2015/1 – #Animals
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- ReviewStorytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narrativesÇağlayan, Emre (2015)
- ReviewDossier: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015de Valck, Marijke; Baars, Fanny; Bower, Molly; Butt, Marina; Celeste, Aidan; Gialitis, Aleksas; Maciver, Frances; Schumacher, Anne; Suchá, Lenka; Vandergeerde, Sarah (2015)
- ReviewEDUCATION IN THE SCHOOL OF DREAMS: Travelogues and early nonfiction filmFreeman, Adam Ludford (2015)
- ArticleDancing in the sun: The musical as touristic hook in HONEYMOONMerás, Lidia; Wright, Sarah (2015)The British/Spanish co-production HONEYMOON (LUNA DE MIEL, Michael Powell, 1959) is a curious case of an export for foreign audiences that won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival yet was a commercial failure. Taking this now forgotten film as a case study, we will investigate the musical genre from a transnational perspective. Recently restored to its original length, Honeymoon includes compositions by Manuel de Falla and Sarasate, as well as performances by ballet dancer Ludmilla Tchérina and Spanish dance star Antonio (Ruiz Soler), both choreographed by Léonide Massine. We examine the interplay between national and transnational elements in a musical that tries to emulate the success of THE RED SHOES (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948) by putting it in the context of the Spanish cultural and economic policies of promoting the country.
- ArticleCinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in BOVINES, with Deleuze and GuattariMcMahon, Laura (2015)Deleuze elaborates accounts of cinematic time and of becoming-animal quite separately, without addressing potential links between these accounts. Drawing on a range of works by Deleuze and Guattari, this article allows these accounts to intersect through a reading of the aesthetics of slowness in the documentary art film Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches (THE TRUE LIFE OF COWS, Emmanuel Gras, 2012) and its generative focus on (de)territorialisation, becoming, and affect. In privileging what Peter Hallward calls ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, Bovines implicitly proposes a celebration of biovitality rather than an interrogation of biopolitics, pointing to the possible political limitations of the film and of the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework deployed here.
- ReviewThe documentary film bookWahlberg, Malin (2015)
- ArticleIn search of Godard’s SAUVE LA VIE (QUI PEUT)Witt, Michael (2015)This article examines a little-known compilation film titled Sauve la vie (qui peut) that Jean-Luc Godard created in 1981 within the framework of a series of lectures on cinema history that he delivered in Rotterdam in 1980-1981. To make this compilation film he combined sections from his Sauve qui peut (la vie) with extracts from four other films. Based on archival research, the article considers the context for the screening, the film’s structure, Godard’s wider engagement with the filmmakers whose work he incorporated, the prints he used, my attempts to reconstruct the film, and its reception in 1981 and today.
- ReviewToo much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospectiveAlbuquerque, Paula (2015)
- ReviewMcMansion of media excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISITÅkervall, Lisa (2015)
- ArticleTasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) lossSmaill, Belinda (2015)In this essay I explore how two divergent examples of the nonfiction moving image can be understood in relation to the problem of representing species loss. The species that provide the platform for this consideration are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the polar bear. They represent the two contingencies of species loss: endangerment and extinction. My analysis is structured around moving images from the 1930s of the last known thylacine and the very different example of ARCTIC TALE (Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson, 2007), a ‘Disneyfied’ film that dramatises climate change and its impact on the polar bear. Species loss is frequently perceived in a humanist sense, reflecting how we ‘imagine ourselves’ or anthropocentric charactersations of non-human others. I offer a close analysis of the two films, examining the problem of representing extinction through a consideration of the play of absence and presence, vitality and extinguishment, that characterises both the ontology of cinema and narratives about species loss.
- ReviewDavid Reeb: Traces of Things to ComeTorchin, Leshu (2015)
- ArticleFilm studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal LocomotiveGrant, Catherine (2015)
- ArticleFeminist film studies 40 years after VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA, a triologueMulvey, Laura; Rogers, Anna Backman; van den Oever, Annie (2015)Forty years after the publication of her seminal essay VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA in Screen, Laura Mulvey, together with Anna Backman Rogers, has edited Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, which is the latest instalment of The Key Debates series. NECSUS invited Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers to join Annie van den Oever, editor of NECSUS and series editor of The Key Debates, in a ‘triologue’, which in part reflects and re-emphasises the topics publicly discussed during the Feminisms symposia.
- ArticleThe audiovisual essay as art practiceÁlvarez López, Cristina; Martin, Adrian (2015)
- ArticleCows, clicks, ciphers, and satireTyler, Tom (2015)The social network game FARMVILLE, which allows players to grow crops, raise animals, and produce a variety of goods, proved enormously successful within a year of its launch in 2009, attracting 110 million Facebook users. However, the game has been criticised for its mindless mechanics, which require little more than repeated clicking on its colourful icons. By way of parody, Ian Bogost’s COW CLICKER permits its players to simply click on a picture of a cow once every six hours. In this essay I extend Bogost’s critique and suggest that COW CLICKER highlights not just the soulless inanity of FARMVILLE gameplay but also the paucity of that game’s portrayal of the painful reality of a dairy cow’s punishing daily existence and untimely end.
- Review
- ReviewReaching out!: Activating space in the art of Olafur EliassonEriksson, Olivia (2015)
- ArticleHorseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinemaHockenhull, Stella (2015)Throughout Béla Tarr’s latest and reputedly final film THE TURIN HORSE (2011), the horse (Ricsi), as the title of the film indicates, leaves the spectator in no doubt that she is an important, if not the most important, individual within the narrative. However, unlike most films which feature animals as central protagonists, at no juncture is the horse’s behaviour articulated in human-driven semantics. Furthermore, she is never presented with what Emmanuel Gouabault, Annik Dubied, and Claudine Burton-Jeangros describe as a superindividual status. This stated, neither does the director devalue the role of the animal. Instead, Ricsi’s performance can be analysed in what Brenda Austin-Smith argues is ‘memorable film characterization’, whereby animal performance is valid and ‘counts for something’. While it cannot be suggested that Ricsi deliberately acts as a character her performance is equally valuable for analysis both within and outside the context of the narrative. Applying performance theory and film theory to a study of the role and performance of the horses in two films, THE TURIN HORSE and OF HORSES AND MEN (Benedikt Erlingsson 2013), this essay proposes an alternative and more fitting approach to the study of animals in film. The contention here is that neither film humanises or ‘starifies’ the horses, yet all of the equine presentations are significant, as well as examples of what Michael Kirby terms simple acting. This essay begins by examining the ways in which animal performance has predominantly been represented and discussed in media and film before proposing Kirby’s notion of simple acting as a mode of analysis.
- ReviewTelevision studies reloaded: From history to textScaglioni, Massimo (2015)
- ArticleEditorial NecsusNECSUS Editorial Board (2015)