2015/2 – #Vintage
Recent Submissions
- ArticleA note on COMEDY VITTI STYLE (2015)Iannone, Pasquale (2015)
- ArticleA theoretical approach to vintage: From oenology to mediaNiemeyer, Katharina (2015)The term ‘vintage’ is common in our modern-day vocabulary. The concept to which it refers is familiar in the fields of oenology and fashion studies but has also, more recently, appeared in those of media and cultural studies. However, a theoretical and historical exploration of its evolution prior to the 20th century is still missing from much literature. This article is a first attempt to fill this gap by discussing patterns of vintage in contrast to retro and kitsch (notions with which it is often blurred). Vintage and its relationship with nostalgia and media are then analysed as part of the discourses and practices that engage with contemporary obsessions with the past. An examination of historical and more recent vintage patterns also leads us to discuss the uses and production of analogue and digital vintage objects. On a more general level this reflection on vintage within media studies might also be inspiring for other research or professional domains.
- ArticleAgamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of lifeHarbord, Janet (2015)Agamben’s essay on gesture is perhaps his most influential piece of work for film studies, in which he argues that cinema at its inception captures the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures, manifest in a crisis of communicability. Comparing the traces of the gesticulating bodies of Gilles de la Tourette’s patients with those in the proto-cinematic series of photographs taken by Eadward Muybridge, Agamben suggests that these are the twin processes of a biopolitical production of life; respectively, the body as the site of investigation and the exemplary body put to work. Yet the ethico-political implications of Agamben’s essay on gesture and the biopolitical production of life are relatively under-developed. This article pursues not only cinema’s relation to biopolitical capture but also the way in which cinema came to compensate for such a reductive version of corporeality by constructing the concept of an individual located as complex interiority. When gestural communication declines at the close of the 19th century meaning is relocated to the internal space within the human body; commensurate with this production of human interiority as a site of truth, cinema becomes a machine whose task is to decipher the turmoil of the inside, a process reproduced as narrative explication.
- ReviewArab Pop: Whose Gaze is it Anyway?Harvey-Davitt, James (2015)
- ReviewArtists’ Film Biennial, ICA 2014Satchell-Baeza, Sophia (2015)
- ReviewBeautiful Data / The Democratic SurroundHagener, Malte (2015)
- ReviewCinema of the Swimming Pool / Cinema as WeatherO'Brien, Adam (2015)
- ArticleConstruction of a Heist (2014)Lindenberger, Henrike (2015)
- ArticleDeath, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del ReyFetveit, Arild (2015)The obsolescence of analogue media along with a rapid succession of digital formats has sensitised us to the mortality of media. It has also spawned what Dominik Schrey has called ‘a golden age of nostalgia for these allegedly “dead media”’, now explored by visual artists, filmmakers, cinematographers, Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts, Polaroid fans, Instagram users, music video directors and others. Since the mid-1990s a partially-iconoclastic impulse focused on exploring the mortality of media materials has often taken the form of medium-specific noise. However, in recent years alternative strategies that counteract clarity, involving iconoclastic disruptions of the process of mediation, supported by a host of degrading techniques and strategies that thicken and foreground the medium and its materiality, have partially replaced uses of medium-specific noise.
- ArticleDredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of TELEVISUALITYStauff, Markus; Caldwell, John T. (2015)In 1995, John Caldwell’s TELEVISUALITY: STYLE, CRISIS AND AUTHORITY in American Television familiarised media studies with a heterodox methodology, mixing formal analysis and technical insights with work floor knowledge with elaborate theorising. In this interview Caldwell describes how this approach emerged from a conjuncture of practices as different as art school, farm labor, and high theory. Instead of defining the theoretical essence of the medium this combination of approaches allowed for a recursive mapping and drilling of television’s dynamics. Caldwell claims the ‘commercial media industrial systems’ can neither be understood nor effectively criticised with a one-size-fits-all approach; rather, only if we seriously take into account the changing concepts and practices that emerge within these systems. This also requires a pedagogy which does not teach a well-defined model of analysis but rather makes room for collaborative, open-ended research.
- ArticleEditorial NECSUSNECSUS Editorial Board (2015)
- ReviewHollis Frampton's 'other work'Zryd, Michael (2015)
- ArticleLearning from popular genres – with help from the audiovisual essayÁlvarez López, Cristina; Martin, Adrian (2015)
- ArticleLocating vintageKnowles, Kim (2015)Few issues are as pertinent today as the relationship between old and new, past and present, obsolescence and progress. Contemporary culture is increasingly characterised by a heightened awareness of the past through a revaluing of old styles, artifacts, and aesthetics. From vinyl records and super 8 cameras to iPhone apps and second-hand clothes, vintage and retro increasingly permeate our collective conscious. But how can we parse and understand these overlapping practices of looking back? This introductory essay acknowledges the ambiguous terrain of vintage and the blurred distinction between authentic appreciation and stylistic appropriation. It locates the vintage phenomenon within Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, arguing that current artistic engagements with outmoded technology might be seen as productively activating the past in the present and exploring the new in the old. However, the simultaneous explosion of vintage into mainstream consumer habits requires a broad examination of the term in order to draw out its contradictions and complexities.
- ReviewMade in Peru: Lima Film Festival comes of ageBarrow, Sarah (2015)
- ArticleNo time like the past? On the new role of vintage and retro in the magazines SCANDINAVIAN RETRO and RETRO GAMERHandberg, Kristian (2015)The article presents a cultural historical rendition of the terms vintage and retro and how the revival of the recent past based on objects of modern culture is a characteristic feature of late 20th and 21st century culture. In the words of music critic Simon Reynolds, we have entered a state of retromania, where revival has become ubiquitous and has changed the focus from new to old. Retro and vintage has been made accessible to a wider audience and is not delimited to the subcultural sphere. This development is shown and analysed through the case of two monthly magazines: SCANDINAVIAN RETRO (2011-present) and RETRO GAMER (2005-present). On the basis of these specialised retro medialisations the framing of the past through retro and vintage is discussed and suggested as being nurtured by myth and well as materiality.
- ArticleRetro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks backBaschiera, Stefano; Caoduro, Elena (2015)This article explores the definition of ‘vintage cinema’ and specifically re-evaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: faux-vintage, retro and anachronistic; by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism. It furthermore unravels the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).
- ArticleRichard Serra: Sculpture, television, and the status quoSpampinato, Francesco (2015)While he is appreciated primarily as a sculptor, Richard Serra also made several films and videos in the 1960s and 1970s which have a pivotal role in both the history of avant-garde film and the development of early video art. This article takes into account this ‘collateral’ production, suggesting that Serra’s work is not merely formalist or materialist. Rather, as his video work suggests, his larger sculptural works and conceptual approach require a re-interpretation as commentaries on social and political issues. This essay focuses on the artist’s videos, reading them as an extension of both his films and his sculptural production, but which takes a more explicit stance than either. The essay will also take into account the similarities between Serra’s stance and that of the contemporary Guerrilla Television movement, trying to position them within the articulated history of the relationships between contemporary art and mass media.
- ReviewSelling film in the summer of 2015: Midnight Sun, Il Cinema Ritrovato, and Karlovy VarySan Filippo, Maria (2015)
- ReviewStrong positioning on the international festival circuit: An interview with Diana Iljine of Filmfest MünchenKrainhöfer, Tanja C. (2015)