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Additive processes as format: The Synchrome Corporation and the politics of early experimental film

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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 Through an analysis of archival material, including unpublished letters between Macdonald-Wright and Russell, and patents, I trace and contextualise the Synchromists’ efforts within the political and industrial dynamics of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.

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Movies born online: The formalisation and industrialisation of Chinese internet movies

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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.

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Archival encounters: Institutional critique in contemporary found footage films

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Reuses of archival film continue to proliferate in filmmaking practices across the United States, concurrent with the opening up of film collections for expanded use and activation. Building upon past scholarship on appropriation and found footage filmmaking, this article argues that appropriation films are uniquely positioned to foreground the material conditions of ownership and the histories of enclosure and extraction that shape the film archival world. It proposes the metaphor of an ‘archival encounter’ between a filmmaker and a specific film collection, which becomes the subject of an institutional critique. Two films are discussed as examples that stake out political and ethical positions regarding the material they use and make demands of archival collections: Expedition Content (2020) demonstrates the embedded racism of ‘objective’ ethnographic film material through textual interventions and aural parapraxes; Riotsville, USA(2022) follows a painstaking research-based route to contextualise a visual narrative of American racism that white audiences are eager to misremember. Rather than perfect models to imitate, these films exemplify the strengths and limitations of filmmakers as agents in the push to democratise film archives. They also add nuance to contemporary discussions of appropriation films that mostly focus on the changes wrought by digital technology.

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The rise of computational images: The role of star-targeting spectroscopy

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This article examines the pivotal role of Angelo Secchi’s stellar spectroscopy in anticipating computational imaging, underscoring its historical significance and impact on contemporary visualisation techniques. By analysing the shift from visual to invisual cultures, the study illustrates how 19th century spectroscopic practices laid essential foundations for modern datafication and image analysis. The discussion addresses methodological innovations, including Secchi’s spectral taxonomy, pattern recognition, and the establishment of a comprehensive spectroscopic data archive based on remote sensing, emphasising spectroscopy’s transition from qualitative representation to invisual, data-centric imaging.

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Poetics of refraction, Black subjectivity, and Alice Diop’s ‘Saint Omer’

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This essay explores Diop’s poetics of refraction in Saint Omer, also the ways in which her Afropeanness enables an angled articulation of audiovisual materials that calls attention to mediation and materiality and carves spaces for critical inquiry. These critical spaces occur both in the film’s subtext and in its textual use of breathing, (extra)diegetic sound, and the gaze. On the level of subtext, the film probes the ethics and politics of fictionalised accounts of heinous crimes; and textually, it forges an audiovisual community of Black subjects that contests European polarities of white subjects and Black objects in favor of relational connections.

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Game engines: Optimising VFX, reshaping visual media

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Game engines have emerged as a significant site of convergence for several visual media pipelines, from XR to animation and In-Camera VFX (ICVFX). However, they are a computational medium – the images they produce are the derivative by-products of their management of computational complexity. Focussing on the game engine-dependent production technique of In-Camera VFX, this article will explore the ways in which game engine visuality incorporates and re-mediates a great deal of the phenomenological and epistemic characteristics of photographic visuality, in a way that de-prioritises visuality as a sensed and embodied experience. The article offers an outline of the image pipelines of photographic and game engine visuality, emphasising the difference in their relations to external phenomena, profilmic reality, and processes such as data management and computational optimisation. The article discusses the production logistics of ICVFX with specific reference to the ‘magic cutaway’, a trope that represents, in its ubiquity, the successful optimisation of both film production and ‘real time’ rendering within the virtual production context. The article will then offer a case study to open up not just the aesthetic impact of ICVFX, but to reflect on the de-prioritisation of photographic, lens-based images – correlated as they are to embodied ocular perception – within visual media. Speculating on the epistemic impact of a predominantly computational, as opposed to ocular, visual regime, this article will conclude by drawing insights from critical algorithm studies and the broader field of digital humanities.

