Where the Film Has the (Visual) Word?

To date, film magazines have primarily seen use as sources when researching individual periods of cinema history, rather than as objects of study themselves. Instead, the following paper brings the visuality, mediality and materiality of film periodicals to the fore. The question being addressed is the following: What kind of film knowledge and film understanding do illustrated film magazines negotiate in their presentation and selection—precisely in their (hitherto mainly disregarded) visuality, in their appearance, in their sensual material presence? The East German magazine Neue Filmwelt serves as an example for this approach. The essay proposes three ways of looking at the visual intermedial relation to film: How the magazine inscribes its words onto the picture; how it appropriates pictures, symbols, signets and typographies associated with cinema; and how it thereby outlines its very own position as a cultural and visual product in connection to film.

Driving Wild Cattle in Illustrated Magazines from Britain to France, and from France to Germany

This case study on English, French, and German penny magazines from the 1830s aims to make visible a mostly overlooked way of producing and diffusing knowledge—not least ethnographic knowledge—in early illustrated magazines. By investigating an example of trading stereotyped wood engravings between England, France, and Germany, the present paper retraces the development of a periodical-specific international verbal-visual syntax which was triggered by the emergence of illustration. It retraces how magazine makers learned within a few months to give meaning to illustrated periodicals’ layout, to the arrangement of thematically heterogeneous articles’ letterpress and images on a double-page spread—and how they used the semanticized mise-en-page of their magazines’ openings to express international connections and tensions. Thus, the page design of illustrated periodicals turns out to be a means of an implicit ethnography, an instrument to render the profile of the own nation, ἔθνος, readable and visible by γραφή, by printed writing and wood-engraved drawings.

Die Ordnung der Bilder

Am Beispiel christlicher und jüdischer Bibelausgaben des Leipziger Verlags Baumgärtner lässt sich zeigen, dass der europaweite Handel mit Druckstöcken (sogenannten Klischees) im 19. Jahrhundert einerseits zu einer Nivellierung nationaler, religiöser und konfessioneller Bildtraditionen führen konnte, andererseits aber auch Möglichkeiten zur Distinktion und Differenzierung bot. Vielfältige Reproduktions- und Zirkulationsweisen steuerten im Kontext des europäischen Orientalismus die Wahrnehmung von Bildern. Darstellungen des sogenannten Heiligen Landes wurden mit verschiedenen Bilddrucktechniken vom Holzstich über die Lithographie bis zur Chromolithographie reproduziert und in verschiedenen Publikationsformaten von Einzelblättern über Tafelwerke, Konversationslexika und Buchausgaben bis zu populären Zeitschriften verbreitet.