by Catherine Grant and Jaap Kooijman How to introduce Richard Dyer? One could start by recognising that he is an academic star, as Su Holmes and Sean Redmond have done in their introduction to Framing Celebrity. Referring to Dyer’s 2006 SCMS keynote lecture, they write: [h]is entrance was greeted with ecstatic applause and he delivered […]
by Wim Staat The Right Stuff (1983) is a film about Project Mercury (1958-1963) and its protagonists, the first American astronauts.[1] It is an ensemble film, as it has an extended cast for several story lines interconnecting the lives of seven astronauts and the test pilot thought to be their predecessor in the 1940s. Philip […]
by Robert Sinnerbrink Although the question of ‘film as philosophy’ has attracted much attention, most discussion has focused on narrative film with only occasional references to documentary.[1] Even less attention has been given to the small number of non-fictional films that focus specifically on philosophers and their work.[2] One such documentary is Kirby Dick’s and […]
by Volker Pantenburg I. Albrecht Schäfer’s installation Swing (2008) is as simple as it is intriguing. In the catalogue its components are given as ‘video projector, DVD player, nylon thread, DVD, color, no sound’. The nylon thread (in the realised work more a robust steel cord) stands out in this list; as will become clear […]
by Clara Miranda Scherffig Introduction According to the Oxford Dictionary a remake is the action of making something again or differently, as well as a film or a music piece that has been recorded again. The construction of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976) and John Smith’s The Man Phoning Mum (2011) can be traced […]
by Geert Lovink Unlike predictions, ‘networks’ are on their way out. The reason for this is the unprecedented concentration of money, power, and infrastructures in the hands of a few monopoly players. Instead of ‘social networks’ we speak of ‘social media’, and that is no coincidence. In fact, ‘network theory’ has followed this trend for […]
by Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever On 5 October 2015 the esteemed Belgium filmmaker Chantal Akerman passed away unexpectedly. Her sudden death created an outpouring of tributes in journals and blogs all over the world, full of sadness about the loss of an extraordinary filmmaker who has been celebrated ever since she […]
Vintage is everywhere. Ranging from vintage design to vintage cloths and vintage media, in our contemporary culture ‘the old rebranded as new’ and ‘the new rebranded as old’ are a striking phenomenon – but what kind of relationship to or longing for the past does ‘vintage’ indicate? Retro nostalgia and other memory practices that can […]
by Janet Harbord What does the work of Giorgio Agamben bring to an understanding of cinema? A political philosopher known predominantly for the ongoing project of works that comprise the Homo Sacer series,[1] Agamben also writes about cinema. However, the relationship between the political determination of his work and the essays on cinema is not […]
by Markus Stauff It has now been 20 years since John Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television was published. With its combined attention to television’s aesthetic, economic, and technological aspects, it was a highly innovative book that questioned a great deal of conventional wisdom. The book’s central claim that, during the 1980s, […]
by Francesco Spampinato Introduction Richard Serra emerged in the 1960s in association with minimalism and land art – two conceptual art movements that speculated on the potentialities of sculpture to affect the space (and therefore the context) in which the work of art is installed or for which it is specifically conceived. Similarly to other […]
by Lidia Merás and Sarah Wright Introduction In 1959, in his first film without Emeric Pressburger since the global success of their collaborative smash The Red Shoes (1948), Michael Powell released Honeymoon (Luna de miel), designed to be a ‘Spanish Red Shoes’. Although the film won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival […]
by Jenifer Chao Introduction In the premiere episode of the Canadian situation comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012) the character Joe, a white prairie farmer, wanders into the local Anglican parish hall to witness a group of Muslims praying and prostrating in unison. Alarmed, he stumbles out of the building to call the […]
by Michael Witt This article examines a little-known experimental compilation film that Jean-Luc Godard constructed and showed within the framework of a series of lectures on cinema history that he delivered in Rotterdam in 1980-1981.[1] In February 1981, during the 10th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Film International 1981),[2] his film Sauve qui […]
by James Harvey-Davitt In Film Fables[1] Jacques Rancière contests some deeply-held theoretical stances on a number of canonical auteurs. He claims these auteurs countered the soullessness of their industrial constraints through a shared act of ‘thwarting’: ‘to thwart its servitude, cinema … constructs dramaturgies that thwart its natural powers’.[2] In doing so he confronts attempts […]
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Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Malte Hagener
Philipps-University Marburg
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Francesco Pitassio
University of Udine
Belén Vidal
King’s College London