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Becoming a Netflix nation: Extroversion, exportability, and visibility through a case study of ‘Maestro in Blue’

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Christopher Papakaliatis, a prominent figure in Greek television, propelled Greece into the global streaming arena with his series Maestro in Blue. Supported by the National Centre of Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME) and initially aired on MEGA TV, the show made history on 19 December 2022 as the first Greek drama to debut on Netflix. This study explores the significance of such turning points for small television nations, analysing textual choices, production strategies, and broader significance for the visibility of Greek television on the global stage. As such, the study contributes to understanding the evolving landscape of transnational television and its implications for small television cultures and industries.

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The environmental footprint of animated realism: An ecomaterialist exploration of contemporary digital animated documentaries

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Despite animation techniques being highly material, the environmental impact of animation is understudied. This essay starts bridging the gap by investigating the making of digital animated documentaries through the lens of ecomaterialism. In particular, it brings to light how the quest for realism that prompts the production choices of creators of such works often comes at a significant cost to the environment. Indeed, many present-day digital animated documentaries prove unsustainable, because multi-layered, wasteful, and excess-informed modes of production that foresee a squandering of resources tend to be adopted when making them. In so doing, the need for animation-focused green protocols is made apparent, especially since, paradoxically, due to animation being a craft-oriented medium, such non-environmentally friendly approaches tend to be encouraged within the industry.

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Queer bare lives: Melodramatic form and biopolitics in Michael Mayer’s ‘Out in the Dark’

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This paper considers how the melodramatic form of Out in the Dark is employed to subvert the biopolitical discourses concerning queer migration across the Israel-Palestine border. In the diegesis, the queer Palestinian refugee is gradually stripped of his human rights, security, and legitimacy during border crossing, gradually being reduced into a state of ‘bare life’. I contend that the film Out in the Dark represents queer bare lives to subvert the homonationalist discourses employed by Israeli state power. The melodramatic form of Out in the Dark alters the recognition of the victim/hero/villain and cultivates novel spectatorial sensibilities via aesthetics. Ultimately, I show how the film associates queerness with the confluence of nationalism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy on both sides of the Israel-Palestine border, which offers a critique of biopolitical governance over the lives of queer migrants.

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‘I say! Neither a Whore nor a Saint’: Transgender memory, Spanish popular television, and media histories in ‘Veneno’

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In March 2020, the series Veneno was released on the streaming platform Atresplayer Premium, immediately becoming one of the biggest media sensations in Spain. The series centres on the life of the television star Cristina ‘La Veneno’ Ortiz Rodríguez, who shot to fame during the 1990s. Herself a transgender woman, Veneno was frequently an object of both public fascination and mockery, with her life as a sex-worker and gender-identity often relayed in the media through sensationalistic and dehumanising terms. By focusing on a figure who was an object of public fascination, but whose experiences of discrimination were often trivialised, the series Veneno not only humanises its central protagonist, but also acts as a commentary on the broader history of transgender representation in Spanish media and as a re-evaluation of la Veneno’s own legacy as a prominent media representative of the trans community. In turn, this focus on both mediated and hidden histories of transgender experience reflects a broader turn in the Spanish televisual and cinematic landscape, which has shown a marked focus on excavating and recreating local LGBTQI histories, as is evident from recent television series such as Bob Pop’s Maricón perdido (TNT, 2021), Miguel de Arco’s Las noches de Tefía (Atresplayer Premium, 2023) and Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s Vestidas de azul (Atresplayer Premium, 2023), as well as in Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas (2021). In the case of Veneno, the recreation of transgender history also intervenes into current political discourses on transgender rights, with even Spain’s then-vice president Pablo Iglesias recommending the series to his followers on Twitter during a period of intense public debate surrounding the so-called ‘Ley Trans’ or ‘Trans Law’, which came into force in 2023. Drawing on this, this article will examine the ways in which the series intervenes into contemporary discourses surrounding trans rights, as well as how it comments on broader questions of transgender memory and the history of transgender media visibility within the Spanish context.

