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Abstract: A basic question that may come to mind regarding the name of our scholarly interest group (SIG) is how can two seemingly disparate sets of scholarly concerns (i.e., Digital Humanities and videographic criticism) come to co-exist as an interest group' More to the point, why put videographic criticism (VC)—which is already a bewildering category if not in terms of comprehensibility, then in terms of tenure review, funding, and other measures of academic worth—in conversation with an older and far more bewildering and even polarizing vehicle of academic inquiry that is Digital Humanities (DH)'As a SIG, we take this spotlight to re-articulate a point already articulated in the DH and DH-adjacent scholarship of the last ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Matsumoto Toshio's decades of work in intermedial and expanded media practice have recently received scholarly attention, primarily through studies by Miryam Sas, Yuriko Furuhata, Michael Raine, and others. Matsumoto is best known today for the 1969 queer avant-garde quasi-documentary Bara no sōretsu (薔薇の葬列, Funeral Parade of Roses), which transplanted the story of Oedipus Rex onto the "gayboy" culture of Tokyo. Although Matsumoto was not himself gay, his portrayal of explicitly queer (gayboy) subjects with queer (gayboy) performers, as well as the film's fervently experimental aesthetic, is as provocative today as it was at the end of the 1960s. Yet the film does not present queerness with uplifting narratives or ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In confronting the question What is documentary' some theorists have distinguished themselves by adopting a broadly classificatory approach. Rather than attempt to isolate a definitional core of documentary value, scholars such as Erik Barnouw, Bill Nichols, and Michael Renov have offered taxonomies of documentary types, models, modes, and functions.1 Barnouw situates documentary practices within a larger non-fiction tradition, characterizing filmmakers under different roles (e.g., explorers, reporters, poets, chroniclers) and their products within various genres of discourse (e.g., historical chronicles, promotional materials, travelogues, scientific reports).2 In his Introduction to Documentary, Nichols ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Amid ongoing debates within film and media studies about the material organization and cultural meanings of globalization, the former Second World has largely receded from view. "Second World" here refers, of course, to an old label for those formerly socialist societies of East Europe and Eurasia—one that differentiated them from the capitalist First World and the decolonizing Third World—used during the half-century between the end of World War II and the collapse of state socialism that began in 1989. Several waves of transnational scholarship in and around the field have, in various and often divergent ways, rightly discredited the notion that the ostensible unfettering of capital after the Cold War yielded a ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: If you hadn't explained to me the inside of the silver screen with all its subtleties, who knows how long I would have thought that the dreams reflected on that screen were like a karagöz shadow play. When you taught me what cinema life was, you also introduced the heroes of this life to me as "divinity." It would have been nothing if that was all. At the same time, you had created this "love of divinity" in my poor heart by talking about my aptitude for this work.These words are attributed to the fictional character Oriental Star Selma, whose creator is later revealed to be Ziya Şakir, a popular author known for his historical stories during this period. The narrative of Oriental Star Selma was initially ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mel Hunter is a "special, special agent."1 The protagonist of the 1959 syndicated TV show World of Giants, Mel is an American agent who was exposed to dangerous rocket fuel in a mission behind the Iron Curtain. Upon his return home, he began to shrink until he was a mere six inches tall—no doctor knows how to return him to his original size. However, his diminutive stature provides new opportunities for his work as a secret agent, allowing him to sneak unseen into gambling dens, carrier pigeon coops, and the purses of nefarious lady agents. In World of Giants' thirteen-episode run, Mel continues his work for the US government alongside his "normal"-sized partner, Bill Winters, joined midway through the show by ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.In "On Exactitude in Science," Jorge Luis Borges describes a map so ambitious that it covers the territories to be mapped. Given rapid advancements in cartography and geospatial technology, Borges's premise is evolving from the absurd to the plausible. In the age of digital cartography, for instance, it is not unusual to work with data sets, map ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Midway through Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós's 2022 film Dry Ground Burning, the camera pans across a crowd gathered at a rally for Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The shot, filmed during his 2018 electoral bid, slowly reveals the far-right politician's supporters as they sing, chant, look at their smartphones, and pose for selfies. This four-minute pan, a straight-forward capture of a political moment contemporaneous with the film's production, seems like a standard example of observational documentary. But sandwiched between scenes featuring militarized police in semi-futuristic armored vehicles and armor-clad members of a feminist pirate oil cartel guarding their fortress, the rally is a jarring reminder ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The origin point of UFO subculture is typically dated to June 24, 1947, when an initial report of a "flying saucer" near Mount Rainier by Washingtonian Kenneth Arnold quickly sparked hundreds of similar reports nationwide (with varying degrees of irony, earnestness, originality, and reliability).1 The most famous of these claims is almost certainly one originating in Roswell, New Mexico, that July: a purported crash of an alien spacecraft that has remained a source of paranoid fascination for UFO watchers all over the world ever since. Many of the other 1947 claims also retain continued importance in the UFO community, like the so-called Maury Island hoax (which Arnold himself helped investigate), in which one of ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In what feels like a lifetime ago, but in truth is less than twenty years ago, I gave a talk on what I called preenactment in documentary at the "Now (and Again)" BFI symposium. The symposium was focused on reenactment, a topic that never ceases to trouble the peace that documentary as a category seems utterly unable to find. These forays into scripted setups, often complete with actors, lighting, and props, make the already difficult proposition that documentary is entirely divorced from fiction an even harder sell.Unbelievably, looking back at my own archive, I found an abstract for the talk dated before the talk was given, but written proleptically in the past tense, a preenactment itself. It foretells a ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes that photography captures "the sovereign Contingency": the triumphant arrest of ever-flowing time and change by mechanical means.1 If photography reveals the absolute rule of contingency over existence by documenting a slice of time itself, then we might wonder how other visual media display their natures through the expression of their capabilities. My interest here is video games, specifically the science fiction video game Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 2022). In this essay I think about what it means for a video game to represent something through its game mechanical operations and how game studies has understood this capacity in terms of metaphor and allegory. ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Following the assassination of Hamas's head of logistics, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in his Dubai hotel room in January 2010, the Dubai police started an investigation into the circumstances of his death. The investigation's findings were released in a forensic report composed of footage captured by CCTV cameras across the city and matched with hotel, flight, and cell phone records. Showing obscure figures crossing through the city's massively surveilled spaces of commerce and travel, the report aimed to create a chronological timeline leading up to the murder of al-Mabhouh, allegedly by Israeli Mossad agents. The Mossad never responded to the accusations raised by the report. In the media, evidence was measured against a ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna J. Haraway rigorously equates speculative fabulation with scientific fact, arguing that "[speculative fabulation] is storytelling and fact telling … the patterning of possible worlds and possible times."1 Speculative fabulation, then, is an act of science-guided imaginative creativity not only for probing an uncertain or unforeseeable future but also for reconstructing the strata of the past whose excavation could throw new light on our present world. The essay film takes this direction as it activates multiple, often heterogeneous discourses based on the research and quotation of materials associated with seemingly disparate pasts and extends those discourses toward ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This essay examines the dystopic time-traveling proposed in Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer's Nosferasta: First Bite (2021) and Colectivo los Ingrávidos's Tierra en trance (2022). I address these films together to delve into the tensions between the ongoing consequences of colonialism and artistic practices that inquire about the present as the grounds for future self-making. By combining documentary forms and science fiction speculation, both films speak directly to the epistemological collision of the so-called Conquista of 1492.1 Instead of going back to this historic moment as a "distant point in linear time," Khalil, Sweitzer, and Colectivo los Ingrávidos speak to it "as part of their own memories."2 Their ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the introduction to Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981–2022, Jihoon Kim commences with a discussion on two documentaries on labor movements led by women workers: Uridŭrŭn chŏngŭip'ada (We Are Not Defeated, Lee Hye-ran, 2006; hereafter We Are Not Defeated) and Wirogongdan (Factory Complex, Im Heung-soon, 2014/2015; hereafter Factory Complex). Each film epitomizes two documentary traditions delineated in this book: activism and post-activism. The juxtaposition of these films illustrates Kim's aim to showcase the "intensive and compressed coevolution" of the activist tradition from the early 1980s and the post-activist turns of the twenty-first century as a core characteristic of South ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: How is moral unease mediated through films and video' What kinds of moral atmospheres do these widely circulating objects create, especially in a context such as Pakistan where films are otherwise seen as objects of disdain' Timothy Cooper's Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace sets out to answer these questions through an ethnographic inquiry of Hall Road, an electronic market in Lahore that was once a center for film and video distribution.1 Cooper shows the material and phenomenological undercurrents of mediated mauhaul—the atmospheres of film and media. Mauhaul is a metaphor, a symbol, and a container for moral thresholds and values that are contested, negotiated, and hierarchized. ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The past few decades have been an intellectually robust time for critical historical scholarship that challenges traditional conventions of periodization, geographical focus, and disciplinary specialization. Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio for the Millions: HindiUrdu Broadcasting Across Borders is one such work, delving into the history, development, and cultural impact of Hindi-Urdu radio broadcasting across South Asia with considerable verve and scholarly sophistication. The book traverses the colonial period, the tumultuous years of partition, and the Cold War, illustrating how radio became a significant medium for political, cultural, and social discourse. In so doing, it cuts across long-standing disciplinary ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The cover photograph of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema is a delightful preview of what awaits the reader. Actress Colleen Moore, famous for her flapper style and comic performances in silent and talking cinema of the 1910s through the early 1930s, is pictured in close-up on a console television. We see her in one of her best-known roles, in Ella Cinders (Alfred E. Green, 1926), as she mugs, rolls her eyes, and winks for the camera. The setting is the living room in Moore's home in Chicago in 1963, and the sixty-four-year-old actress stands off to the side of the television, with one hand touching the top of the set and the other clinging to her chest and practically clutching the pearls she ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: To fully appreciate the insightful conceptualization that Iván Chaar López uses to analyze the United States' southern border, we must regrettably begin with Donald Trump. Candidate Trump ignorantly assumed that border control was an issue of physical infrastructure: We will build a wall and make them pay for it. One can only imagine that he pictured a golden wall—matching his penthouse toilets—clearly demarcating here from there. Chaar López's The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion punctures Trump's imaginary in two important ways. The book insists, first, that we think of the border as something always in the making (rather than a static cartographic feature upon which a wall can be traced) and ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The so-called historical turn in cinema studies, a polemic reaction to what was seen as an over-emphasis on theoretically informed textual analysis, often makes the scholar feel one has to take sides. Am I more of an archival digger or a hermeneutic ruminator' Kartik Nair's excellent book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror demonstrates one does not have to choose. Regarding horror cinema (c. 1970–1990) from the Bollywood Indian production context, the book provides an original, creative, and engaging model for productively approaching many kinds of cinema, but especially those that are often regarded, however good-naturedly, by academics as guilty pleasures at best or shlock at worst. Without a ... Read More PubDate: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
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