Microgenres in Migration

Author(s):  
Bob Rehak

The movement of special effects among media texts is the focus of this chapter, which argues that certain well-known special effects should be approached as “microgenres” that emerge, evolve, and die out at accelerated timespans. Using The Matrix franchise and its signature “bullet time” special effect as a case study, the chapter relates the digital environment of contemporary transmedia to an analog history of borrowings and citations of special effects in film and television. The chapter concludes with a discussion of migration in digital visual culture, expanding the book’s scope to include videogames.

Author(s):  
Stephen P. Weldon

The IsisCB Explore went online in 2015 as a foundational digital resource for historians of science. Built on the History of Science Society’s 100-year-old Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, this service is meant to lay the groundwork for a digital infrastructure to support historical work in the relatively new digital environment where so much modern scholarship now takes place. In order to create this resource, the director of the project, Stephen Weldon, has learned how to shape traditional historical methods, practices, and resources to fit the new digital paradigm. Computer and networking technologies have been built out of the needs and practices of technologists, natural scientists, and business innovators, all of whom employ it in very specific ways, quite different from the practices of humanistic scholarship, and history in particular. As a result, the digital environment is not especially friendly to historical work or products. As a result, it has taken a great deal of effort to understand and refactor historical data so that it functions well within a digital knowledge ecology, a “knowledge infrastructure,” as Christine Borgman refers to it. This paper describes the difficulties (epistemological, cultural, and economic) that make the creation of tools like the IsisCB Explore service challenging for historians and suggests some ways forward.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-498
Author(s):  
Justin Smith

This article charts the history of an experiment, conducted during the autumn and winter of 1986–7, in which Channel 4 trialled an on-screen visual warning symbol to accompany screenings of a series of international art-house films. The so-called ‘red triangle’ experiment, though short-lived, will be considered as a case study for exploring a number of related themes. Firstly, it demonstrates Channel 4's commitment during the 1980s to fulfilling its remit to experiment and innovate in programme form and content, in respect of its acquired feature film provision. Channel 4's acquisitions significantly enlarged the range of international classic and art-house cinema broadcast on British television. Secondly, it reflects contemporary tensions between the new broadcaster, its regulator the IBA, campaigners for stricter censorship of television and policy-makers. The mid-1980s was a period when progressive developments in UK film and television culture (from the rise of home video to the advent of Channel 4 itself) polarised opinions about freedom and regulation, which were greatly exacerbated by the press. Thirdly, it aims to shed light on the paradox that, while over thirty years of audience research has consistently revealed the desire on the part of television viewers for an on-screen ratings system, the UK is not among some forty countries that currently employ such devices on any systematic basis. In this way the history of a specific advisory experiment may be seen to have a bearing on current policy trends.


Author(s):  
Ingrid S. Holtar

This chapter addresses how 1970s films by Norwegian women filmmakers form an unexplored history of cinematic and feminist “elsewheres,” through their many international connections. In particular, the films by Vibekke Løkkeberg were part of the international women’s film festival circuit at the time. Foregrounding her Women in media (1974), shot while the director was participating at the First International Women’s Film Seminar in West Berlin in 1973, the chapter emphasizes connections to women’s filmmaking in the New German Cinema movement. Women in media is comprised of interviews with French, Italian, British and American women working in film and television who discuss the difficulties of gaining access to production. As a case study, Løkkeberg’s film provides an interesting document about the fight for equality in media in Western Europe, and contextualizing connections between a peripheral feminist national cinema (such as that of Norway at the time), and an emerging international feminist network.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002114002110176
Author(s):  
David Morgan

It is often thought that since remote, rare, and ephemeral events such as apparitions are not available to the direct observation of scholars, the question of their nature as events must be set aside in scholarly inquiry. This results in a focus on meaning that can ignore the qualities of the event as reported and as apprehended by devotional imagery that emerges over time to provide access to the event and its relevance for devotional practice. It also encourages concepts of revelation that are not able to consider the event as a visual form of experience and regard revelation itself as something that must be either true or false. This essay proceeds otherwise, arguing that revelation is not a single, closed event, but an ongoing visual process in which sketchy schemata interact with fixed imagery to interpret the event in an ongoing history of iconography and visual interpretation. The essay focuses on the visuality of devotion to Our Lady of Fátima as a case study in how seeing works and imagery functions to make revelation a visual process whose devotional life is ongoing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-479
Author(s):  
Christopher Lukasik

Abstract The publication of David Hunter Strother’s Virginia Illustrated under the pseudonym Porte Crayon in Harper’s Monthly (1854–56) provides a compelling case study through which to consider the role of race in the development of a US mass visual culture. The media combinations found within and the reception history of Virginia Illustrated demonstrate the importance of racialized viewing to the early success of Harper’s Monthly at a critical moment in media history. To be sure, Virginia Illustrated circulated racist stereotypes to be mass consumed, but the image/text operations of Strother’s literary sketches and illustrations also extended the privileges and pleasures inherent in the performance of the white male gaze to the expanding readership of Harper’s Monthly despite the differences in region, gender, and class of that audience. The case study of Virginia Illustrated challenges us to revisit the oddly marginalized relationship of nineteenth-century illustration to literary, art, and media history and invites us to situate nineteenth-century US literature into the wider media landscape of which it was undoubtedly a part.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.


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