2017/1 – #True

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Sweeping changes in Eastern Europe: The documentary frame in Gerd Kroske’s ‘Kehraus’ trilogy (1990-2006)
Hongisto, Ilona (2017) , S. 125-144
Seeking to expand established notions of documentary cinema, this essay suggests that the indexical, the evidentiary, and the representational are not enough to account for the work of documentary cinema in the real. Drawing on Gerd Kroske’s KEHRAUS trilogy (1990, 1997, 2006) on the lives of street sweepers in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the essay proposes that documentary cinema be considered ‘an aesthetics of the frame’. The argument of the essay builds on the ways in which the three films relate the visible and the audible in the frame to what is left out. The outside of the frame becomes a defining element in how the documentaries capture and express the enfoldment of the Post-Wall transition period to the lives of the protagonists. Through analysing the technological, stylistic, and contextual qualities of the documentary frame in the three films, the essay draws attention to the frame’s embeddedness in the politics of recognition and in processes of actualisation. Instead of locating Kroske’s longitudinal project within the tradition of the indexical chronicle, the essay shows how the trilogy pushes reality to actualise.
The case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’
Coley, Rob (2017) , S. 77-104
In its central concern with questions of epistemology and problems of knowing, detective fiction has always ‘theorised itself’. Over and above any particular crime, the practice of investigation has always supported a broader inquiry into how the world might be interpreted, into how different types of evidence might render the truth of this world knowable, and where the limits of certainty about this knowledge might lie. The current ubiquity of the television ‘crime board’, also known variously as the ‘case board’ or ‘murder board’, offers evidence for a shift in this tendency. Surveying a range of examples from contemporary television drama, this article considers how crime boards both express and perform conditions in which human knowledge of the world is in crisis. Crime boards, and the television shows in which they feature, increasingly problematise rather than uphold the representational authority of ‘truth’ – they serve to investigate phenomena that exceed human powers of detection, but also provoke a more speculative practice, a mode of detection in which the world might still remain aesthetically knowable.
Acts of laughter, acts of tears: The production of ‘truth-effects’ in Oriana Fox’s ‘The O Show’ and Gillian Wearing’s ‘Self Made’
Walsh, Maria (2017) , S. 167-187
In this article, I explore the ‘truth-effects’ of the performative dimension of two artists’ works: Oriana Fox’s therapy chat show THE O SHOW (2011-ongoing), episodes of which were performed live and broadcast simultaneously online, and Gillian Wearing’s experimental documentary SELF-MADE (2010). Situating my argument in relation to Lionel Trilling’s SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY, I claim that authenticity has changed in contemporary cognitive capitalism from modernity’s advocacy of self-alienation to becoming a matter of ‘doing’ sincerity by means of deploying ritualistic formulae or techniques in social exchange. This is exemplified in the artists’ works by techniques such as R.E.B.T. (Rational Emotional Behavioural Therapy) and Method acting, which are used to produce a slippage between authenticity and sincerity for performers and spectators alike.
Outbreak of violent protests prompts a state of emergency
THE ANTI-BANALITY UNION (2017) , S. 283-285
Confronting the screen. Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest at the New Museum
Bartunkova, Barbora (2017) , S. 245-260
Current trends across three European human rights film festivals
de Valck, Marijke (2017) , S. 209-218
William Kentridge: Thick Time
Greslé, Yvette (2017) , S. 261-269
Taking stock: Two decades of teaching the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism
Witt, Michael (2017) , S. 35-59
This article takes stock of a long-running pedagogical experiment in audiovisual film studies. The author first introduced an audiovisual essay assessment component for an undergraduate film analysis course at the University of Roehampton in 1997. He subsequently designed and introduced a course devoted entirely to the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism and analysis. He reflects here on his experience of delivering this course over many years, outlines the theoretical rationale that underpins it, and presents a selection of the audiovisual essays made by some of the approximately 600 students who have now completed it.
