Category Archive for: ‘Issue 32 – Screen Attachment’

© 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 …

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 …

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 …

  © 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 …

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 …

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 …

[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 …

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 …