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Creativity, passion, and community: The rise of India’s transnational producers

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Producers are commonly associated with managing finances and budgets, but the work of a producer primarily involves managing emotions and people. They invest emotional labour in the projects, which remains a largely neglected, invisible and hidden aspect of their work. Recent scholarship on film and media industries is increasingly paying attention to the lived experiences of media makers, their cultures, and the emotional qualities of their creative work. In this light, this article focuses on the working world of emerging creative producers involved in supporting Indian independent cinema through international film festival funding and co-production schemes transnationally. This article borrows insights from media industry studies and affective scholarship, as well as incorporates in-depth interviews with transnational producers themselves. It examines the producer’s labour and work, involving extensive human interactions, community-building, and emotional management to make it in the industry. In doing so, the producers become entwined in the transnational capitalist film industry.

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Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

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Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure ⎯ a Pythagorean theorem ⎯ is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. By mapping this system of relations, I seek to connect the normalising powers of society in the film with the issue of surveillance as developed by both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary modernity and Gilles Deleuze’s subsequent paradigm of information. In a second section, and thinking about the tactics that the film’s characters employ to mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations, I draw on the notion of resistance as an act that defies the city-Law as well as on the politics of love as a reciprocal law that goes beyond any other law; one that remains hidden, or blinded, for characters to see, for as Shakespeare suggests: ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.

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First person war: Helmet cameras between testimony and performance

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In the contemporary media landscape, the visual component of armed conflicts tends to be articulated in two distinct imaginaries. On one hand, we observe a ‘view from above’ generated by aircrafts, UAVs, and satellites; on the other, we encounter videos and photographs shot with consumer technologies by people on the ground such as regular soldiers, militiamen, guerrillas, NGOs, and civilians. Through the internet, these ‘low images’ have created a new imaginary.
Among the devices that mark the iconography of the wars of the new millennium, a prominent place is occupied by minute-sized videographic instruments usually secured on the operator’s head, called helmet cameras. These devices are characterised by two elements: the first-person view and the prosthetic relationship with the human body. The machine vision hence presupposes a form of witnessing inextricably related to the subject’s mobility. Helmet cameras produce an embodied experience of war in which the visual perspective echoes the agency of a body at risk that is exposed to the stimuli and the dangers of the battlefield. Focusing primarily on the television docu-series Taking Fire (2016), the paper aims to explore all the elements that mark helmet cameras as a real topos of the contemporary war imagery, pointing to the relationship between vision, technical device, and body. The essay highlights recurring features of the images on both filmic and content levels, adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Starting from studies on point-of-view shots and documentary filmmaking, the essay demonstrates how helmet camera images are profoundly influenced by several trends shaping the contemporary media landscape, including the post-photographic approach, the videogame world, the aesthetics of extreme sports, and the social network culture.

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From cloudy logic to logistical system: Algorimages, black boxes, and the socio-technical infrastructure of platforms

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This article argues that the critical study of algorithms must shift its focus from solving the problem of the ‘black box’ to seeing the structures that surround and pose it as a problematic in the first place. By mapping the movements of what I call algorimages, and the socio-technical infrastructures through which they circulate, the apparently ‘hidden’ imperatives of algorithms are made visible. Through the case study of Twitter, this article undertakes a critical, materialist analysis of algorimages as logistics, excavating their technical substrates and social conditions of emergence within transformations of the capitalist mode of production since the 1970s.

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Cinema and/as infrastructure in interwar avant-gardes and empire aviation documentaries

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This article analyses cinematic exposition of aeriality in empire documentaries and avant-garde cinema from the interwar period to interrogate cinema as infrastructure, its weaponisation and deployment in the imperial project, and its convergence with aerial infrastructure which united the perception of Empire with the experience of modernity. I argue that the use of aeriality in the aestheticisation of infrastructures in avant-garde films like De Brug (Joris Ivens, 1928) and La Tour (Rene Clair, 1928) cannot be divorced from the ideology that is on overt display in Empire aviation documentaries such as Wings over Everest and Contact.

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Editorial Board

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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NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.

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