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National film festivals circuits in the Latin American sphere: Discussing film canon, film culture, and cinephilia

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Film festivals have been understood as part of a global network where each event acts as a node. Their position depends on their relevance and hierarchies within the circuit. However, this notion of a network does not necessarily reflect the establishment of national or local circuits linked to small nations and cinemas. Therefore, this article discusses the creation of local film festival circuits in Latin America based on film culture and cinephilia. I use the water cycle as a reference in order to identify that national circuits in Latin America work around a small group of festivals that act as condensers of resources, which are distributed to the rest of the circuit through different relationships: sublimation and deposition (film historiography); runoff (influence on smaller and local festivals); infiltration (film education); and evaporation, where the processed and transformed resources bring new films and new filmmakers to nurture the condenser film festivals to start this cycle all over again.

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Preserving the now!: Mediating memories and archiving experiences in Ukraine

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by Bohdan Shumylovych, Oleksandr Makhanets, Taras Nazaruk, Natalia Otrishchenko, and Dagmar Brunow Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022. Everyone in the country experienced this and the afterward moments in their own way. All of us have learned what the shock of invasion is, mobilisation and how to resist […]

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Dani Gal’s cinematic and activist engagements with Israel/Palestine in Germany

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This essay contributes to current debates about the problematic conflation of support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on the cinematic and activist work of Dani Gal, an Israeli migrant in Berlin. Gal’s film, White City (2018), deals with intersections between memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba by reformatting archival materials – namely, a Nazi propaganda postcard and Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin’s diary – in ways that rethink migrations of architectural aesthetics and racist practices. By upending the expectation to document the past, the photographic stills in White City instead performatively re-imagine historical and contemporary predicaments around ethnic discrimination in Germany and Israel/Palestine. By bringing together the proximal victimisation Jews and Palestinians suffered from the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as the linked perpetrator pasts of some Zionists and Nazis, White City inspires us to understand the power of ‘multidirectional memory’ and ‘cocitizenship’ anew.

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Distant reading televised public information: The communication of Swedish government agencies, 1978-2020

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This study focuses on the Swedish public information programme Anslagstavlan, a unique audiovisual communication tool for Swedish government agencies since 1972 and an important part of Sweden’s audiovisual cultural heritage. Whereas digital research methodologies for data-driven text analysis have been developed and established over the last decades, the use of digital tools in the analysis of audiovisual sources has only recently gained increased attention. In this article, automatic speech recognition algorithms are used to extract the speech from a large sample of spoken messages in Anslagstavlan (1978-2020) which are then explored using digital methods for text analysis. The article argues that automatic speech recognition and corpus analysis should be viewed as a useful tool to gain an overview of a larger corpus of audiovisual media and to notice patterns and trends that would not be visible by close reading alone.

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Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’

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Grounded in Dakar’s elemental properties as much as manifestations of immaterial and virtual presence, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019) embodies what Thomas Elsaesser has described as a post-photographic realism of world cinema. In this article, I show how Atlantics collapses divisions between the evidentiary and the ghostly within the same realist impulse to create a reparative postcolonial aesthetic. Furthermore, as seen in the lucid depiction of Dakar’s clairvoyant nights, the ontological unrest of the film’s post-photographic realism also happens at the level of image aesthetics.

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Inhabited stories: An enactive media archaeology of virtual reality storytelling

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What makes a story designed for (and experienced via) real or imaginary VR systems so different from other stories and storyworlds? Through an enactivist perspective on media archaeology, I will address the issue by discussing the notion of virtual reality storytelling (VRS) as the art of crafting ‘inhabited stories’ and a discursive frame where VR narrativity has been articulated. In fact, narratives of and for VR identify a recurring discourse, or ‘topos’, that circulated from medium to medium during Western media history. After discussing theoretical notions such as that of ‘virtual reality’, ‘storyworld’, and ‘presence’, I will address the historical and cognitive relationship between VR space design and narrative of environmental storytelling by exploring different examples from peep media tradition, gaming, and VR cinema. Second, I will propose a media archaeology of ‘human enhancement’, a recursive topos in real and imaginary VR and haptic technologies. In doing so, I will highlight some recurring narrative strategies at the basis of VRS: the illusion of non-narration, i.e. the ability to direct the story-making activity of the virtual user without his/her awareness; the craftsmanship of paths of ‘attentional matching’ made of haptic responses and spatialised stories; and the design of new senses which can disclose enhanced processes of world- and story-making.

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Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s ‘Undine’

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We examine uses of sound in German director Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020), based on the story of a water sprite who marries a human and acquires a soul. We employ the concepts of ‘acousmatic sound’ and ‘the acousmêtre’ to suggest that the film’s uncanny soundscape invites a mode of listening that challenges and transforms habitual perception. While Undine largely adheres to cinematic realism, its sound design evokes intrusion by the preternatural and fantastical. By auditory allusions to the mysterious and uncanny, Undine asserts the significance of fairy tales and storytelling for perceiving and understanding reality and for imagining alternatives.

