Could Television Streaming Sites Lead the Charge for Film-Induced Tourism Post COVID?

By focusing on television film-induced tourists, this chapter will contribute to a better understanding of tourist behaviour in relation to motivations for travel to filming locations. The chapter combines, analyses, and critiques the main debates raised by key authors in relation to identifying the motivational factors that prompt site-specific film tourism as well as providing contributions from this author's 2016 research on television film-induced tourism in Ireland. The chapter is divided into the following sections: a brief history of film and television and a review and discussion on film tourism, a breakdown of the different categories of film tourist and a summation of the various motivations for television induced film tourism, followed by an insight into the concept of authenticity in film tourism studies and the use of technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality as a means to provide a more immersive experience post COVID-19.

Dobra Nowina w środkach społecznego przekazu pod red. Henryka Sławińskiego, Ancilla Verbi, t. 10, Kraków 2020

The Church must tirelessly seek appropriate means and language to effectively proclaim every person’s universal vocation to salvation. Today’s witnesses to the Gospel should use the potential of old and new means of communication in preaching and ministry. Above all, they should revive in themselves the courage to settle on ‘new areopaguses’. The most important goal of evangelization is to bring every person to an encounter with Christ, who is the main content of the proclaimed Good News. The authors of this monograph did not forget about it. By showing both the enormous possibilities and certain limitations of the new media in proclaiming the Gospel to the world, they first asked themselves whether those countless texts, images and sounds that fill today’s periodicals, radio, television, film truly reflect the face of Christ and let His voice be heard.

The docudrama of a destiny: Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu

First, a brief excursion is made in the evolution of the historical-biographical film in the Republic of Moldova by highlighting the stages and personalities from the history of this category of non-fiction films. The research focuses on the televised historical-biographical film Evocare. Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu/Evocation. Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu – a co-production of Romanian filmmakers (Romanian Television Film Studio) and the Republic of Moldova (State Company Teleradio Moldova) – dedicated to the eminent personality of the history of our culture – Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu. The authors of the film managed to evoke the multiple activity of the protagonist (writer, poet, playwright, scientist, folklorist and also the most dramatic moments of his troubled destiny. Some similarities and differences in the aesthetic conditions of the TV film and the one for the screen are revealed. The aesthetic peculiarities of the televised historical-biographical film were highlighted, the premises of its approach to docudrama – a species with a perspective of the non-fiction film.

Parables for the Virtual

Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

The Rogue Poster-Children of Universal Design: Closed Captioning and Audio Description

To abide by the tenants of universal design theory, the design of a product or service needs to not only consider the inclusion of as many potential users and uses as possible but also do so from conception. Control over the creation and adaption of the design should, therefore, fall under the purview of the original designer. Closed captioning has always been touted as an excellent example of an design or electronic curb-cut because it is a system designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, yet is used by many others for access to television in noisy environments such as gyms or pubs, or to learn a second language. Audio description is poised to have a similar image. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the processes and practices associated within closed captioning and audio description, in their current form, violate some of the main principles of universal design and are thus not such good examples of it. In addition, we will introduce an alternative process and set of practices through which directors of television, film and live events are able to take control of closed captioning and audio description by integrating them into the production process. In doing so, we will demonstrate that closed captioning and audio description are worthy of directorial attention and creative input rather than being tacked on at the very end of the process and usually to only meet regulatory or legislative mandates.

The Rogue Poster-Children of Universal Design: Closed Captioning and Audio Description

To abide by the tenants of universal design theory, the design of a product or service needs to not only consider the inclusion of as many potential users and uses as possible but also do so from conception. Control over the creation and adaption of the design should, therefore, fall under the purview of the original designer. Closed captioning has always been touted as an excellent example of an design or electronic curb-cut because it is a system designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, yet is used by many others for access to television in noisy environments such as gyms or pubs, or to learn a second language. Audio description is poised to have a similar image. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the processes and practices associated within closed captioning and audio description, in their current form, violate some of the main principles of universal design and are thus not such good examples of it. In addition, we will introduce an alternative process and set of practices through which directors of television, film and live events are able to take control of closed captioning and audio description by integrating them into the production process. In doing so, we will demonstrate that closed captioning and audio description are worthy of directorial attention and creative input rather than being tacked on at the very end of the process and usually to only meet regulatory or legislative mandates.

Lay Beliefs About Gender and Sexual Behavior: First Evidence for a Pervasive, Robust (but Seemingly Unfounded) Stereotype

Although casual sex is increasingly socially acceptable, negative stereotypes toward women who pursue casual sex remain pervasive. For example, a common trope in television, film, and other media is that women who engage in casual sex have low self-esteem. Despite robust work on prejudice against women who engage in casual sex, little empirical work has focused on the lay theories individuals hold about them. Across six experiments with U.S. adults ( N = 1,469), we found that both men and women stereotype women (but not men) who engage in casual sex as having low self-esteem. This stereotype is held explicitly and semi-implicitly; is not driven by individual differences in religiosity, conservatism, or sexism; and is mediated by inferences that women who have casual sex are unsatisfied with their mating strategy—yet the stereotype persists when women are explicitly described as choosing to have casual sex. Finally, the stereotype appears to be unfounded; across experiments, the same participants’ sexual behavior was not significantly correlated with their self-esteem.

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

Oppositional gaze or revenge? A critical ideological analysis of foreignness and foreign identities in Nollywood feature films

The media, including popular media such as music and films, often generate conversations about different spectrums of society. Due to an overabundance of imagery and sounds from the media, including television, film, advertising, social media and the internet, audiences are constantly bombarded with stereotypes and ideologies about other races and identities. As an exponentially growing popular culture industry, Nollywood – the Nigerian movie industry – positions itself as a source of knowledge and popular discourse about issues emanating from the continent and other places. With this growth, Nollywood seems to have been given a spot in the political circle of identity politics, giving it the power to represent the ‘Others’. This study interrogates the theme of identity construction in African films by focusing on the ways in which some select Nollywood films of the early and late 2000s and early 2010s frame and construct foreign races and foreign societies, using critical ideological analysis and the framework of critical race theory. Representations and portrayals of difference in the analysed movies could be serving some ‘revenge’ of sorts, transgressing age-long representations of Black people in Blaxploitation films. The multiplex representations as seen in the analyses serve the primary purpose of such stereotypes: to reproduce and to reaffirm prejudices that over time become naturalized and normalized. The study thematically specifies the significant use of labels, stereotypes and certain orthodoxies that aim to frame and characterize foreign societies in popular Nigerian films and suggests some broader implications of the findings.