Festivals, Books, Conferences, Exhibitions
This review examines two recent publications which explore cinema exhibition, alternative viewing practices, audience and reception studies. The books are María A Vélez-Serna’s Ephemeral Cinema Spaces: Stories of Reinvention, Resistance and Community (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Emma Pett’s Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021). Both […]
An infinite exhibition fills the nave: Laurent Grasso’s ANIMA The world of analogies and meaning takes on its full scope, resonances prevail over impoverishing causality. Instead of being the sum of possessed objects, the world becomes the unity of all the spaces granted to the entities that populate it. – Grégory Quenet, curator of ANIMA […]
The Havana Film Festival New York (HFFNY) is the city’s longest continuously running Latin American/US-Latino festival. In this review I examine the nuances of the festival’s 22nd offering from 3-10 November 2022, as well as its unique premise, making it a key space for over two decades of cultural encounter and negotiation. Additionally, I highlight […]
The exhibition Becoming Geological (25 November 2022 – 8 January 2023), curated by Martin Howse and Florian Weigl, maps several earthly trajectories by which the technologically destabilised Anthropocene is offered alternative futures, affirmatively. Situated in V2_ Lab for Unstable Media, a location which was founded as an artists’ initiative in 1981, and which has become […]
In person events, human contact, direct encounters with the protagonists are the keys to a film festival. We are still in a pandemic, let’s not forget, but we are already returning to theaters, to that dark but bright place that makes us feel so comfortable.[1] The introductory text for the 17th International Documentary Film Festival […]
Created under the organization of Brazil’s National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo em Cartaz[1] (2015-) is among the few festivals dedicated to audiovisual preservation in the national circuit.[2] Established as an annual event since 2015, the festival celebrated its 8th edition in November 2022 with the theme ‘ethnographic film – views on the world’,[3] […]
In the area of South Asian film studies, Pakistani cinema has rarely been the subject of focused and dedicated scholarship. As such, Mushtaq Gazdar’s Pakistan Cinema 1947-1997 has remained the only historical study of Pakistani cinema, its disputed origins, and its evolution from the creation of Pakistan in 1947 until the late 20th century. In […]
The discussion of media often meanders between the way media objects are perceived as written texts, projected audiovisual messages, or recorded music on the one hand and material objects on the other. Materiality in the sense of physical matter is considered multi-sensory and in a direct relation to the perceiving body, traditionally – particularly in the arts – associated with processes of valorisation as in the term and concept of ‘aura’. But media studies have long established perspectives beyond simple notions of matter. Even light, sound, and energy have entered the discourse, and materiality can be traced in any and all understandings of media. This special section brings together some of the latest post-digital perspectives on the long-standing discussion of materiality in our ever-changing media landscapes. The contributions represent today’s broadness of the field and discourse, connecting media from their analogue pasts to their materially ambiguous futures.
This roundtable brings together several film festival organisers and scholars to compare notes on the general impact of film festivals on the environment and to anticipate future directions for greening the sector. The event was hosted by The Creative School Catalyst, Toronto Metropolitan University. This is an edited transcript of the roundtable that took place on 13 January 2022 via Zoom.
Sheffield DocFest, the UK’s largest documentary festival, returned this year for its first predominantly in-person edition following two years of pared back, online, and hybrid editions in 2020 and 2021. Returning in June 2022 as a six-day event comparable in size and scale to the 2019 festival, this year’s edition was framed in part as […]
Embracing hybridity beyond the pandemic: The contrasting cases of PÖFF and SGIFF Film festivals have developed to be hybrid multi-layered, ever-expanding complex events that include diverse activities, engage multiple stakeholders, serve various purposes[1] and take place in multiple and diverse places.[2] The outburst of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 caused an unpredictable crisis […]
The thematic contents of the Berlin Biennale 12 and documenta 15, which both took place in Summer 2022, are certainly close, ‘focusing on themes of colonialism and decolonization … art as an opportunity to repair’[1] even though ‘documenta fifteen is practice and not theme based’,[2] its themes also follow decolonisation and demonstrating the continued presence […]
Justin Remes’ Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020) can be treated as the complement to the author’s earlier volume, also from Columbia University Press, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (2015), in that he deconstructs the art of the ‘moving image’ to its fundamentals: i.e., films that […]
How does one win at photography? The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, London is a very good place to ask this question, since it hosts one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions: the Deutsche Börse Prize, whose past winners include Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijsktra, Anna Gaskell, Juergen Teller, and Luc Delahaye. But it is precisely […]
In reviewing The Milk of Dreams, an enthusiastic Laura Raicovich summarises: The exhibition features mostly women and non-binary artists and engages deeply with notions of transformation and identity beyond the anthropocentric. Plants, animals, and machines are integral; the hybridity of these forms emphasizes inter-connectedness, solidarity networks, and alternate forms of knowledge production.[1] These few lines […]
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Belén Vidal
King’s College London
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.
Online
The online version of NECSUS is published in Open Access and all issue contents are free and accessible to the public.
Download
The online repository media/rep/ provides PDF downloads to aid referencing. Volumes are also indexed in the DOAJ. Please consider the environmental costs of printing versus reading online.