2016/2 – #Home

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 20 of 21
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    Being Bowie
    Brooker, Will; Hughes, Rebecca (2016)
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    Dreaming of Cinema / Slow Cinema
    Newton, James (2016)
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    Editorial Necsus
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2016)
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    Even today there are people who think these harmless little books are dangerous: An interview with David Bordwell
    Hagener, Malte (2016)
    After a distinguished career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, David Bordwell remains active as a scholar, as a public speaker, and as a visitor at film festivals. With his partner Kristin Thompson he has not only written three important books – FILM ART: AN INTRODUCTION (1979; 10th edition 2010), probably the most widely used introductory film studies book; FILM HISTORY: AN INTRODUCTION; and THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA: FILM STYLE & MODE OF PRODUCTION UNTIL 1960 (with Janet Staiger, 1985) – but he also maintains the blog Observations on Film Art (http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/), which includes reports from his ongoing research, discoveries at film festivals, and discussions of current issues in film culture. This email dialogue touches his career, the ‘paradigm wars’, and the current situation in which film culture is being reconfigured.
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    For here there is no place that does not see you: MINORITY REPORT and art as de/legitimisation
    Früchtl, Josef (2016)
    The article argues that art is part of a panoptic culture in a twofold sense: first, as long as it holds fast to an emphatic claim to truth and, by association, perfection; second, as long as it remains fixated on visuality, as is primarily the case in film. The article tests this double assumption by analysing a popular work of art from the modern age, the film MINORITY REPORT.
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    From single male guest worker to Muslim: An archaeology of iterating archival footage on Dutch television
    Meuzelaar, Andrea (2016)
    Over the course of more than 50 years Dutch television has produced an enormous amount of stories and images of Muslim immigrants. These stories and images are preserved in the Institute of Sound and Vision, the Dutch national audiovisual archive-, where they are constantly available for reuse. This article presents an archaeology of iterating archival footage that has come to represent a pivotal moment in the Dutch televisual narrative of Islamic immigration. The footage – an item from the current affairs magazine TELEVIZIER that was broadcast in 1969 – depicts the recruitment of cheap labour forces in Morocco by a Dutch official. Due to its evocative nature and its capacity to illustrate the beginning of postwar immigration the footage has been recycled extensively over the course of time. This essay traces the iterations of the TELEVIZIER footage through 50 decades of Dutch television history and demonstrates how the televisual discourses on Muslim immigrants have changed over time. The study departs from a constructivist paradigm of archives and cultural memory and demonstrates how the TELEVIZIER footage has adopted, absorbed, and added new meaning through time. The analysis of how and when the meanings of the footage shift sheds light on the changing televisual discourses of Muslim immigrants, on television’s modes of representing and transforming the past, on television’s symbiotic relationship with its own history in the shape of its archive, and on the canonisation of archival footage.
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    From the bedroom to LA: Revisiting the settings of early video blogs on YouTube
    Hillrichs, Rainer (2016)
    This article revisits the settings of early video blogs on YouTube and the arguments made about these settings thus far. Video bloggers’ use of domestic and other settings is a far more complex issue than it may initially appear. Convenience, creative ambitions, viewers’ expectations, and emerging conventions intersected in this dimension of video blogging. In contrast with the notion of private spaces that were simply shown as they are, I suggest that bedrooms were consciously and performatively put into the scene. For these reasons, and because videos were typically produced to be publicly shown on YouTube, I challenge the notion of a genealogical relation of video blogs with home movies and videos. Instead, video blogs should be historicised and contextualised with other public audiovisual practices.
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    House Arrest
    Torlasco, Domietta (2016)
  • Review
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    Songs of home (and away): Ethnically-coded diegetic music and multidirectional nostalgia in fiction films about Polish migrants
    Heuckelom, Kris Van; Guść, Iwona (2016)
    This article offers a textual and contextual analysis of ethnically-coded musical performances in migration-themed fiction film, with a particular focus on productions featuring expatriate characters from Poland. As we argue, the Polish sample substantially differs from soundtrack-related approaches prevalent in films about postcolonial migrants and ethnics. In the hands of the filmmakers and actors involved, traditional Polish songs that typically revolve around protective domesticity and bonding (especially lullabies) hint at the possibility of reinstalling a sense of intergenerational affinity at the core of the local household. Therefore, rather than evoking an aura of multicultural hybridity or exotic Otherness, the foreign-language musical performances featured in the films involved create a soundscape in which nostalgia ceases to be the exclusive property of the displaced newcomer.
