Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age. A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive's hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.
In: Vestnik Volgogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta: naučno-teoretičeskij žurnal = Science journal of Volgograd State University. Serija 4, Istorija, regionovedenie, meždunarodnye otnošenija = History. Area studies. International relations, Heft 1, S. 44-54
Introduction. The article is devoted to the consideration of McCarthyism as one of the leading factors that influenced the cultural policy and politics of memory in the United States throughout the entire period of the Cold War. Methods and materials. The ways of representing the atmosphere of conservative ideological control in the United States in the films of the 1950's – 2010's are explored. Films are considered media texts, and the images contained in them are considered symbolic resources used to form and transform a collective identity, legitimize power, its control, and repressive technologies and practices – social mobilization, politicization of everyday life, censorship, and segregation into "their" and "strangers." Analysis. In the course of the historical and imagological analysis, a conditional typology of potential agents of McCarthyism is made. The following are distinguished: institutional conformist careerists, administrators; "soft" conformists – failed oppositionists to political pressure; indoctrinated representatives of mass culture, demonstrating the active complicity of the authorities in imposing ideological labels and encouraging spy mania and exposure. Results. Conclusions are drawn that McCarthyism has become a form of anti-Americanism, moral corrosion, and commemorative trauma in American society, the result of the escalation of the cultural, ideological, and mental "storm," producing a state of intolerance not only to the image of the enemy but also to the Other as a whole. This required more than half a century of overcoming and purifying in the media space.
Despite and perhaps because of Joseph Massad's scathing critique of the 'Gay International', and of Israeli 'pinkwashing' efforts, scholarly theorization of sexuality in Arab cinema has been minimal. Within this context, upon which this article elaborates, I offer recommendations for scholarly movement forward in the area of Arab film sexualities, by analysing the intellectual limitations of extant allegorical and auteurist approaches to the subject, and in turn suggest conceptual means towards a more substantive film analytic praxis. In so doing, I draw from critiques of Massad's position as well as of the pinkwashing agenda, both of which have emerged from and around an interdisciplinary array of texts focusing on homonationalism, homonormativity and homocapitalism; while critiquing the concomitant fact that the majority of such texts marginalize or absent Arab same sexualities and Middle Eastern cultures generally, insofar as they retain an unproblematized transnationalist orientation.
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With an estimated 6,9 million deaths and with its enormous scale of economic, social and political collateral damages, the COVID-19 Pandemic has created excessive momentum for re-considering the rules and procedures governing global health – or has it? In this blog contribution, I will discuss the promises and pitfalls of current law-making and law-amending efforts that seek to strengthen pandemic governance post COVID-19 by reflecting on three distinct features of global health as an area of international cooperation.
Frank Ankersmit tells historians of their mission: "You can approximate objectivity only as long as you sincerely despair of approximating it." It follows that it is incumbent upon anyone who represents the past to enter that struggle. Whether by keyboard or camera, historians who do not probe and question their suppositions may seek to represent the past, but they do not make history. A prime question for historiophoty is to ask what this struggle looks and sounds like projected off the page. This chapter considers the cinepoetics of historical objectivity through a model of moving images that rewinds the clock to the emergence of film on screens and traces a new path for cinema through to a digital reimagining of what Tom Gunning calls the "cinema of attractions." It explores the documentary methods of narration and reenactment in Sam Green's Live Documentary practice and analyzes the methods by which filmmakers become cine-historians through articulating the historians' dilemma by audiovisual means in the creation of moving history of shared experience and public spectacle.
This article examines Netflix's recycling content strategies in the era of streaming cinema. It starts from the assumption that because of the different institutional logic at work in the land of SVODs, the affordances that recycled content brings may not be as effective (and necessary) as it has been in Hollywood. Using a database-centered approach, we analyze 658 Netflix Original films. Between 2015 and 2022, Netflix released 440 non-recycled Originals, showcasing a commitment to offering a high quantity of niche films. The dataset equally shows that the percentage of recycled films (33%) follow a linear upward pattern, highlighting the persistence of conservative content strategies. More specifically, (re-)adaptations constituted the biggest chunk of recycled content (68%), as these allow the streamer to quickly fill its catalog with recyclable IP. Netflix's inclination toward sequels (16%), spin-offs (6%), and prequels (2%) aligns with its sequelization strategy, while also leveraging its own IP. Remakes (8%) play a less significant role, likely due to the relatively young age of Netflix's content library. The article concludes that Netflix may, in fact, be less of a disruptive force to the film industry in terms of the diversity of its content creation, prompting further recycling of existing properties.
