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 […]
‘HD is about reality’[1] (p. 11). Elisa Linseisen’s first monograph High Definition: Medienphilosophisches Image Processing (Meson Press, 2020), based on her doctoral thesis, opens with a powerful argument. The book is published open access. Through the analysis of documentaries, video art works, galaxy photographs, blockbusters, press images, and Netflix series Linseisen demonstrates that high definition […]
In the early years of the digital turn and the post-medium age, Edward S. Small developed his direct-theory argument and his presentation of experimental film/video as a separate major genre in his 1995 book. He defined the function of experimental film/video as ’neither to entertain nor persuade but rather to examine the quite omnipresent yet […]
In recent years, two monographs have been published about queer film festivals, consolidating the wide range of articles, book chapters, and other work by scholars such as Skadi Loist and Ragan Rhyne. Stuart James Richards’ The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Antoine Damiens’ LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness […]
The year 2019 marked 40 years since the publication of Stars – Richard Dyer’s seminal intervention in film studies which promoted the importance of, and provided a framework for, analysing film stars. The anniversary prompted some reflection on the current state of star studies in a special issue of Celebrity Studies journal[1] and at a […]
Only in recent years has a new awareness about the role of colour in film aesthetics arisen. Several historical accounts of colour in film have appeared, but in 2019 two volumes come as significant contributions to film and media studies: Color Mania and Chromatic Modernity. Color Mania: The Material of Color in Photography and Film (Zurich: […]
Two books with very different contents, languages, and structures published between 2018 and 2019 convey through their respective arguments how displacing might serve as a method for investigating new and heterodox forms of remediation and montage. Both books offer the possibility to cross new terrains of interdisciplinary migration, unexpected ‘adaptations’, and new ways of displacing […]
Comedies and situation comedies have long been a staple of US and British television. How comedies and situation comedies have been consumed, discussed, and decoded during different times and across various viewer communities have become important points of twenty-first century academic and political examinations. Recent scholarship has challenged the frivolous and simplistic character of (situation) […]
In 2012, Helen Warner published the article ‘Tracing Patterns: Critical Approaches to On-screen Fashion’ in which she was still able to claim that ‘the study of on-screen fashion continues to be somewhat marginalised in the academy’.[1] Since then, publications dedicated to fashion and film have significantly grown in number. Beyond the seminal Fashion in Film […]
‘There have never been any good films on that period’, quips Jean-Luc Godard in his salty assessment of 1968, a thunderous era of insurrection, invention, and promise.[1] No artists, no aesthetics, were able to competently capture those outbursts, monumental as they were; elusive and at least a tad unrepresentable, the Parisian barricades (an event that […]
The advent of cinema coincided with the birth of Italian Futurism. The emerging medium seemed perfectly suited to the concerns of a movement promoting new aesthetics and modes of perception, fascinated with the sensation of speed and the dynamism of modern life. However, the film output of Futurism was very limited, with several works lost […]
At a time when women’s access to shaping the public discourse through the exercise of their agency remains a precious commodity, the volumes edited by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers – Female Authorship and the Documentary Image and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies – come as important and necessary contributions to the field of […]
As audiovisual practices become increasingly multiplied and complex − from the omnipresence of (multi-)screens to the overstimulation of digital technologies − art is more sociopolitically-oriented than ever and, conversely, society acquires an aestheticised bias. Cinema still plays an important role in the current media landscape, but it is increasingly pervaded by other art forms and […]
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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
Sapientia University