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Abstract: The Activist and Revolutionary Film and Media scholarly interest group (SIG) emerged from a desire for community. There are lots of people invested in radical political film and media, but since the 1980s, this research has become increasingly factionalized. Although we both knew people working in this area, things felt pretty disconnected. We wanted to develop a SIG that would reconnect scholars and practitioners working across these subfields and forge a scholarly community that would help formalize and legitimize this area of study. Interdisciplinarity remains central; we didn't want to create a group around a singular definition of activism or that privileged a particular type of media or methodology. We work ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Can you explain how your research in experimental cinema and new media intersects with postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and queer feminisms'I'm broadly interested in the way images mediate our sense of ourselves and structure our sense of belonging in the world. When I first started writing academically about film, I wrote about mainstream Bollywood cinema and its limited visual vocabulary for addressing queer life in India at a time when there was a growing national LGBTQ movement and ongoing fights for women's rights. But I became tired of writing critiques of films with bad politics and wanted to focus on work by artists and filmmakers who are committed to queer minoritarian life and to exploring the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reviewers of actress Marguerite Clark's feature comedy Mice and Men (J. Searle Dawley, 1916) stressed women in the audience as the main sources of laughter during the film's screenings. One reviewer was struck by "the ripple of mirth, feminine in sound, that passed over the big house in the Strand."1 Exhibitors likewise observed that feature comedies went over well with female patrons. A theater owner from Carrollton, Illinois, discerned that Madge Kennedy's Baby Mine (John S. Robertson and Hugo Ballin, 1917) was "especially pleasing to the women; the house was full of giggles."2 Sometimes exhibitors even suggested that feature comedies played to feminine tastes at the expense of male customers. Reporting that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ace in the Hole (1951) is the first Hollywood film for which Austrian-Jewish émigré Billy Wilder served as producer, director, and head screenwriter. It was also his first box office flop. The work came on the heels of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Wilder's breakup with writing partner Charles Brackett. With new, younger writers who would follow his lead and whims, Wilder used his film to treat the tabloids and thrill-chasing midcentury audiences as cynically as he and Brackett had treated Hollywood and the media in Sunset Boulevard.The picture follows the exploits of sneering, ambitious reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), who has been banished from New York to New Mexico as punishment for journalistic misdeeds. In ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the neorealist classic Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952), the title character, played by Carlo Battisti, goes outside one evening to sell some books to raise money for overdue rent. When he returns, night has fallen, and the hallway of the apartment is dim. Patterns of light move back and forth across the walls, suggesting the presence of trams passing by on the streets below. I have long found this moment to be one of the most beautiful instances of lighting in all of cinema. The lights from the trams appear, hop from one wall to another, and then disappear, creating ephemeral layers of lines and shapes on top of the already intricate wallpaper. Although the film includes scenes photographed on location, this ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Soon after Kaspar Hauser, the protagonist of Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog, 1974), appears in the town of Nuremberg, he is taken to a stable where the town's officials examine him. During the examination, the officials find several objects in Kaspar's possession previously accorded to him by his captor: a letter of introduction, two prayer books, a rosary with a metal cross, and a paper containing gold leaf. In his director's commentary on the scene, Werner Herzog stresses that it is based on real descriptions of the historical Kaspar Hauser and that the objects were those actually found in Hauser's possession. Pondering over the meaning of some of these ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This article compares two video games, both of which are about gobbling up objects and wreaking havoc on quaint, normative towns: Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004) and Donut County (Annapurna Interactive, 2018). In Katamari Damacy, players roll around increasingly large, sticky balls that pick up everything from household items to animals to buildings, creating bizarre, colorful masses that are then shot into outer space. Similarly, in Donut County, players move around holes in the ground, which widen as they swallow up more items, sucking homes and businesses into a jagged chasm that has formed beneath a sunny, pseudo Los Angeles. Though neither video game includes overt LGBTQ representational content, such as gay ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Born in 1896 into an upper-middle-class, assimilated German Jewish family, Lotte Eisner was a bright student and the recipient of a broad humanistic education, which culminated in a PhD in art history in 1924, at a moment when graduate education was rare for women, particularly in the humanities. Working as a freelance art and literary critic for the Literarische Welt and Berliner Tageblatt from 1926 to 1927, Eisner soon found herself immersed in the artistic and political ferment of interwar Berlin film culture. In 1927, despite her initial misgivings about seriously engaging with popular culture, she became the first professional female film critic at Film-Kurier, the leading German trade journal of the period. ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Since the mid-2010s, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and artists have increasingly been turning to virtual reality (VR) and immersive filmmaking for its ostensibly unprecedented ability to conjure empathic feelings that lead to humanitarian action.1 Technology companies and charitable institutions alike have touted immersive storytelling's "potential for good"; prominent examples include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees virtual reality program, UNICEF's Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality for Good initiative, and Oculus's VR for Good project.2 These initiatives emphasize the power of immersive media in a variety of instructive contexts, including medical training and diagnostics, physical ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Abbas Kiarostami's educational film, Beh tartib ya bedoun-e tartib (Orderly or Disorderly, 1981), features four sequences of Tehran's citizens engaging in quotidian activities. In the first, a group of schoolboys descends the stairs to the schoolyard after class. In the second, they line up to drink water from the school water fountain. In the third, they board the school bus. The fourth sequence focuses on drivers negotiating a busy Tehran cross street. For each activity, we see how city life proceeds if citizens are orderly or disorderly. The orderly version of doing things saves everyone time, whereas in the disorderly versions, no one is able to complete their duties. This sense of time loss is experienced by ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The eye carries men to different parts of the world.While virtual reality (VR) scholars have not been blind to its aesthetic and spectatorial affinities across large-scale painting, panoramas, dioramas, stereoscopy, globes, cinema, IMAX, and 3D video, less attention has been paid to the influence of cartographic techniques from the medieval and early modern era of geographic exploration.2 Without denying the obvious phenomenological differences between VR and cartography, cartographic techniques may be considered part of the long dureé of recombinant media that bring the world into visibility, practices of imaginary projection and reconciliation that serve as containers for civilizing and humanitarian discourses. ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 2009, Swiss ex-artillery officer Christian Rouffaer, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), was tasked with documenting war crimes committed in video games, in a research project called "Playing by the Rules."1 Rouffaer found that human rights law was frequently violated in games such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003). This discovery was mocked in the press, with reporters declaring that the Red Cross was out to incite moral panic, could not distinguish between fiction and reality, and had "virtually lost the plot."2 Bad press aside, the outcome of this rather bizarre episode is interesting if we consider how virtual reality (VR) and so-called gamification would later become key to ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On November 20, 2017, artist and architect Alison Killing launched a ten-daylong, web-based multimedia narrative addressing Europe's so-called migrant or refugee crisis. Billed variously as documentary, journalism, and interactive storytelling, Killing's project, titled Migration Trail, draws upon data visualizations, maps, and social media to recreate the journeys of two fictionalized irregular migrants: Sarah, a nineteen-year-old Syrian woman, and David, a thirty-year-old man from Nigeria.1 In separate storylines, these two characters make their way to Europe via the Eastern and Central Mediterranean routes, respectively.2 Sarah's and David's experiences are visualized on a two-dimensional map of the world. Their ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz is an Iranian American practice-based researcher and assistant professor of film production at Georgia State University. Her creative work, which emphasizes community engagement and participatory practice, includes live performance and virtual reality (VR) and multimedia installations. Bazaz explores issues of immigration, diaspora, and liberation, often with a reflexive eye toward the limits and capacities of media itself. Her 2019 film, How to Tell a True Immigrant Story, is a 360-degree documentary VR short made in collaboration with the residents of Saratoga County, New York. Bazaz's sensory film plays with the conventions of the documentary interview, staging an encounter between the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It is not a new idea to suggest that our twenty-first-century technologies of data collection are changing who we are. The idea of selfhood—already under scrutiny by philosophers and information studies scholars alike—is even more precarious in a world of gene indexing, facial recognition, browser tracking, and similarly invasive media. Fortunately, Deborah Lupton's Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives goes much further than rehearsing such well-known threats to personal sovereignty. Ambitious and multidisciplinary, it outlines what amounts to a new theory of media ontology involving human-data assemblages. Digital media users are constantly generating data about themselves as they go about tracking steps ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty, Rahul Mukherjee presents a compelling investigation into the multiple environmentalisms of contemporary India. He convincingly argues for the crucial role of media and mediation in constituting perceptions and publics around infrastructures capable of emitting radiant energies that are difficult to perceive, comprehend, and control. Mukherjee uses invigorating ethnographic and analytical details to elaborate how the mediated and empirical traces of "radiance" contribute to conceptual debates on intermediality, infrastructural politics, public spheres, and human-nonhuman relationality.The two radiant infrastructures investigated in this ... Read More PubDate: 2022-05-02T00:00:00-05:00