2017/2 – #Dress

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 20 of 25
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    Dressing the surface
    Bruno, Giuliana (2017)
    This text presents some key issues that drive the author’s ongoing investigation of materiality, hapticity, and surface conditions, in the realm of media, contemporary art, and visual culture. What is the place of materiality in our contemporary visual world of rapidly changing materials and media? Engaging this haptic ‘matter’, the text focuses on the fabrics of the visual, their surfaces, weaves, and textures. In arguing for textural models of ‘fashioning’ images, it exposes patterns of wearing and wearing out. Particular attention in this regard is given to the fabric of the screen, and the material transformations that occur in the surface tension of media.
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    Editorial Necsus
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2017)
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    Fritz Lang (1974/1990)
    Pantenburg, Volker (2017)
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    Intertextuality, cybersubculture, and the creation of an alternative public space: ‘Danmu’ and film viewing on the Bilibili.com website, a case study
    Yeqi, Zhu (2017)
    I will examine the film-viewing experience influenced by ‘Danmu’ (literally barrage), particularly popularised in China by the website Bilibili.com. As a combination of private and public film screening-viewing-transformation systems, Danmu allows the viewer to develop a ‘paracinematic’ reading. It is also used by the audience as a way of constructing a ‘public space’, making the website function as an alternative to limited offline screening and discussion spaces. I will argue that film viewing by appropriating the cybersubcultural platform creates a sphere where the ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ receptions of films join hands.
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    LA GRANDE BELLEZZA: Adventures in transindividuality
    del Río, Elena (2017)
    This essay examines Paolo Sorrentino’s LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (THE GREAT BEAUTY, 2013) as a film where the conjunction of human and milieu maps the immanent links between individual and collective. I draw on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transindividuality as simultaneously a spatial and temporal process of collective individuation. In making the city and its human inhabitant indiscernible, the film preserves the link between solitude and the collective. The collective arises in a preindividual zone of affects that inscribes a non-conscious form of intimacy among bodies in a shared milieu. I examine two major aspects of the film’s expressions of transindividuality: the artwork as a catalyst for the affirmation of disparate forces coalescing around the dynamic disparation of sacred and profane realities, classical and contemporary art; and the conjoined image of city and human crystallising as successive existential territories that are shown in paradoxical simultaneity. The city-human spectacle shows the body passing through endless processes of individuation. It is the dephasing of temporalities in the city-human body, rather than a judgmental opposition between sacred past and profane present, that energises the film in its ability to capture preindividual forces and affective singularities.
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    Only a groomed woman deserves her name: Fashion, emancipation, and stardom in the Czechoslovak film musical THE LADY OF THE LINES
    Gmiterková, Šárka; Papežová, Miroslava (2017)
    Socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s witnessed substantial changes in terms of lifestyle. The film musical DÁMA NA KOLEJÍCH (THE LADY OF THE LINES, 1966) addresses these shifts through female emancipation and fashion. Therefore the film articulates a utopian space of couture fashion as a vehicle for equality of the sexes. The seductive vision of a stylish, empowered lady was presented as accessible to any working class woman. Also, the pages of period lifestyle magazines, the musical form, and the bitter finale tell a different story of a very limited transferability to everyday reality.
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    Providing evidence for a philosophical claim: The Act of Killing and the banality of evil
    Wartenberg, Thomas E. (2017)
    This article extends the thesis that films can do philosophy from narrative fiction film to documentary, a film genre whose philosophical significance has been underappreciated. It argues that documentary films are capable of doing philosophy by providing empirical support for a philosophical thesis. Focusing on the innovative use of reenactment in THE ACT OF KILLING (2012), the argument is that the film confirms Hannah Arendt’s thesis concerning the banality of evil articulated in EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM (1964).
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    Redressing perspectives: Mediation, embodiment, and materiality in digital fashion and smart textiles
    Joseph, Frances (2017)
    Digital technologies have not only introduced different ways of designing and producing textiles and garments and changed their systems of distribution, they have led to new fields of practice and inquiry including digital fashion, wearable technologies, and smart textiles. Bringing together disciplines as diverse as engineering, textile science, health science, design, and materials science, these new interdisciplinary fields have required collaboration and demand new perspectives extending beyond their initial scientific frameworks. While early research was dominated by functional and technical concerns, utilising scientific approaches, the area of smart wearable technologies warrants diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks to better support the development of these particular new forms that combine dress and device, material and digital, bodies and technologies. Curiously, the fields of fashion and dress theory, and of media studies, have been slow to engage with the emerging field of ‘wearables’. Established framings of fashion and dress have tended to focus on systems and symbolism, positioning fashion as an industry that manufactures and sells commodities, or a socio-cultural system of signification that can be ‘decoded’. The field of media studies has focused on culture and communication in relation to media technologies, but has tended to ignore their techno-material conditions. In this essay concepts of mediation, embodiment, and materiality, drawn from areas including media studies, fashion theory, embodied cognition, and new materialism are discussed in relation to digital fashion and smart textiles. These theories introduce new ontological perspectives that help articulate the particularity of these new fields, the ways they contest traditional subject/object relationships, and open up new methodological approaches. Three examples of recent practice-based research projects conducted at the Auckland University of Technology are discussed in relation to these new frameworks and associated design methodologies.
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    TELEKRITIK: Über Song of Ceylon
    Pantenburg, Volker (2017)
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    TELEKRITIK: Über zwei Filme von Peter Nestler
    Pantenburg, Volker (2017)
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    The dress is the screen: Dancing fashion, dancing media
    Baronian, Marie-Aude (2017)
    This essay reflects upon the intimate interrelation between fashion, media, and dance. In particular, it looks at designer Rabih Kayrouz’s 2017 summer collection fashion show (and its filmic version), which features a performance by ballet dancer Marie-Agnès Gillot. Drawing freely from Loïe Fuller’s famous Serpentine dances, the aim is not only to substantiate – historically and ontologically – the fascination for bodily movement from which both the film and fashion industries have emerged, but also to epitomise the inherent choreographic features of both dress and screen.
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    The ghost is just a metaphor: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, nineteenth-century female gothic, and the slasher
    Kindinger, Evangelia (2017)
    This article proposes a feminist reading of Guillermo del Toro’s horror-ghost film CRIMSON PEAK (2015) that is based on the film’s allusions to nineteenth-century female gothic writing and the slasher’s final girl trope. Del Toro utilises the ghost as a metaphor that mirrors the precarious position of women in patriarchal societies (in general) and in horror narratives (in particular). The film simultaneously sketches the development of the genre as such, from literary fiction to film. CRIMSON PEAK is thus a highly self-referential film that borrows from its predecessors and sheds light on the ghostliness of horror as such.
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    The journeys of a film phenomenologist: An interview with Vivian Sobchack on being and becoming
    Hanich, Julian (2017)
    In this interview Vivian Sobchack, a leading film phenomenologist and Professor Emerita at UCLA, looks back at her career as a film and media scholar. She relates how she first wanted to become a novelist – as well as an astronomer – before academia and the study of film attracted her attention. She describes how she became interested in existential phenomenology, how her groundbreaking book THE ADDRESS OF THE EYE took shape, and how it has influenced film studies since its first publication 25 years ago. She also reflects on the value of phenomenology as a research method and responds to criticism of it as a philosophy that is too subjectivist and apolitical.