2017/1 – #True
Recent Submissions
- ArticleActs of laughter, acts of tears: The production of ‘truth-effects’ in Oriana Fox’s ‘The O Show’ and Gillian Wearing’s ‘Self Made’Walsh, Maria (2017)In this article, I explore the ‘truth-effects’ of the performative dimension of two artists’ works: Oriana Fox’s therapy chat show THE O SHOW (2011-ongoing), episodes of which were performed live and broadcast simultaneously online, and Gillian Wearing’s experimental documentary SELF-MADE (2010). Situating my argument in relation to Lionel Trilling’s SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY, I claim that authenticity has changed in contemporary cognitive capitalism from modernity’s advocacy of self-alienation to becoming a matter of ‘doing’ sincerity by means of deploying ritualistic formulae or techniques in social exchange. This is exemplified in the artists’ works by techniques such as R.E.B.T. (Rational Emotional Behavioural Therapy) and Method acting, which are used to produce a slippage between authenticity and sincerity for performers and spectators alike.
- ArticleCinema’s Turing test: Consciousness, digitality, and operability in HARDCORE HENRYYu, Chang-Min (2017)Through defining cinematic subjectivity as both composite and aggregate, this article examines cinema’s Turing test – the relationship between artificial intelligence and cinema – via the case study of HARDCORE HENRY (2015). It does so via analysing how the film is composed of a series of (semi-)subjective images that deliberately imitate the style of first-person shooters in the entanglement of vision and tactility and investigating how the electronic consciousness formulated by the film is ‘pure intelligence’ in both senses.
- ReviewConfronting the screen. Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest at the New MuseumBartunkova, Barbora (2017)
- ArticleCritique, protest, activism, and the video essayLee, Kevin B. (2017)Video essays curated for the Spring 2017 issue of NECSUS are introduced as a way to view audiovisual film criticism and scholarship in a more explicitly social and political context. The author finds themes of social critique, protest, and activism underrepresented in audiovisual essay work originating from both popular video sharing platforms and from academia. The author interrogates the nature of his own interest in these themes as related to his background as a cinephile, promoting the question of how a cinephile might become political as well as how the production of video essays could be construed as a political activity.
- ReviewCurrent trends across three European human rights film festivalsde Valck, Marijke (2017)
- ArticleEditorial NecsusNECSUS Editorial Board (2017)
- ArticleFalse color/real life: Chromo-politics and François Laruelle’s photo-fictionGranata, Yvette (2017)This article looks to false color practices within photography, cinema, and media imaging technology, from surveillance to photographic art, and the manner in which they do not remain positioned on separate planes of Truth versus Fiction. In film and media theory, color is not only the problem of the metaphysics of color versus ‘reality’. Film theory realism has also always been concerned with the realness of color practices and social and racial violence, color and death, color and the corpse. In this way, film and media theory draw the line for approaching color imagery on the grounds of chromo-politics, historical, and new. With the conceptual lens of François Laruelle’s ‘photo-fiction’ this article aims to re-think the relation of realism, fiction, and the politics of color imagery through an analysis of ‘false color’ practices. Ultimately, I look to contemporary thermal images and the chromo-politics of contemporary images via employment of Laruelle’s non-philosophy and photo-fiction.
- ArticleFor a radical media archaeology: A conversation with Wolfgang ErnstRoy, Elodie A. (2017)This interview retraces and illuminates some aspects of Wolfgang Ernst’s pioneering media archeological propositions. Ernst provides insights into the most significant methodological challenges for media archeology for scholars in the Humanities, charts future directions in media archeography, and calls attention to the ever-renewed necessity to think about our contemporary technological condition.
- ArticleIntroduction: The ring of the true in contemporary mediaHongisto, Ilona; Pape, Toni; Thain, Alanna (2017)This introductory essay to the special section #True seeks to outline and activate the ring of the true in contemporary media. It moves beyond the sceptic and positivist stances relating to ‘post-truth’ by foregrounding the audiovisual methodologies with which the true comes to be and by affirming the potentials of ‘falsification’. The essay insists on a critical distinction between falsification and a lie, and thereby builds on the speculative and aesthetic modalities in producing ‘truth-effects’ in contemporary media. In this way, the essay address uncertainty and the temporalisation of truth, the creative nodes of difference involved in knowledge production and subjectivation, as well as the intermedial and ecological immanence of truth-effects.
