‘There is a point at which methods devour themselves.’ – Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) One can observe, in recent years, an obsession with methods – both in humanities research and teaching. Discussions include apprehensions about the imminent obsolescence of established media studies methodologies, a more liberal (in all senses?) search for synergies with […]
by Calum Watt Introduction: Société Réaliste This article discusses an experimental film, The Fountainhead (2010), by Société Réaliste, a cooperative of two Paris-based artists, the Hungarian artist Ferenc Gróf and the French artist Jean-Baptiste Naudy, founded in 2004 and dissolved a decade later. ‘Empire, State, Building’ was their first major exhibition, held at Jeu de […]
by Pedro Querido It is often sourly remarked about our time, with its brisk pace and information overload, that it is characterised by impermanence. For an example of what prompts such distraught musings, we need not look much further than the staggering success enjoyed by messaging services like Snapchat, which elevate ephemerality to the level […]
At a time when women’s access to shaping the public discourse through the exercise of their agency remains a precious commodity, the volumes edited by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers – Female Authorship and the Documentary Image and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies – come as important and necessary contributions to the field of […]
by Tina Kendall This article approaches gesture in relation to the problem of boredom in a postdigital culture. As David M. Berry and Michael Dieter suggest, the term ‘postdigital’ encompasses ‘a wide range of issues attached to the entanglements of media life after the digital’, including, crucially, ‘a shift from an earlier moment driven by […]
As audiovisual practices become increasingly multiplied and complex − from the omnipresence of (multi-)screens to the overstimulation of digital technologies − art is more sociopolitically-oriented than ever and, conversely, society acquires an aestheticised bias. Cinema still plays an important role in the current media landscape, but it is increasingly pervaded by other art forms and […]
Hakan Ergül’s Popularizing Japanese TV: The Cultural, Economic, and Emotional Dimensions of Infotainment Discourse (London-New York: Routledge, 2019) and Annette Hill’s Media Experiences: Engaging with Drama and Reality Television (London-New York: Routledge, 2019) constitute two recent examples of strenuous ethnographic work with empirical focus on popular television. Both publications reveal the extremely rewarding character of […]
by Nicole De Brabandere and Alanna Thain Drawing Light was a research-creation workshop on procedural thinking held in the early evening of a wintery Saturday (10 February 2018) in Montreal, Canada. The workshop was facilitated by Nicole De Brabandere, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, and Alanna Thain, director of the […]
One must imagine Béla Tarr busy. Even though he has repeatedly insisted on the fact that he considers himself retired – at least as a director of feature films[1] – he has not stopped working since the release of The Turin Horse (2011). Currently, he is preparing a book project;[2] between 2013 and 2017 he […]
by Ljudmila Bilkić A modern political coda [refugees, constructed] A full-screen, single drone shot of an airport. Accurate black markings on the runway and taxiways suggest calculated bombardments. The phrase ‘Afghanistan 1987’ rapidly moves from right to left in the middle of the frame while ‘Afghanistan 1989’ appears in larger font underneath. The following subtitles […]
by Jiří Anger The Czech philosopher Karel Thein once said, with regard to the expressive features of Pedro Almodovar’s film Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999), that in melodrama, ‘a second lasts a lifetime, a minute is eternity’.[1] While the term melodrama is used in so many different contexts and with so […]
In ELEKTRA’s own words, the digital art festival has been ‘helping audiences explore the diversity of performance practices, particularly audiovisual and robotics, since 1999’ and takes place over six days and nights in selected venues across Montreal. While the festival has become an important place to experience digital art in Montreal, it also functions as […]
by Kai Matuszkiewicz and Franziska Weidle Introduction In 2016, Facebook, Sony, and HTC released new Virtual Reality (VR) hardware. In combination with other VR devices such as Google’s Project Cardboard and locomotion simulators (e.g. Virtuix Omni), Oculus rift, PlayStation VR, and Vive aim to push VR gaming into the mass market. A similar development appears […]
This year’s gay pride celebrations were particularly important as both community-based groups and official institutions organised various symposiums, exhibitions, and festivals to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots – an event often credited as the birth of the gay political movement. In Europe, several municipalities and official institutions capitalised on this anniversary and […]
In the turmoil of political relations between the US and Turkey, cultural activities build bridges that facilitate diplomacy and mutual understanding. In this report, I explore how the 23rd Boston Turkish Festival (BTF) serves as a deployment of film diplomacy and presents a strategic image of Turkey in the US via films. The themes covered […]