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 […]
Sarah Barrow argues that the video essay provides a ‘viable alternative to the academic book’.[1] This article explores that claim, considering how a video essay-based project can pursue a single topic in the manner of a monograph. The case study is Indy Vinyl, my collection of video essays and writing about vinyl records in American Independent Cinema. I argue that an approach informed by traditional scholarly values should be augmented by more exploratory thinking, when moving from written to practice-based forms of film criticism.
‘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 […]
This article studies the function of the iconic sign and the operation of diagram-icons in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018), a film about a serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon) who builds a house of corpses before being escorted to hell. What is remarkable in this film is von Trier’s specific use of filmic iconicity in probing the value of Western icons in art and architecture. In voiceover digressions from the narrative action following Jack’s serial killing, a comparison is made between the iconic power of murder on a grand scale (specified as genocides throughout history) and culturally valuated icons of art and architecture. The article focuses on the audiovisual icons in the film that invites the audience to diagrammatic readings and fabulation throughout and beyond the film’s narrative content. After a short introduction to the iconic sign and the diagram-icon respectively, the exploration of the film takes its starting point in how Jean-Luc Godard used the iconic force of the color red in Pierrot le Fou (1965). Even though the significant use of red throughout The House That Jack Built is justified within the context of serial killing, its many reiterations also qualifies ‘red’ as a diagrammatic feature combining iconic elements transversally. This diagrammatic feature foregrounds the film’s fabulatory and haptic levels beyond its strictly narrative content, making way for the wider philosophical comments expounded ‘in the film’ by the figure of Verge (Bruno Ganz). His extradiegetic voice becomes intradiegetic in the last part of the film as his body appears, acting as a guide for Jack into a version of Dante’s hell.
On 12 January 2020 the exhibition Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities opened in the Palazzo del Governatore in Parma. Commissioned by the city’s Department of Culture led by the film studies scholar Michele Guerra and conceived as part of the cultural program for Parma 2020 Italian Capital of Culture, this exhibition offers a transmedial and media-archaeological […]
The online media repository media/rep/ – which also provides PDF downloads of our issues – has made several lectures from the ‘Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory’, held at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, available online. The lecture series, named in honor of the Frankfurt-born philosopher, sociologist, and writer Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), presents innovative […]
From 5-6 November 2020, the Queen Mary University of London will be hosting the conference ‘Experimental Film, Video Art, and the Borders of Cinema’ in cooperation with the British Society of Aesthetics Synergy. The conference aims to highlight the contribution of experimental films and video art to contemporary culture. Overcoming negations – such as non-narrative, […]
Every collective, no matter if a family, an academic discipline, or a nation, is in need of a story that provides an origin as well as a destiny and purpose, but this story – being an aesthetic object in itself – also contains a surplus, something that reaches beyond the sheer functionality of providing an […]
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf has a vacancy for a full-time professorship starting in October 2019 in the field of analysis and aesthetics of audiovisual media within the department of media science. Applicants should have a willingness and motivation to cooperate with the artistic departments of the Film University, to collaborate on interdisciplinary teaching and […]
The book The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, written by Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), and Catherine Grant (Birkbeck, University of London) has been made available in a revised and expanded edition by caboose books within its Kino-Agora book series. Developed from a workshop held at Middlebury College in 2015, […]
by Francesco Pitassio As part of the series of conversations NECSUS has published with prominent scholars (see those with David Bordwell, Ian Christie, Richard Dyer, Anton Kaes, Laura Mulvey, and Vivian Sobchack), we spoke with Pierre Sorlin on his groundbreaking work in film and media studies. Educated as a historian, and working on interdisciplinary subjects […]
On 16 May in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Duke University Press will co-host a launch for two new books in media studies: Eliza Steinbock’s Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change and Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemption by NECSUS editorial board member Toni Pape. […]
From 5-7 June 2019, a conference on Italian actress, diva and icon Anna Magnani will be hosted at the University of Torino, organised by Giulia Carluccio, Federica Mazzocchi, and Mariapaola Pierini. Through a variety of perspectives, the conference aims at tackling Magnani’s iconic work, which has had a peculiar influence on the history of Italian […]
by Malte Hagener and Annie van den Oever Martin Scorsese and production design, early British cinema and Sergei Eisenstein, the Archers and contemporary European film culture – Ian Christie is as versatile as he is prolific. We caught up with Ian between a visit to the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, teaching at Birkbeck, […]
On 5 and 6 April, Richard Dyer, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at King’s College London, will give a master class and a public lecture at the University of Amsterdam. Both events are organised by NECSUS editorial board member Jaap Kooijman. Based on two of Dyer’s recent books, the master class topic is Lethal Repetition: […]
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
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.
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