The latest practices of social and psychological engineering are significantly changing the mental environment of modern societies: the human brain is becoming the battlefield. Achievements in the sphere of high technology, associated with information operations and using the tools of "soft power", make it possible to introduce false paradigms, falsify meanings and values into the minds of large masses of people. The article shows the evolution of the concept of "cognitive warfare" on the basis of analytical materials, analyzes the methods of forming the image of a hostile "alien".
Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters's Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema epitomizes Hollywood's shift in focus from the mass audience fostered by the classic studios to the multitude of niche audiences sought today. "At long last, a top film scholar takes a deep dive into New Line Cinema's remarkable and most unlikely history. Mining a wealth of primary sources and trade press accounts, and with access to New Line's renegade founder Bob Shaye himself, Daniel Herbert deftly recounts the company's rags-to-riches saga and firmly situates New Line as one of the most important Hollywood studios in the past half century." — THOMAS SCHATZ, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era "Exhibiting the same archival dexterity he brought to Videoland, Herbert reconsiders how New Line's eclecticism both predicted and reflected broader changes in US film culture of the late twentieth century. This book will revitalize the field of distribution studies." — CAETLIN BENSON-ALLOTT, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television "Focusing on New Line Cinema, an indie outfit rooted in 1960s college-campus film culture that in the 1990s briefly became the tail that wagged the dog at the WB, Herbert crafts a compelling road map of the volatile movie industry of postclassical Hollywood." — JON LEWIS, author of Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture
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'Life 24x a Second' highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays particular attention to pedagogical practice and students' reflections on what the study of cinema has given to their lives. This book provides multiple perspectives on cinema that matters for the deepest personal and social reasons-from films that represent psychological healing in the face of individual losses to films that represent humanitarian hope in the face of global crises. Ultimately, Walker shows how cinema that moves us emotionally can move us toward a better world.
Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema's ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang's film, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.
Theory represents the highest form of scientific knowledge in any discipline, a sort of certificate of maturity of the latter, and, at the same time, the key to its systematic teaching and understanding. From this point of view, international studies show a somewhat paradoxical picture. On the one hand, at the moment there is no shortage of either theoretical studies of international political issues or textbooks on the theory of international relations. On the other hand, their common leitmotif remains the idea that international studies either have not yet acquired a full-f ledged theory, or, due to their inherent complexity, dynamism and inconsistency are not subject to systematic generalization in principle. As a result, teaching of the IR theory turns out to be equally inconvenient for the lecturers, if they want to not just bombard students with terms and personalities, but teach them to effectively use different concepts and approaches, and for students. The author argues that these difficulties stem not only from the objective complexity of international processes and problems, but also from the subjective theoretical, methodological and philosophical specifics of the textbooks on the IR theory. To substantiate this claim this paper examines a selection of modern Russian and foreign textbooks on IR theory. The first section summarizes their key advantages, which include, first of all, the fact that they all successfully perform an educational function, introducing the reader to the key approaches, schools and theories that form the 'body' of modern IR theory. In this regard, one can easily find both textbooks specially designed for an unprepared audience which provide an introduction to the discipline, and publications containing an in-depth analysis of the driving forces and internal logic of the IR theory development. At the same time, as shown in the second section, all modern textbooks on IR theory share a number of common short-comings, which can be divided into methodological and philosophical ones. The former include not sufficiently substantiated logic of presentation, the lack of clear criteria for structuring the material and explicitly formulated principles for selecting approaches to be considered. The latter imply reliance on extremely shaky philosophical assumptions, which, consciously or not, reproduce post-modernist views on the problems of ontology and epistemology of international relations and international studies. And it is in a critical revision of these basic philosophical principles where, according to the author, lies the key to addressing the problems in both teaching the IR theory and formulating the theory of international relations in the strict sense.