Romanian and Hungarian film cultures at the Transilvania International Film Festival
Virginás, Péter (2017) , S. 219-225
My crush was a superstar
Galibert-Laîné, Chloé (2017) , S. 279-281
Snake oil in N—–town
Boone, Steven (2017) , S. 287-288
Cinema’s Turing test: Consciousness, digitality, and operability in HARDCORE HENRY
Yu, Chang-Min (2017) , S. 189-207
Through defining cinematic subjectivity as both composite and aggregate, this article examines cinema’s Turing test – the relationship between artificial intelligence and cinema – via the case study of HARDCORE HENRY (2015). It does so via analysing how the film is composed of a series of (semi-)subjective images that deliberately imitate the style of first-person shooters in the entanglement of vision and tactility and investigating how the electronic consciousness formulated by the film is ‘pure intelligence’ in both senses.
False color/real life: Chromo-politics and François Laruelle’s photo-fiction
Granata, Yvette (2017) , S. 105-124
This article looks to false color practices within photography, cinema, and media imaging technology, from surveillance to photographic art, and the manner in which they do not remain positioned on separate planes of Truth versus Fiction. In film and media theory, color is not only the problem of the metaphysics of color versus ‘reality’. Film theory realism has also always been concerned with the realness of color practices and social and racial violence, color and death, color and the corpse. In this way, film and media theory draw the line for approaching color imagery on the grounds of chromo-politics, historical, and new. With the conceptual lens of François Laruelle’s ‘photo-fiction’ this article aims to re-think the relation of realism, fiction, and the politics of color imagery through an analysis of ‘false color’ practices. Ultimately, I look to contemporary thermal images and the chromo-politics of contemporary images via employment of Laruelle’s non-philosophy and photo-fiction.
Critique, protest, activism, and the video essay
Lee, Kevin B. (2017) , S. 271-278
Video essays curated for the Spring 2017 issue of NECSUS are introduced as a way to view audiovisual film criticism and scholarship in a more explicitly social and political context. The author finds themes of social critique, protest, and activism underrepresented in audiovisual essay work originating from both popular video sharing platforms and from academia. The author interrogates the nature of his own interest in these themes as related to his background as a cinephile, promoting the question of how a cinephile might become political as well as how the production of video essays could be construed as a political activity.
Problems with the gendered POV shot in LILYA 4-EVER
Sandusky, Kiera (2017) , S. 289-291
Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2017) , S. 1-2
For a radical media archaeology: A conversation with Wolfgang Ernst
Roy, Elodie A. (2017) , S. 3-14
This interview retraces and illuminates some aspects of Wolfgang Ernst’s pioneering media archeological propositions. Ernst provides insights into the most significant methodological challenges for media archeology for scholars in the Humanities, charts future directions in media archeography, and calls attention to the ever-renewed necessity to think about our contemporary technological condition.
Statistic intersubjectivity: A phenomenology of television audiences
Ferencz-Flatz, Christian (2017) , S. 15-33
In the following paper I engage in a phenomenological interpretation of the so-called ‘modernity-thesis’ – the idea that perception is historically mutable, while cinema in particular and modern media in general are symptoms of such mutations – in Walter Benjamin’s ARTWORK essay. Thus, in the first part of the paper I specifically follow the impact that the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life and the corresponding rise of statistics in the field of theoretical thought have on perception. In the second part of the paper I try to apply Benjamin’s insights for an analysis of television audiences while drawing the consequences that derive from here for a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity.
Training the eye for war: A politics of spatial fictions
Licha, Emanuel (2017) , S. 145-166
Fort Irwin National Training Centre is a United States Army facility situated in the Mojave Desert in California used for training soldiers before they are deployed in various conflict zones. Simulated environments, such as mock Iraqi or Afghan villages, are used for this purpose. In this essay, I consider the use of fiction in preparation for reality, but also as a means to augment and orient it. Looking at how three different groups of users are moving about this training facility, namely the soldiers, the role players, and the journalists, I discuss its function as an optical device that is used to frame the experience of each of these groups. This framed experience is not only bound to this camp, as it is prolonged and has repercussions outside of it as well – and this is how the real gets influenced by the fictionalised reality of the camp. I look at historical examples of creative fiction in politics to show that the deceptive strategy that was at stake then is what differs fundamentally at Fort Irwin. The last section discusses Mirages, a film on this training camp that I directed, and the role that the images from this film play in producing a critique of the image, acknowledging the fact that they participate in the dissemination of a framed vision of war.
Archives of the present − memory work in the making: ‘Transmission from the Liberated Zones’ (Filipa César, 2015)
Wahlberg, Malin (2017) , S. 237-244

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