Category Archive for: ‘Issue 31 – First Release’

The representational chamber is an energetic dispositif. To describe it and to follow its functioning, that’s what needs to be done. –      Jean-François Lyotard (1993: 3, translation amended) Graphics, Stacks and Materiality It is always fascinating and instructive to return to a moment in history when a change in the conditions of culture loomed on the horizon. In terms of …

In the lead-up to and long shadow following cinema’s centenary in 1995, film has increasingly been understood and defined in terms of its disappearance or demise. Over the past decade, film studies conferences have been regularly peppered with papers on cinema’s passing, journals have run special issues on the medium’s anticipated death, and leading film theorists have bookended their publications …

Absence can be considered as a resonant field in which cultural objects such as painting, film and video art interact through an act of representational negation—the viewer experiences a thing that is both not there and there, an imminent presence. We find this resonant field in the whiteness of a canvas or in the blue and green screens of digital …

Were it not for the well-sustained intermedial formula that characterises Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête homme (France, 1978), the film might appear to a distracted viewer as little more than a big-budget movie displaying an above-average predilection for carefully composed tableaux. The director of the film is a well-known and lauded theatre director, founder and primary force …

Let’s be frank – the idea of filming Karl Marx’s Das Kapital strikes one as, at the very least, strange. To film thousands of pages written in a dry language of 1860s political economy? To film … what, exactly? The notions of productive forces, relations of productions, use value and exchange value, commodity fetishism and capital per se? To film …