The purpose of the book review section is to inform NECSUS readers about new scholarship in media studies and to support critical engagement with published work. Please consult the Review Guidelines for further guidance. In the upcoming issues of NECSUS, we are particularly interested in featuring reviews of the following books: The Ethnographic Optic: Jean […]
How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity – the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others – help us reimagine and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself?[1] This is the question at the heart of the exhibition Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep, curated by Marianne Cloutier, Aleksandra Kaminska, and Alanna Thain, held at the […]
At the center of Lazzaretto Vecchio, the immersive island of the Venice Film Festival, there is an open social space where directors, producers, press, volunteers, and festival visitors can gather together to grab quick drinks, meet old and new friends, and sit down for interviews and/or business talks. The community space offers a relief from […]
Within the Venice Film Festival, a dedicated section for immersive works was introduced in 2016, quickly gaining competitive status alongside traditional cinematic works. Venice Immersive serves as both an exhibition and promotion venue for XR and a forum for discussing pivotal market issues. This interview with the Venice Immersive creators and curators, Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac, delves into the early stages of the section, its objectives, the challenges faced, and the major issues within the immersive works market.
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 […]
Accreditations typically determine how people access a film festival: they determine whether someone acts, for instance, as a journalist, a producer, a creator, a researcher, or as a regular member of the audience. The fact that a festival does not consider any accreditation system also conditions how attendees behave during the event. The spaces one […]
Proudly announcing on its website ‘thirty-seven years of emotions’, the 37th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato promised a gargantuan feast to those prepared to disengage themselves from the demands of everyday life during nine packed days. This year, the festival’s program boasted ‘470 films including 35mm, 16mm, restored masterpieces and hidden gems from all over […]
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 […]
The One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (One World), which takes place in March, opens the Czech festival season. Since its inception in 1999, initiated by a human rights campaigner Igor Blaževič, this has become a reputable event and one of the major European human rights film festivals. In terms of the total number […]
Amidst violent police killings of people of colour, a global health pandemic, and a grassroots surge in activism calling for social justice in the US and abroad, the Boston Latino International Film Festival (BLIFF) was more crucial than ever in 2020. Launching virtually from 23-27 September 2020, the community festival continued with its nearly twenty-year […]
‘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 […]
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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