by Ariane Hudelet From March 2020 to 2022, the global population endured months of lockdowns, social distancing, and sanitary measures, which restricted public gatherings and movement. One of the striking and intriguing effects was the specific sense of attachment, comfort, and knowledge that television series provided to their audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all […]
by Mathias de Bondt This audiovisual essay examines a conspiratorial reading of the cult television series Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2014). During the COVID-19 pandemic, I rewatched Utopia while conducting ethnographic research on conspiracy-oriented Reddit communities, where I observed intense engagement with this series. Users interpreted its plot – featuring a bioweapon engineered to sterilise […]
by Catherine Fowler At a time when, for many, lockdown meant isolation from others, the absence of actual intimacy made depictions of it onscreen achingly poignant and even painful. That is one way to explain the streaming surge that accompanied the ten-part BBC/Hulu series Normal People in April 2020, when it was reportedly downloaded 16.2 […]
Introduction Since the 2000s the number of environmental film festivals around the globe has increased significantly; we have witnessed a diversification within eco-themed film festivals, including events focusing on wildlife and environment protection, sustainable food cultivation, animal ethics, and human/animal relations. Among these is Animal Nature Future Film Festival (ANFFF), which was established in 2023 […]
When I first enter the room, I follow a small pathway, and my eyes struggle in the darkness. My senses are strained, but I can feel the vibrations of sound from a distance and begin to feel excited in anticipation of a new experience. A dim light emitted from afar assaults my eyes, but as […]
Argentina is usually known for two leading film festivals: BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival), known for its attraction to cinephiles, and Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only A-list festival in Latin America. However, the country has a rich circuit of film events that are little known outside its boundaries, mainly due […]
by Martine Beugnet, Greg de Cuir Jr, Ilona Hongisto, Judith Keilbach, Skadi Loist, Toni Pape, Maria Velez Serna, and Andrea Virginás It is with great pleasure that we present the Autumn 2024 issue of NECSUS with a special section on the topic #Enough. The word ‘enough’ usually indicates a limit. This may be a lower […]
In 2014, an iQiyi representative defined the term ‘big internet movies’ and formalised a burgeoning category of streaming content. This article examines the history of these movies, from their beginnings as micro-movies or cellflix to cinema comparable to its theatrical equivalent, through an overview of the form’s shifting commercial infrastructure and regulation. The career of Zhang Hao, a comedian from Northeastern China, serves as a throughline across three periods of development. As an actor, director, and sometimes screenwriter of over a dozen features, Zhang’s films can be read as metaphorical commentary on the industry itself.
This article examines the little-known colour film experiments of the Synchromists, an avant-garde group founded in the 1910s by US painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. It focuses on the Synchrome Corporation, a company founded by Macdonald-Wright in Los Angeles in the 1920s to develop new colour film techniques. Through an analysis of archival material, including unpublished letters between Macdonald-Wright and Russell, and patents, I trace and contextualise the Synchromists’ efforts within the political and industrial dynamics of the interwar period and examine Macdonald’s subversive approach to film as a technological and ideological construct.
Drawing on recent developments in format studies, media archaeology, and machine epistemology, I use this case study as an invitation to re-evaluate the existing concepts of ‘visual music’ and ‘intermedia’ that have been adopted to discuss early experimental film. The methodological model I propose highlights the interconnectedness of technical innovation, industrial ambition, and artistic modernism, in an attempt to enrich our understanding of early experimental film history.
Karin Wagner’s From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age presents a fascinating exploration of how typography has been shaped and reshaped by socio-cultural and historical influences. Focusing on four distinct phenomena within the practice of typography, Wagner traces their unexpected ‘usage, design, printing as well as dispersion’ (p. […]
Two recent books find common ground in radically rethinking the projective function of media technologies. The first is Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), a detailed media archaeological investigation into the role of optical and projection devices in reorganising the concept of the world at […]
Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is an ethnographic exploration of the culture of feminist fandom found on the titular social media platform Tumblr. Hannell uses interviews with 342 participants to explore how the platform has developed a culture of feminist consciousness-raising which has, the book argues, helped […]
by Pierre-Olivier Toulza I first saw Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018) during the 2020 lockdown and was puzzled by its rejection, and even erasure, of the novel it claims to be adapting. Indeed, its emphasis on male characters radically undermines the novel’s concern with solitary and unstable girls in ‘an attempt […]
by Barbara Zecchi ‘Atemporalities and Becomings in the Age of Covid’ juxtaposes two distinct visual experiences: clips from the Spanish television series Estoy Vivo, a tragicomedy I watched during the evenings of the COVID-19 lockdown as a way to relax and disconnect from the horror of the outside; and news on the pandemic, which I […]
This article explores the recent proliferation of GenAI models capable of generating ‘infinite’ sophisticated visual and audio outputs, and it discusses the challenges that these models pose to an AI art discourse oriented around concepts such as creativity or agency. We propose ‘the infinite’ as a new paradigm that shifts the focus away from individual artists and artworks, offering a more scaled-up perspective on cultural practices in the age of AI. We argue that rather than making the previous paradigm obsolete, the infinite acts as a vector of expansion of the discursive limits of AI art.
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
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.
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