by Martine Beugnet, Greg de Cuir Jr, Judith Keilbach, Skadi Loist, Toni Pape, Belén Vidal and Andrea Virginás The figure of the loop has become a staple technique of contemporary narrative art and a flexible tool for thinking about media in ways that challenge teleological histories. In the special section on #Cycles, we are bringing […]
by Nicolás Medina Marañón and Miklós Kiss Our video departs from an interest in the use of the split screen in Vince Gilligan and Peter Goud’s television series Better Call Saul. More specifically, we are interested in the use of the split screen as both a technique featured in the show as well as a […]
This introduction provides three brief conceptual frames for the special section #Cycles: matter, history, and control. A first section on ‘cycles of matter’ problematises recycling discourse and its implications. The second section on ‘cycles of history’ revisits cyclical concepts of history and their contemporary re-evaluation to think about cyclical modes of (over)production. Finally, the section on ‘cycles of control’ briefly discusses cybernetic theories of feedback loops. It addresses how systemic processes of corrective feedback loops can lead to so-called cybernetic subjectivities. Each section highlights the contributions that speak to the respective conceptual frame. All contributions to the special section and audiovisual essay section are briefly introduced in the final two sections.
An established and beloved aspect of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is standing in ‘queues winding their way around city blocks in the depths of winter’, meeting like-minded cinephiles.[1] This is not something I can participate in. My disability makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time. For many years, MIFF did […]
It is rare that an exhibition of contemporary visual art is so vigorously conceived as a reading exercise.[1] In Dora García’s She Has Many Names (M HKA Antwerp), curated by Joanna Zielińska, books are everywhere. Not only are writers such as James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, or Albert Camus subjects of García’s work, but writing and […]
Family records and personal analogue artefacts such as home movies and snapshots have continually become noticeable through practices of repurposing and appropriation, particularly in documentary films that have utilised archives either as an illustration, a storytelling device, or historical evidence.[1] Following this perspective, in documentary practices, domestic footage is not just viewed as stale or […]
The Big Three film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin) may be of venerable age, but we do not have much by way of detailed and authoritative scholarship on their history. In 2000 there was Wolfgang Jacobsen’s 550-page volume 50 Years Berlinale: International Filmfestspiele Berlin, published by Nicolai in collaboration with the festival and Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche […]
by Daniel O’Brien by Daniel O’Brien This twenty-six-minute video essay explores ideas of the time-loop on screen. It examines a range of films to argue that the concept of the time-loop can be found within the mechanics of the computer game, particularly in the aspect of failure and repetition (considered through ludologist Jesper Juul’s 2013 […]
An established and beloved aspect of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is standing in ‘queues winding their way around city blocks in the depths of winter’, meeting like-minded cinephiles.[1] This is not something I can participate in. My disability makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time. For many years, MIFF did […]
Accreditations typically determine how people access a film festival: they determine whether someone acts, for instance, as a journalist, a producer, a creator, a researcher, or as a regular member of the audience. The fact that a festival does not consider any accreditation system also conditions how attendees behave during the event. The spaces one […]
The first film festival of its kind in Germany, the Asian Film Festival Berlin (AFFB), was run by multiple generations of Asian German organisers from 2007-2017. In 2020, the festival came to a halt due to lack of resources. The recent disruption of the AFFB leads us back to the festival’s roots in migrant labor organising by South Korean guest workers in 1970s West Germany. This harbinger labor movement sparked by migrant women inspired the creation of two important diasporic Asian grassroots collectives based in Germany, each of which would respectively host the AFFB: the Koreanische Frauengruppe and korientation. To excavate these genealogical connections is to document an interconnected history of community organising that remains overlooked in official postwar history, and that highlights the unique cyclicality of the AFFB as part of ever-evolving minoritarian movements that positively advance documentation, inclusion, and social justice.
