In the fall of 2008 Malte Hagener aptly summed up decades of Film (and Media) studies tradition, arguing that its agenda had progressively shifted from an ontological question (‘what is cinema?’) to an historical one (‘when is cinema?’), and finally landed on a matter of location (‘where is cinema?’). Seventeen years later, his interpretive proposal […]
Is it French? Popular Postnational Screen Fiction from France, edited by Mary Harrod and Raphaëlle Moine (Springer International Publishing AG, 2024), is the result of a five-year international research project whose original title was ‘Producing the Postnational Popular: The Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Film and Televisions Series’. Published in open access, the book gathers […]
Karin Wagner’s From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age presents a fascinating exploration of how typography has been shaped and reshaped by socio-cultural and historical influences. Focusing on four distinct phenomena within the practice of typography, Wagner traces their unexpected ‘usage, design, printing as well as dispersion’ (p. […]
Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is an ethnographic exploration of the culture of feminist fandom found on the titular social media platform Tumblr. Hannell uses interviews with 342 participants to explore how the platform has developed a culture of feminist consciousness-raising which has, the book argues, helped […]
Two recent books find common ground in radically rethinking the projective function of media technologies. The first is Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), a detailed media archaeological investigation into the role of optical and projection devices in reorganising the concept of the world at […]
Ten years after Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading,[1] Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton released their book Distant Viewing (MIT Press, 2023), where they explore the ‘methodological and epistemological implications of using computer vision as a tool for the study of visual messages’. (p. 11) When Moretti used his concept of ‘distant reading’, although the study of […]
In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performance (2003), seminal literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coins the term ‘paranoid reading’ to describe the tendency of critics to see their objects of study as having some inherent flaw that the critic must unmask. This paranoid reading, contended Sedgwick, deeply prevents critics’ capacity to sense […]
What sense remains today of mounting a defense of formalism in film and media theory? In fact, two recent books provide compelling accounts of how a taxonomy of ‘forms’ can – exactly in constituting such a taxonomy – capture those singular features of our experiences of works that have usually been thought to militate against […]
Family records and personal analogue artefacts such as home movies and snapshots have continually become noticeable through practices of repurposing and appropriation, particularly in documentary films that have utilised archives either as an illustration, a storytelling device, or historical evidence.[1] Following this perspective, in documentary practices, domestic footage is not just viewed as stale or […]
When speaking about operational images, the first definition of the term that comes to mind is the one proposed by Harun Farocki in Eye/Machine (2003), a series of installation works that traces a genealogy of the evolution of such images. Operational images are images produced by and for machines, which in most cases enable them […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in walking, as evidenced by an increasing number of publications, workshops (or sometimes ‘walkshops’), and other events dedicated to the topic. In this review, I focus on two recent volumes that can be positioned within this growing interest, but particularly contributing to the field […]
The surge of scholarly interest in the essay film has brought to light Theodor Adorno’s analogy in The Essay as Form that is as fruitful as it is intuitive: ‘The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language […]
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
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.