Coda

Queer Timing ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 149-152
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Sexual Representation

This coda draws attention not only to the opacity of sexuality but its complex ordering across multiple, dynamic registers. It instigates a close reading of a digital fragment from the archive of early cinema in order to denaturalize processes of sexual representation and their interpretation, and to consider their imbrications in sexuality itself. It argues that the simultaneous sexual transparency and opacity of such digital fragments in the present foregrounds the ongoing value of an interdisciplinary film history while also sharpening the need to make explicit our perspectives, disciplinary frameworks, and approaches to film historiography.

Between Copyright and Creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Amanda Egbe
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Archaeological Approach

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.

Summoning the Ghosts of Early Cinema and Victorian Entertainment

2020 ◽  
pp. 136-154
Author(s):  
Su-Anne Yeo
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
Film History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Museum Exhibition

This chapter analyses the singularly arresting yet endlessly repeatable appearance via projection of the iconic British supermodel Kate Moss within the recent V&A Museum exhibition Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen. Originally created for the late fashion designer’s 2006 Widows of Culloden show in Paris, this appearance by Moss was no less rapturously received at the V&A exhibition than it had been at the hologram’s launch almost a decade previously. Drawing upon scholarship in the fields of film history and media history, the chapter argues that the Kate Moss hologram should be conceptualized not as a ‘new’ technology, but as a remediation of older cultural forms and practices such as the Victorian entertainment known as Pepper’s ghost and the genre of early cinema known as the serpentine dance. Subsequently, the chapter examines how the exhibition’s marketing and critical reception helped to construct cultures of appreciation that reinforce dominant and idealist discourses of technology. The chapter argues that contemporary film and media culture cannot be understood without an appreciation of older forms and practices of visual entertainment and amusement.

scholarly journals Cultivating the Early Canons: The Pordenone Silent Film Festival

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-95
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Small City ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
The North ◽  
Special Events ◽  
The World ◽  
Les Miserables

Festival Report: For passionate lovers of silent cinema, the first weekend of October is permanently highlighted in the calendar: it is then that a small city in the north of Italy serves up more than just excellent antipasti and chilled Aperol Spritz. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, or “the days of silent cinema,” commonly known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, has been the mecca for film historians and amateurs of “mute flickers” since its founding in 1982. The festival is the largest silent film festival in the world, offering a nine-day bombardment of rediscoveries, restorations, retrospectives, and special events from dusk until well past dawn, projected at the proper speeds and accompanied by such leading early cinema musicians as Neil Brand, John Sweeney, and Günter Buchwald. Film history comes alive. Films reviewed include: Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931), Chuji tabinikki (A Diary of Chuji's Travels, Daisuke Ito, 1927), and Henri Fescourt's 1925–26 rendition of Les Misérables.

Greens of Glasgow: ‘We Want “U” In’

Film Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet McBain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Business ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Film History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Silent Era

This short essay draws on research undertaken by the curator of the Scottish Screen Archive on the few surviving films credited to Greens Film Service of Glasgow in the teens and twenties. The research revealed a dynamic family business, born out of the travelling cinematograph shows of the late nineteenth century, growing to assume a dominant role in the Scottish cinema trade in the silent era, across exhibition, distribution and production. One small part of a lost film history waiting for rediscovery – early cinema in Scotland.

scholarly journals Introduction: touch, click and motion: archaeologies of fashion film after digital culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Caroline Evans ◽  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
Contemporary Practice

This article functions as the introduction to the Themed Issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as an historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, the authors propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work, that links different time periods from early cinema to recent digital platforms, even ‘post-cinema’. The introduction makes references to the contributions in this issue that address historical conditions of emergence, marginal voices in the historical record and unexcavated archival materials; and the issue shows how they all contain feedback loops or recursive traits that resonate in contemporary practice where infrastructures of platforms and data frame the moving image.

scholarly journals Whakama: The Truth in White Lies

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-71
Author(s):  
Jani Katarina Taituha WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Film History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Face

This article explores the deeper meanings of the term whakamā so it is understood as a fundamental inhibitor of Māori potential, particularly in relation to rangatahi (Māori youth). The kupu (word) whakamā has a number of distinct meanings; firstly, whakamā comprises ‘white’ and ‘clean’,1 and together literally mean to be whitened clean. Secondly, to reflect the process of the blood draining from the face, whakamā is also to be ‘embarrassed’ or ‘ashamed’. As I will show through one of my tribal pūrākau (stories) and a close-reading/analysis of characters in recent feature White Lies (2013, dir. Dana Rotberg), whakamā is far from a straightforward concept. The analysis of White Lies in particular demonstrates and underlines some of the subliminal elements of whakamā in the characterisations of Marāea (Rachel House) and Rebecca (Antonia Prebble), particularly in terms of landlessness. As a Māori film scholar who is generally focused on what cinematic representations of Māori in film history get wrong, I was taken by White Lies for what it gets right in terms of whakamā, particularly in terms of the contribution of whakamā to the clarity – or lack thereof – in decision-making. For the most part, whakamā is a feeling that cannot be easily expressed, and this essay contemplates some of the difficult qualities necessary to explain the effects of whakamā.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

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