Author Archive for: Greg DeCuir

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Ghost in the (Hollywood) machine: Emergent applications of artificial intelligence in the film industry

July 6, 2020in /by

This article examines the nascence of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the film industry at the greenlighting stage, where decisions are made as to the feasibility and earning potential of film projects. Through a qualitative analysis of company case studies, interviews, and media discourse, I interrogate and tease out the ethical, cultural, and industrial implications emerging from the use of AI in influencing decisions about film production, particularly the ways the use of AI might influence notions of creativity, labour, and reception. The article sets out possible research agendas for the future to critically engage with this emerging phenomenon.

The Golem in the age of artificial intelligence

July 6, 2020in /by

What can the Jewish myth of the Golem teach us about artificial intelligence? This article explores the Golem as one of the earliest AI prototypes and a myth that became a foundational story of sci-fi cinema. The Golem sets the parameters of opposition between men and intelligent or sentient machines, and at the same time points to possible third options beyond the dialectic of control.   

Film studies, feminism, and film curating in Germany: An interview with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann

July 6, 2020in , , /by

by Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana This interview arose out of a shared desire to document some of the unwritten, anecdotal history of film studies and the cultures of cinema more broadly. In a conversation with Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann, film and media scholars Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana encouraged them to narrate some […]

Clipping us together: The case of the Google Clips camera

July 6, 2020in /by

This article uses the Google Clips camera as a case study to illustrate the impact of autonomous machine learning on self-perception, and to investigate how ‘delegation’ of our self to those cameras occurs. The research is based on reviews of the Google Clips camera, analysed using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) and interpreted using Don Ihde’s postphenomonological framework complemented by Bruno Latour’s relation analysis. Positioning the Clips camera as a technological mediator, the analysis concentrates on human-technology-world interaction relations. The research findings include changes in self-perception through complex concepts, such as autonomy, agency, and rationality.

A Machine for Viewing

July 2, 2020in , /by

by Richard Misek In 1970, experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a cinema auditorium for Anthology Film Archives in New York, in which ‘shell-like’ seats and reams of black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness.[1] He referred to his Invisible Cinema as ‘a machine for viewing’.[2] Though the movie theatre is now […]

(Ad)Dressing film history: Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin / Film, Fashion and the 1960s

June 26, 2020in , , /by

In 2012, Helen Warner published the article ‘Tracing Patterns: Critical Approaches to On-screen Fashion’ in which she was still able to claim that ‘the study of on-screen fashion continues to be somewhat marginalised in the academy’.[1] Since then, publications dedicated to fashion and film have significantly grown in number. Beyond the seminal Fashion in Film […]

From ‘video essay’ to ‘video monograph’?: Indy Vinyl as academic book

June 15, 2020in , /by

Sarah Barrow argues that the video essay provides a ‘viable alternative to the academic book’.[1] This article explores that claim, considering how a video essay-based project can pursue a single topic in the manner of a monograph. The case study is Indy Vinyl, my collection of video essays and writing about vinyl records in American Independent Cinema. I argue that an approach informed by traditional scholarly values should be augmented by more exploratory thinking, when moving from written to practice-based forms of film criticism. 

Megaphone, Molotov, Moviola: 1968 and Global Cinema / Celluloid Revolt

June 14, 2020in , , /by

‘There have never been any good films on that period’, quips Jean-Luc Godard in his salty assessment of 1968, a thunderous era of insurrection, invention, and promise.[1] No artists, no aesthetics, were able to competently capture those outbursts, monumental as they were; elusive and at least a tad unrepresentable, the Parisian barricades (an event that […]

The play of iconicity in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built

June 14, 2020in , /by

This article studies the function of the iconic sign and the operation of diagram-icons in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018), a film about a serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon) who builds a house of corpses before being escorted to hell. What is remarkable in this film is von Trier’s specific use of filmic iconicity in probing the value of Western icons in art and architecture. In voiceover digressions from the narrative action following Jack’s serial killing, a comparison is made between the iconic power of murder on a grand scale (specified as genocides throughout history) and culturally valuated icons of art and architecture. The article focuses on the audiovisual icons in the film that invites the audience to diagrammatic readings and fabulation throughout and beyond the film’s narrative content. After a short introduction to the iconic sign and the diagram-icon respectively, the exploration of the film takes its starting point in how Jean-Luc Godard used the iconic force of the color red in Pierrot le Fou (1965). Even though the significant use of red throughout The House That Jack Built is justified within the context of serial killing, its many reiterations also qualifies ‘red’ as a diagrammatic feature combining iconic elements transversally. This diagrammatic feature foregrounds the film’s fabulatory and haptic levels beyond its strictly narrative content, making way for the wider philosophical comments expounded ‘in the film’ by the figure of Verge (Bruno Ganz). His extradiegetic voice becomes intradiegetic in the last part of the film as his body appears, acting as a guide for Jack into a version of Dante’s hell. 

Making the Xapiri dance: Photography and shamanism in the exhibition Claudia Andujar, The Yanomami Struggle

June 14, 2020in , , /by

The xapiri are the images of the yarori ancestors who turned into animals in the beginning of time. This is their real name. You call them ‘spirits’, [sic] but they are other. They came into existence when the forest was still young. The shaman elders have always made them dance and we continue to do […]

Nothing short of a revolution: A conversation with Frank Saptel of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival

June 14, 2020in , , , /by

Film festivals cannot always claim to practice what they preach. Even some of the best-intentioned festivals often hit a wall: while attempting to exhibit politically subversive films, organisers also have to respond to diverse – and even conflicting – voices. Responding to the demands of local communities, audiences, filmmakers, and sponsors leads to compromises and […]

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Editorial Board

Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot

Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade

Malte Hagener
Philipps-University Marburg

Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam

Francesco Pitassio
University of Udine

Belén Vidal
King’s College London

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