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Adaptive images: Practices and aesthetics of situative digital imaging 

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Digital images increasingly determine the way people interact with physical space. Combined imaging and sensing technologies register, process, and transmit information about the physical world in real time and make it possible to continuously adapt such images to specific spatio-temporal settings and in relation to motion and perspective. With the ability to integrate situative and customised information in media, like digital maps or virtual reality applications, images also gain in importance for perception and interpretation. Such integration of image, action, and space heralds a new type of visual media described as adaptive images. Based on cases from industrial production, medicine, and psychotherapy as well as from sports and entertainment, the paper addresses their aesthetic, spatial, and operational conditions, and provides a typological survey of adaptive images as a phenomenon, including their respective challenges and implications for image and media theory.

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Documentary’s longue durée: Beginnings, formations, genealogies

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We have tended to think of the documentary as emerging in the early 1920s within the framework of cinema. Yet the documentary tradition possesses a much longer historical trajectory, beginning with public lectures that were illustrated with models and scientific experiments. Appearing in the English-speaking colonies of North America as early as the 1730s, these were a crucial component of the American Enlightenment. The key term was ‘lecture’. Religious groups had used the church-based lecture to communicate the truth of God using the bible as the basis for understanding the world. Appearing in secular venues, these public presentations offered new kinds of truths determined through observation, science, reason and analysis. Creating a new dispositif, they used an increasingly diverse array of illustrative materials – models, charts, demonstrations, paintings, panoramas, reenactments, quotations from literary or musical sources, and even very occasional lantern slides. The term ‘illustrated lecture’ emerged gradually in the 1840s but went through a radical redefinition in the 1870s as the mode merged with the popular but distinct stereopticon exhibition that used photographic lantern slides. By the 1890s and 1900s these illustrated lectures gradually incorporated motion pictures, until many only showed films. When the lecture was replaced by intertitles in the late 1910s, the label ‘illustrated lecture’ became anachronistic and the term ‘documentary’ eventually filled the void.

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A conversation with Henry Jenkins  

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In this interview, Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California) discusses with Doron Galili the origins and the reception of his landmark book Convergence Culture, as well as the initial effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on media practices and Jenkins’s most recent work on comic books.  

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New perspectives on an imperfect cinema: Smartphones, spectatorship, and screen culture 2.0

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This paper discusses smartphone spectatorship with a focus on user participation, interactivity, and the fusion of digital media and moving images. In the renaissance of mobile filmmaking and participatory culture, there is no longer a definite difference in the quality of cinema and mobile media tools. Instead, users’ embodied and social presences define the framework of viewing and production. By reflecting on the sovereignty of smartphone film culture, this paper highlights the behavioural and cultural trajectories of mobile movie consumption, where content access merges with content production.

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

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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 […]

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

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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. 

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

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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. 

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Iconomy of the derivative image: Effacing the visual currency in Société Réaliste’s ‘The Fountainhead’

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by Calum Watt Introduction: Société Réaliste This article discusses an experimental film, The Fountainhead (2010), by Société Réaliste, a cooperative of two Paris-based artists, the Hungarian artist Ferenc Gróf and the French artist Jean-Baptiste Naudy, founded in 2004 and dissolved a decade later. ‘Empire, State, Building’ was their first major exhibition, held at Jeu de […]

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Mid-twentieth century radio art: The ontological insecurity of the radio text

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by Pedro Querido It is often sourly remarked about our time, with its brisk pace and information overload, that it is characterised by impermanence. For an example of what prompts such distraught musings, we need not look much further than the staggering success enjoyed by messaging services like Snapchat, which elevate ephemerality to the level […]

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‘The refugee is … FOOD FOR BIOPOLITICS’: Critical knowledgescapes in Ursula Biemann’s ‘Contained Mobility’ and ‘X-Mission’

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by Ljudmila Bilkić  A modern political coda [refugees, constructed] A full-screen, single drone shot of an airport. Accurate black markings on the runway and taxiways suggest calculated bombardments. The phrase ‘Afghanistan 1987’ rapidly moves from right to left in the middle of the frame while ‘Afghanistan 1989’ appears in larger font underneath. The following subtitles […]

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(Un)Frozen expressions: Melodramatic moment, affective interval, and the transformative powers of experimental cinema

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by Jiří Anger The Czech philosopher Karel Thein once said, with regard to the expressive features of Pedro Almodovar’s film Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999), that in melodrama, ‘a second lasts a lifetime, a minute is eternity’.[1] While the term melodrama is used in so many different contexts and with so […]

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At the threshold into new worlds: Virtual reality game worlds beyond narratives

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by Kai Matuszkiewicz and Franziska Weidle Introduction In 2016, Facebook, Sony, and HTC released new Virtual Reality (VR) hardware. In combination with other VR devices such as Google’s Project Cardboard and locomotion simulators (e.g. Virtuix Omni), Oculus rift, PlayStation VR, and Vive aim to push VR gaming into the mass market. A similar development appears […]

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Editorial NECSUS

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Gesturality is the source of signifying practices overall. The body set in motion generates meaning, and all other modes and matters of expression ensue this pristine act of signification. Soviet-Russian film director and theoretician Sergei Eisenstein started from here – from ‘expressive movement’ – in tracing the pathway of meaning throughout all the different artistic […]

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A conversation with Pierre Sorlin about film studies, film and history, and European cinema

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by Francesco Pitassio As part of the series of conversations NECSUS has published with prominent scholars (see those with David Bordwell, Ian Christie, Richard Dyer, Anton Kaes, Laura Mulvey, and Vivian Sobchack), we spoke with Pierre Sorlin on his groundbreaking work in film and media studies. Educated as a historian, and working on interdisciplinary subjects […]

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The film is the museum: Ken Jacobs, Gus Van Sant, Mark Lewis, and Pierre Perrault

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by Barbara Le Maître, translated from the French by Claire Labarbe[1] In the last twenty years, the question of the relationship between cinema and the museum has been raised in multiple theoretical and practical contexts, giving rise to a number of discussions about the exhibition of moving images, the use of the medium of film […]

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Recent News

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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