideas in Hollywood cinema, alongside – and indeed often in conflict with – the prominent demand for realism.
- ArticleSyncedBinotto, Johannes (2022)
- ArticleThe filmmaker as Instagram auteur: A case study on Claire DenisMurphy, Cáit (2022)In this article I propose further inclusion of auteurs’ Instagram profiles within contemporary auteurism. Examining selected auteur profiles, I trace aesthetic and commercial tendencies. I compare the forms of film and Instagram, connecting this to Lev Manovich’s research and Timothy Corrigan’s ‘commerce of auteurism’. Instagram’s individualism extends Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo theory. My case study is Claire Denis’ profile. I argue that her posts share aspects with her filmic ‘corpus’, like fragmentation and transience. Her profile has thus far expressed an anti-promotional stance, a distinctive design aesthetic, and the highly autobiographical part of her ‘work’ is indicative of Instagram’s authorial potential for filmmakers.