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    The audiovisual essay as performative research
    Grant, Catherine (2016)
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    The Calais Jungle: Mediations of home
    Rosello, Mireille (2016)
    This article focuses on the relationship between the definitions of home and the contemporary figure of the migrant. The specific context is the politics of representation that has developed around the so-called Jungle in Calais, the unofficial refugee camp that the French State has regularly attempted to dismantle for years. In the aftermath of one particularly spectacular operation, this study asks what it means for the media to have reported on the end of the Jungle in October 2016. It explores the origin of the word ‘Jungle’ and its strategic uses by various social actors who either oppose or embrace the label. Depending on whether they can successfully describe the Jungle as a home or insist that it cannot be one, migrants, volunteers, journalists, sociologists, lawyers, and politicians are able to justify the decisions they make. Depending on which concepts or metaphors of home they invoke, social actors can defend radically different agendas such as the destruction of tents and caravans, the distribution of food and clothes, or the building of an unofficial shop. An analysis of the instrumentalisation of the concept of home shows which political or ethical agendas are better served by the deployment of radically different conceptions of the word.
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    The filmic representation of home in transnational families: The case of I FOR INDIA
    Cuevas, Efrén (2016)
    This article intends to study the filmic representation of home and homeland in transnational families through an analysis of the documentary I FOR INDIA (2005). This film, made by Sandhya Suri, offers an autobiographical portrait of an Indian family that emigrated to the UK in the 1960s. Following their story, it will be seen how transnational families are changing the traditional understanding of home, a concept normally associated with the notions of homeland and the family house. Since Suri builds this portrayal of her family with the help of a valuable family archive of home movies and audio reels (shot by her parents and by her Indian family), the article gives special attention to the role of this domestic archive in the narrative of the documentary and in the configuration of transnational families.
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    The home screen as an anchor point for mobile media use: Technologies, practices, identities
    Werning, Stefan (2016)
    Mobile media use is more dispersed and de-centralised than ever – spatially and socially, but also in terms of the platforms and apps involved. In that context, the home screen of the smartphone’s operating system arguably acts as an anchor point and catalyst that not only shapes the procedural rhetoric of the apps using it but also ‘remediates’ several traditional functions that we associate with the notion of home. This article conceptualises the home screen as a hybrid concept between place and practice. For instance, customising the screen can be interpreted as a playful performance of the user’s online identity, especially since sharing screenshots is becoming increasingly common as a cultural practice. This notion of curating the surface of one’s media device and assessing it in aesthetic terms is contextualised with reference to historical practices of constructing domesticity in the 19th century by way of designing and photographing one’s family home. To retrace the shifting functions of the Android and iOS home screen, the article pursues a comparative software studies approach that outlines how they evolve as socio-technical systems in terms of affordances, material metaphors, and rhetoric, often reflecting public discourse around mobile phone use in general. Finally, the findings are offset against prominent discursive frames that characterise the home screen as a ‘hallowed place’, thereby demonstrating the ongoing relevance but also the ambiguity of the concept of home in mobile media use.
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    The politics of spatiality in experimental nonfiction cinema: Jonathan Perel’s TOPONIMIA
    Smith, Patrick B. (2016)
    This article maps out the presence of a spatio-political tendency within a diverse corpus of experimental nonfiction films. Within such works urban/rural landscapes and spaces – typically presented through protracted, deep focus shots – become the central and structuring foci through which to deploy critiques of authoritarian state governance, global capitalism, and neoliberalist political hegemony. Using Argentinian filmmaker Jonathan Perel’s film TOPONIMIA (2015) as a case study, this article examines some of the political and aesthetic potentialities for this mode of film practice.
  • Review