Monthly Archive for: ‘November, 2011’

Screening the Past > 2011 > November

Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial

Motion picture serials, the forerunner of today’s serialized television dramas, have been around since the earliest days of the narrative cinema. Exhibitors rapidly realized that in order to assure continued audience attendance, open ended “cliff hangers” were sure to keep viewers returning week after week, to find out the latest plot twists, character developments, and of course, how the hero …

Screen Attachments: An Introduction

© Isaac Julien In an essay published in 2000 Anne Friedberg observed: Now, a variety of screens – long and wide and square, large and small, composed of grains, composed of pixels – compete for our attention without any arguments about hegemony. Not only does our concept of ‘film history’ need to be reconceptualised in light of these changes in …

Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation

Alfredo The movie theatre is already completely full and, at the entrance, a small crowd keeps pressing to enter. In the projection booth, Alfredo is working, as usual, with the assistance—and perhaps even more so with the companionship—of little Totò. The projectionist has an idea: using mirrors, he intercepts the beam of light coming from the projector that is destined …

A Portrait of Harry Potamkin

One page after creasing the cover of the anthology that informs this investigation, I was immediately drawn to a portrait of its author. It is a shadowy monochrome photograph of a young man’s side profile, captured by Irving Lerner. Immortalised in that bygone moment, this twenty-something male can be seen as stern, contemplative and ambiguous. The young man reflectively stares …

DVD Screen Culture for Children: Theories of Play and Young Viewers

The viewing practices of film audiences have undergone some significant changes over the last few decades, particularly since the release of films in DVD format. DVDs, as John Thornton Caldwell has argued, allow viewers to forge “new relationships with film and television” (2008, 306). Bonus or special features figure prominently in many DVDs marketed to the adult market, but even …

Brief Encounters: Theorizing Screen Attachments Outside the Movie Theatre

© Isaac Julien We should note that the word “emotion” comes from Latin, emovere, referring to ‘to move, to move out’. Of course, emotions are not only about movement, they are also about attachments or about what connects us to this or that. (Ahmed 2004, p.11) Spectatorship is not only the act of watching a film, but also the …

Fingers, Futures, Fates: Viewing Interactive Cinema in Kinoautomat and Sufferrosa

Introduction Why do we sit so close [to the screen]? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers (2003) In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a character describes his cinephilia as an indolent, almost submissive absorption of images, eyes glued to the screen as he sits …

Waterbodies: Moving-image installations at Termemilano Spa

unless a man be born again of water John 3.5 In recent years, the health spa experience has become a popular and widespread social practice. The quest for bodily relaxation and wellness is permeating the needs of contemporary society, as a way of counteracting the stressful pace of city life. What is more, health spa centre designers are increasingly integrating …

A Minoritarian Digital Poetics of YouTube

[Martin Arnold, excerpt from Alone] I Does the short digital video shared over the Internet constitute a form or genre of its own? Do such digital movies have a particular sensibility? The film theorist Vivian Sobchack once argued that this was so. In her essay “Nostalgia for a digital object”, Sobchack points out that online moving images obey neither the …

Rethinking Screen Encounters: Cinema and Tamil Migrant Workers in Singapore

Introduction Over a five month period — August to December 2010 — I conducted field research in Singapore where I interviewed 40 South Asian migrant workers engaged in both skilled and unskilled work, three senior executives from the construction industry (a major sector that employs unskilled foreign workers), an executive from the Singapore Construction Workers Association (SCAL), an organisation responsible …

The Artist as Ecologist

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the …

Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) The technology to produce such environments as Kroitor and Thompson describe has existed for some time; what has not been available is the necessary consciousness. Man has been so busy proving his right to live that he has not learned how to live. Thus we exist in an environment …

Intermedia Theatre

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) Susan Sontag once defined the “two principal radical positions” in contemporary art as that which recommends the breaking down of distinctions between genres, and that which maintains or upholds those distinctions: on the one hand seeking a “vast behavioral magma or synaesthesis”; on the other hand pursuing “the intensification of …

Modernism, Cinema, Adolescence: Another History for Teen Film

I’m allowed to go to picture shows, That is, if nurse is feeling able; But we only go to Mickey Mouse, I’m not allowed Clark Gable! It’s such an imposition For a girl who’s got ambition To be an in-between! (Love Finds Andy Hardy, USA 1938) In film buff histories, the retrospective compilations produced for awards shows, and in commentary …

Understanding Virginia: Quoting the Sources in Terrence Malick’s The New World

How much they err, that think every one which has been at Virginia understands or knows what Virginia is. – Capt. John Smith These words appear upon a black screen at the beginning of the 2008 “Extended Cut” of The New World, Terrence Malick’s film about John Smith, Pocahontas, and the founding of the Virginia Colony. They are followed by …

Normalcy in Jazz-Mad America: Clara Bow in My Lady of Whims

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the biennial conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (November 2008) and to the University of Otago Department of History and Art History’s Work in Progress Seminar (May 2010). America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy. —Senator Warren G. Harding, 14 May …

Vertigo and the Maelstrom of Criticism

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is a site of cultural fascination. Brian de Palma has remade the film twice (Obsession [1976], Body Double [1984]), while it has been reworked or quoted in films such as Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), and Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994). Chris Marker pays tribute to Vertigo (“a film I …

Missing in Action, Caught on Film: Silent Film Actor “André de Beranger” Goes to War

Young Duke Cameron lies mortally wounded on a smoky, bloody Gettysburg battlefield. Suddenly, a northern youth appears above him, bayonet poised to strike him through. A glimmer of recognition passes over the youth’s face. The wounded Rebel is his childhood chum. As the Yankee lowers his rifle and bends over his dying friend, a shot rings out. He falls to …

Musical Modernism in Brian May’s Australian Film Scores

Introduction Film music has provided a useful space for the exploration of modernist composition. It is through this association with popular film texts that audiences who were otherwise dissociated from new music composition consumed modernist techniques. Modernist techniques adopted in film scores include the conscious use of atonality and dissonance (often linked to specific film genres such as science fiction …

Giorgio Mangiamele’s Clay and the Beginnings of Art Cinema in Australia

“Clay…the least commercial work ever made in the history of cinema.”[1] Almost two decades ago Graeme Cutts quite rightly characterised Giorgio Mangiamele as “one of the forgotten directors of the Australian cinema” (Cinema Papers, 1992, p. 17). In the intervening years, Mangiamele has frequently scored a mention in the new standard histories that have appeared, and has now achieved his …

What is Digital Cinema?

First published (In English and German) in Telepolis – das Magazin der Netzkultur (www.ix.de/tp). Munich: Verlag Heinz Heise, 1996. (Republished with the permission of the author) Cinema, the Art of the Index 1 Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority …

Alternative Primary Sources for Studying Australian Television History: An Annotated List of Online Pro-Am Collections

Introduction It is possible to write many different histories of Australian television, and these different histories draw on different primary sources. The ABC of Drama, for example, draws on the ABC Document Archives (Jacka 1991). Most of the information for Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia is taken from original interviews with television production staff (Moran 1985). Ending …

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