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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
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
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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