| Features

Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of ‘Televisuality’

November 16, 2015/in Autumn 2015_'Vintage', Features, Interviews /by Jeroen Sondervan

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, […]

Richard Serra: Sculpture, television, and the status quo

November 16, 2015/2 Comments/in Autumn 2015_'Vintage', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

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 […]

Dancing in the sun: The musical as touristic hook in ‘Honeymoon’

June 10, 2015/in Features, Spring 2015_'Animals' /by Jeroen Sondervan

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 […]

Oppositional banality: Watching ordinary Muslims in ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’

June 10, 2015/in Features, Spring 2015_'Animals' /by Jeroen Sondervan

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 […]

In search of Godard’s ‘Sauve la vie (qui peut)’

June 10, 2015/1 Comment/in Features, Spring 2015_'Animals' /by Jeroen Sondervan

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 […]

Disputing Rossellini: Three French perspectives

December 3, 2014/in Autumn 2014_'War', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

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 […]

Laughter and collective awareness: The cinema auditorium as public space

December 3, 2014/in Autumn 2014_'War', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Julian Hanich Introduction ‘[L]aughter allows the audience to become aware of itself.’ This brief statement by André Bazin uttered in passing in his second article on ‘Theater and Cinema’ harbors a number of thought-provoking ideas.[1] The main goal of my article will be to examine what Bazin’s sentence may imply for the collective experience […]

The documentary temptation: Fiction filmmakers and non-fiction forms

December 3, 2014/in Autumn 2014_'War', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Adrian Martin 1. Some directors flirt with it at the beginning of their careers and then quickly move on, never to return, like Jacques Rozier after Blue Jeans (1958) and Paparazzi (1964). Some dwell there secretly, making a spin-off of their better-known productions, like François Truffaut putting together a little poem about planes launching […]

Reconfiguring film studies through software cinema and procedural spectatorship

December 2, 2014/1 Comment/in Autumn 2014_'War', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Marina Hassapopoulou Introduction The increasing use of software and database aesthetics in film and video production has created hybrid modes of spectatorship by altering the dynamic between media production and reception. The reduction in the degree and compass of authorial control invites us to reconsider existing models of cinematic spectatorship and narration within new […]

Editorial Necsus

December 1, 2014/in Autumn 2014_'War', Features /by Jeroen Sondervan

Perhaps no war has stirred the human imagination more deeply than the so-called ‘Great War’. From William Wellman’s Wings (1927) to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004), and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), filmmakers have been reimagining the Great War in distinctly different yet captivating ways, profoundly […]

Representation or misrepresentation?: British media and Japanese popular culture

June 12, 2014/2 Comments/in Features, Spring 2014_'Traces' /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Perry Hinton From the late 1980s to the early 21th century Japanese popular cultural rose from a cult interest to mainstream media in many Western countries, including the United Kingdom. Large numbers of Japanese comics (manga) and animated films (anime) were sold in English translations, gaining their own sections in British book and video […]

Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy

June 12, 2014/in Features, Spring 2014_'Traces' /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega Introduction Historians date the beginning of the Transition to democracy in Spain in 1975 – the year of Franco’s death. However, there are multiple periodisations in regard to its end: the passing of the Constitution in 1978, the democratic election in 1979, the 1981 coup d’état, or 1982, the year in […]

Mapping the rise of the iPhone: Between phones and mobile media

June 12, 2014/in Features, Spring 2014_'Traces' /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Ginette Verstraete Introduction In June 2007 Apple introduced its first generation iPhone, which proved the beginning of a very successful new line of smartphones. At that time smartphones were no more than a convergence of telephones and personal digital assistants produced by Nokia and Sony in Europe, NTT DoCoMo in Japan, and Blackberry in […]

Empire is out there!?: The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film ‘Up’

May 16, 2014/1 Comment/in Features, Spring 2014_'Traces' /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Dietmar Meinel At the beginning of the Pixar animated film Up (Pete Docter, 2009) a young Carl Frederickson is shown eagerly watching the afternoon program at a local movie theater. Set in the early 1930s, the program starts with a black-and-white newsreel montage of the ‘Movietown News “Spotlight on Adventure”’ which provides ‘footage never […]

Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities

May 16, 2014/1 Comment/in Features, Spring 2014_'Traces' /by Jeroen Sondervan

by Thomas Elsaesser The five affinities…with photography? In Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, under the rubric of ‘general characteristics’ of the medium, there is a section called ‘Inherent Affinities’.[1] It follows two sections where Kracauer discusses the recording function and the revealing function – two of the vectors along which Kracauer conducts his theory of […]

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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

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