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: […]
From 25-28 March 2021, parallel to the RAI Film Festival 2021, an academic conference featuring research in visual anthropology, ethnographic film and adjacent disciplines will be taking place virtually. Within the broad theme ‘Creative Engagement with Crisis’, the conference invites reflections on the notion of crises and the creative engagements with crises: How might research […]
The ‘Cinepoetics Lectures’, a collaboration between the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and the Kino Arsenal (Institute for Film and Video Art), are open to the public and free of charge – and now also available online as audio recordings. Following the research center’s goal to explore the poetologies […]
Mina, one of the longest running film festivals dedicated to mobile & smartphone filmmaking, is now inviting submissions for the 10th edition of the International Mobile Innovation Screening. From 13-15 November 2021, #Mina2021 will present a public screening of smartphone, mobile and pocket films at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and via Urban Screen […]
From 5-7 November 2020, the Birmingham City University and the Black Sands Educational Project will be hosting the 14th ‘International Conference and Festival on Global Cult Film Traditions’, featuring online academic presentations as well as industry panels and a streamed film festival. The theme of this year, ‘Representations as Weapons: Cult Film and the Politics […]
This article introduces the special section #Intelligence, which includes seven essays addressing the impact of artificial intelligence on cinema and media from a cultural perspective. More particularly, three levels of pertinence are focused on. For the first level, selected papers analyse several representations of non-human intelligence confronted with human intelligence, as provided by film, television series, and video games. On the second level, a set of mutual functioning dynamics between AI and the media are identified and scrutinised. On the third level, the contributing authors consider how AI algorithms lead cinema and media theory to deeply rethink its assumptions about creating and viewing moving images.
by Oscar Raby
by Richard Misek In 1970, experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a cinema auditorium for Anthology Film Archives in New York, in which ‘shell-like’ seats and reams of black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness.[1] He referred to his Invisible Cinema as ‘a machine for viewing’.[2] Though the movie theatre is now […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
The Centre for Screen Cultures at the University of St Andrews has asked staff members, visiting lecturers and PhD students to create themed playlists covering film, television and video. Ranging from contemporary films on human isolation to a playlist centered on documentarian Naomi Kawase, the playlists function both as resources for teaching as well as […]
As film events are currently being cancelled, postponed or moved online, we are specifically inviting “festival reviews” that deal with film festivals in the context of COVID-19 for the film festival review section of our upcoming Autumn 2020 issue. What tactics and strategies are employed to face the current crisis in the festival world? Possible […]
‘There is a point at which methods devour themselves.’ – Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) One can observe, in recent years, an obsession with methods – both in humanities research and teaching. Discussions include apprehensions about the imminent obsolescence of established media studies methodologies, a more liberal (in all senses?) search for synergies with […]
One must imagine Béla Tarr busy. Even though he has repeatedly insisted on the fact that he considers himself retired – at least as a director of feature films[1] – he has not stopped working since the release of The Turin Horse (2011). Currently, he is preparing a book project;[2] between 2013 and 2017 he […]
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Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Malte Hagener
Philipps-University Marburg
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Francesco Pitassio
University of Udine
Belén Vidal
King’s College London