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Screen decorum: Silent Hollywood and neoclassical concepts of acting

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This article revisits the debates around the notion of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ in order to call attention to how various traits of neoclassical aesthetics characterised discourses on film acting in American cinema of the silent era. Drawing on a host of film acting manuals, how-to guidebooks, magazine advice columns, and interviews with actors from the 1910s and 1920s, the article demonstrates that besides film’s indebtedness to melodrama, pantomime, and other contemporary theatrical practices, variants of neoclassical aesthetic ideas came to play an important role in informing how silent-era Hollywood reflected on ideal forms of screen acting. By placing the early discussions on silent film acting in the context of the American renewed interest in the classics during the early twentieth century, the article makes a case for the importance of classical ideas in Hollywood cinema, alongside – and indeed often in conflict with – the prominent demand for realism.

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The filmmaker as Instagram auteur: A case study on Claire Denis

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In this article I propose further inclusion of auteurs’ Instagram profiles within contemporary auteurism. Examining selected auteur profiles, I trace aesthetic and commercial tendencies. I compare the forms of film and Instagram, connecting this to Lev Manovich’s research and Timothy Corrigan’s ‘commerce of auteurism’. Instagram’s individualism extends Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo theory. My case study is Claire Denis’ profile. I argue that her posts share aspects with her filmic ‘corpus’, like fragmentation and transience. Her profile has thus far expressed an anti-promotional stance, a distinctive design aesthetic, and the highly autobiographical part of her ‘work’ is indicative of Instagram’s authorial potential for filmmakers. 

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Shot and never seen again: Videotapes as waste and merchandise in post-socialist Romania

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What if videotapes were considered as either waste or commodity – to be forgotten, or sold and reused and re-recorded? This is the question raised by this text, which gives an account of a multi-sited ethnographic project that follows the human and material circulation of amateur analogue video technologies in Romania since the mid-1980s. At the intersection of anthropology and media archaeology, this text aims to show how videotapes have been an important part of a post-socialist Romanian media infrastructure, that distributed pirated media, home movies, and local television productions.

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Gentrification by genre? The Berlin rom-com

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Over the past few decades, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people relocating to Berlin. This influx is most often viewed as a response to rebranding the reunified German capital as a creative city – a tactic that foregrounded Berlin’s longstanding reputation for cheap rent, liberal attitudes, artistic culture, and vibrant nightlife. The housing market responded as vacancies plummeted while rent prices skyrocketed. Alongside the widely lamented changing face of the reunified capital, the spike in rent prices is one tangible outcome of Berlin’s rapid gentrification. This essay examines the aesthetics of gentrifying Berlin through an examination of a genre commonly associated with the imperatives of gentrification: the romantic comedy. Unlike other cinema traditions associated with urban space, the romcom is commonly understood as a genre that frames the city as a site of aspirational affluence and consumerism. This framing has, to date, overwhelmingly referred to romcoms produced in the American context. Through analyses of three romcoms set in Berlin – Germany’s highest grossing romcom to date Keinohrhasen (‘Rabbit Without Ears’, Schweiger, 2007); the 2019 installment in Emmanuel Benbihy’s ‘City of Love’ anthology film series, Berlin, I Love You; and Doris Dörrie’s Glück (‘Bliss’, 2012) this essay interrogates whether romcoms set in Berlin can be, as has been claimed of their US counterparts, understood as a genre of gentrification.

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Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism

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This article sets out the rationale for a videographic scholarship (the audiovisual study of screen media) that adopts constraint-based or ‘parametric’ procedures, and concludes with a short manifesto composed according to the simple constraint of division into ten equal segments of 50 words each. The article situates a parametric practice in relation to OuLiPo (a group founded in the early 1960s to explore constraint-based approaches to writing), to pataphysics (an absurdist branch of knowledge concerned with what eludes understanding by conventional means), to themes in the digital humanities, and to the posthuman. And it issues a call to forge an ‘agonistic society’ of videographic scholars who goad each other to greater achievement through the conspicuous and wasteful expenditure of resources of knowledge.

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Desktop documentary: From artefact to artist(ic) emotions

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One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.

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Narrating the ‘Eternal City’ in ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) and ‘La Grande Bellezza’ (2013)

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by Temenuga Trifonova Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of the city and the moving image to the modern urban imaginary: one need only recall Anne Friedberg’s illuminating account, in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1994), of the ways in which 19th century visual experiences like photography, urban strolling, panoramas, and dioramas anticipated cinema, […]

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Tokyo drifters: The negotiation and regulation of generational precarity in ‘Terrace House’

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As reality television has shifted steadily in the direction of scandal, drama, and high-stakes emotionality, the Japanese reality series Terrace House is notable precisely because of the ordinariness of its content; hinging on the observation of young working individuals as they live together and get to know one another. This article aims to explore the significance of this series, particularly in terms of the growing precarity of younger generations in Japan, demonstrating how Terrace House cultivates a neoliberal subjecthood whose aim is to master the art of precarious living – both for the sake of the individual and the nation. 

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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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