- ArticleMy crush was a superstarGalibert-Laîné, Chloé (2017)
- ArticleOutbreak of violent protests prompts a state of emergencyTHE ANTI-BANALITY UNION (2017)
- ArticleProblems with the gendered POV shot in LILYA 4-EVERSandusky, Kiera (2017)
- ReviewRethinking geolinguistic spaces: The San Sebastian Film Festival between Latin America and EuropeUmaran, Amaia Nerecan; Vallejo, Aida (2017)
- ReviewRomanian and Hungarian film cultures at the Transilvania International Film FestivalVirginás, Péter (2017)
- ArticleSnake oil in N—–townBoone, Steven (2017)
- ArticleStatistic intersubjectivity: A phenomenology of television audiencesFerencz-Flatz, Christian (2017)In the following paper I engage in a phenomenological interpretation of the so-called ‘modernity-thesis’ – the idea that perception is historically mutable, while cinema in particular and modern media in general are symptoms of such mutations – in Walter Benjamin’s ARTWORK essay. Thus, in the first part of the paper I specifically follow the impact that the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life and the corresponding rise of statistics in the field of theoretical thought have on perception. In the second part of the paper I try to apply Benjamin’s insights for an analysis of television audiences while drawing the consequences that derive from here for a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity.
- ArticleSweeping changes in Eastern Europe: The documentary frame in Gerd Kroske’s ‘Kehraus’ trilogy (1990-2006)Hongisto, Ilona (2017)Seeking to expand established notions of documentary cinema, this essay suggests that the indexical, the evidentiary, and the representational are not enough to account for the work of documentary cinema in the real. Drawing on Gerd Kroske’s KEHRAUS trilogy (1990, 1997, 2006) on the lives of street sweepers in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the essay proposes that documentary cinema be considered ‘an aesthetics of the frame’. The argument of the essay builds on the ways in which the three films relate the visible and the audible in the frame to what is left out. The outside of the frame becomes a defining element in how the documentaries capture and express the enfoldment of the Post-Wall transition period to the lives of the protagonists. Through analysing the technological, stylistic, and contextual qualities of the documentary frame in the three films, the essay draws attention to the frame’s embeddedness in the politics of recognition and in processes of actualisation. Instead of locating Kroske’s longitudinal project within the tradition of the indexical chronicle, the essay shows how the trilogy pushes reality to actualise.
- ArticleTaking stock: Two decades of teaching the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticismWitt, Michael (2017)This article takes stock of a long-running pedagogical experiment in audiovisual film studies. The author first introduced an audiovisual essay assessment component for an undergraduate film analysis course at the University of Roehampton in 1997. He subsequently designed and introduced a course devoted entirely to the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism and analysis. He reflects here on his experience of delivering this course over many years, outlines the theoretical rationale that underpins it, and presents a selection of the audiovisual essays made by some of the approximately 600 students who have now completed it.
- ArticleThe case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’Coley, Rob (2017)In its central concern with questions of epistemology and problems of knowing, detective fiction has always ‘theorised itself’. Over and above any particular crime, the practice of investigation has always supported a broader inquiry into how the world might be interpreted, into how different types of evidence might render the truth of this world knowable, and where the limits of certainty about this knowledge might lie. The current ubiquity of the television ‘crime board’, also known variously as the ‘case board’ or ‘murder board’, offers evidence for a shift in this tendency. Surveying a range of examples from contemporary television drama, this article considers how crime boards both express and perform conditions in which human knowledge of the world is in crisis. Crime boards, and the television shows in which they feature, increasingly problematise rather than uphold the representational authority of ‘truth’ – they serve to investigate phenomena that exceed human powers of detection, but also provoke a more speculative practice, a mode of detection in which the world might still remain aesthetically knowable.