This article moves from small-gauge film technology manufacturing and experimental film practices to develop a twofold exploration of film and camera conceptually interlinked in a mutual cycle of experimentation. Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi’s city symphonies provide an illustrative example: active in the early 1930s as an independent filmmaker, between 1930 and 1933 he produced five films sponsored by Agfa, which was expanding its market in Italy. Magnaghi’s experimental films were thought to stress the material resistance of cameras (an Agfa Movex 30) and the film stock (Agfa Isopan reverse). The article will shed light on the affordances offered to the filmmaker regarding the film stock’s specificities and the camera involved in the manufacturing process. Such a virtuous cycle connecting manufacturing and creativity is metaphorically reinforced on the level of aesthetics in Magnaghi’s film Symphony of Life and Work (1933), characterised by a reiterated circling camera movement. Inspired by this, we aim to craft a study that assembles the various components of the filmmaker’s work in a rounded film experience, underlining the nature of small-gauge cinema as a non-neutral yet empowering practice able to create a complex room for critical analysis eliciting new ways of looking, problematising, and therefore thinking reality.
This paper raises an aesthetic bridge between pioneer video art and current machine learning art through the prism of instant feedback. It reinstates the former’s real-time processual practices as a pertinent origin to reflect on the resolutely looped construction of cybernetic subjectivities. Given the latest developments of artificial intelligence, it infers that these now include technological agency. The article proceeds to compare the room left for human mastery in the recursive operations of both closed-circuit video setups and generative AI models. Taking into account their synthetic power, it ultimately proposes two general definitions of the artist’s creative position within today’s networked landscape.
This paper presents a dataset of fine-grained film analytical annotations (Melgar & Estrada & Koolen 2018) for a corpus study of feature films, documentaries, and television news on the Global Financial Crisis (2007-), generated by the research group Affektrhetoriken des Audiovisuellen (Freie Universität Berlin and Hasso-Plattner-Institute Potsdam, 2016-2021, see Bakels et. al. 2020a). The semantic video annotations are based on the AdA Filmontology (v1.8), which consists of eight annotation levels, 78 annotation types, and 501 annotation values (Bakels et. al. 2020b). Each level, type, and value has a unique resource identifier (URI) as well as an English and German name and description. In our paper, we reflect on the specific challenges of capturing film-analytical claims of embodied viewing experiences in an ontology-based taxonomy. We further critically discuss aspects such as intercoder-reliability, consistency, as well as the requirements of training and synchronising expert annotators. The dataset contains more than 92,000 manual and semi-automatic annotations authored in the open-source-software Advene (Aubert/Prié 2005) by expert annotators, as well as more than 400,000 automatically-generated annotations for wider corpus exploration. The annotations are published as Linked Open Data under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence and available as rdf triples in ttl files and in Advene’s non-proprietary azp-file format, which allows instant access through the graphical interface of the software. Via a web application all annotations can be downloaded, queried, and visualised in conjunction with password-protected access to the source video files (Agt-Rickauer 2022). This dataset is of interest for research on the financial crisis discourse or the specific films and broadcasts; also, the dataset serves as a proof of concept for ontology-based video annotation and as a provider of training data on film analytical concepts such as shot length, camera movements, or affective tonalities.
This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agency panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and addiction. According to Melley, agency panic concerns a set of anxieties linked to the diminished sense of agency, which he sees as escalating after the Second World War. Agency panic is, for him, rooted in the counterfactual expectation of full autonomy, a fantasy that is constantly undermined by the growing influence of global networks of communication and capital. In our paper, we examine how an even more networked and distributed sense of agency panic manifests today by engaging with two different figures of contemporary digital culture: the non-playable character (NPC) and the internet addict. First, we look at how, in online conspiracy discourse, the NPC is the product of a process of othering whereby the conspiratorial subject externalises its own sense of compromised agency in digital environments, allowing it to sustain the fantasy of its own autonomy and independence from these environments. From there, we examine different discourses of addiction linked to online cultures as manifestations of digital agency panic. Through the language of addiction, and by promoting the ideal of autonomy as individual self-control, these discourses stigmatise and pathologise users’ various dependencies and interrelations with digital devices and services. Building on our analysis of NPC and addiction discourses, we then suggest that the panic-ridden fantasy of the liberal sovereign subject often serves as a pipeline to reactionary, misogynist, or neoliberal immunopolitical cultures set on policing the boundaries between the self and the inferior or unwanted other. We conclude by speculating on how a more distributed understanding of agential self might serve as an antidote to these immunopolitical tendencies.
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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