The Cine-Files: Psychoanalytic film theory

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Thứ Hai, 23 tháng 12, 2013

Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

Updated January 20, 2014

RITES OF PASSAGE by Catherine Grant

A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

Thứ Ba, 1 tháng 10, 2013

Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.

Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline...

Online written work by Laura Mulvey:

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work:

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:

Thứ Năm, 8 tháng 3, 2012

"Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.

The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis. [Eva Bru-Domínguez, 'The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat' (1974)', Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]

[I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge women's role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around women's power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]

Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images. [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]

Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Women's Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied 'object' in all of feminist film theory: the 'dangerous' woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detective's office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isn't one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.

Thứ Sáu, 4 tháng 11, 2011

On 'Affect' and 'Emotion' in Film and Media Studies

Image from Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), a film explored by Tim Groves in 'Cinema/Affect/Writing'

Emotion is a phenomenon that, according to [Sergei] Eisenstein, "is completely identical with the primary phenomenon of cinema. [In cinema] movement is created out of two motionless cells. Here, a movement of the soul, i.e. emotion (from the Latin root motio = movement), is created out of the performance of a series of incidents." ([Towards a Theory of Montage] 145, emphasis in original). Properly structured as a series of uncompleted incidents, montage calls on us to finish the actions mentally, and for Eisenstein this internal movement of filling in the gaps is emotion, a movement of the soul. [Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315 citing Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage. Trans. Michael Glenny. Ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. London: BFI Publishing, 1991; hyperlinks added]

[H]ow to write about specific, personal affective experiences of the cinema? [...]

It is difficult for me to articulate, but I was affected [in Unforgiven] by the conjunction of lighting, costuming, and the melancholy, homicidal figure of [Clint] Eastwood in the final shootout in Greely’s. The mise en scène of this confrontation repeats that of the night of Will’s beating at the hands of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). The lack of contrast in lighting and the orange and brown colours of both the characters’ costumes and saloon setting cause the characters to merge into their surroundings. It is literally difficult to see what is happening. While William Munny and the Eastwood persona are constructed as unforgiven in this scene, somewhere in the gloom I found a metaphor for the ambivalence of their forgiveness across the entire film. As a result, I declined to judge this “notoriously vicious and intemperate” figure, as he is labelled in [the film]. Instead I forgave him. I saw his thinning hair and the wounds engraved on his face, and reached out to tend to them. Forgiveness was the punctum which I found in Unforgiven and which is already there in the text, if ambiguously. [...]

But I cannot write your cinema/sadness . . . [Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003 hyperlinks added]

Film Structure and the Emotion System is concerned with this emotion system's structure, rather than with particular emotions themselves. This is not a book about sadness or joy; instead it deals with the foundational structures that make such emotions possible. Culturally nuanced work on particular emotions certainly needs to be done, but we should make sure that we first understand the basic principles of how the emotion system is constructed. [Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) hyperlinks added]

The elicitation of affect in the audience stands firmly at the core of the film-going experience, figuring into the poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology of film viewing. If our goal is to understand how mainstream viewers experience films, if we want to explore the cultural role of movies, if we wish to expand our conception of the poetics of the cinema, then we cannot ignore the place of emotion elicitation and affective experience within film viewing. [Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 hyperlinks added]

In their work, [Torben] Grodal, [Greg M.] Smith, and [Carl] Plantinga all rely on a “downstream flow” of perception, cognition, emotional processing in narrative film. It is a uni-directional flow; the viewers see, they comprehend, they experience emotion. However, underlying all of their work are Silvan Tomkins’s foundational studies of affect from the 1960s. Tomkins’s analyses make possible a more complicated multi-directional understanding of affect [...]. Tomkins explored affect as located in the voice, skin, autonomic nervous system, hand, body, and most extensively, the face. Rather than perceive affect and emotion as developing outward from the inner organs as Henri Bergson, William James, or Carl Lange had suggested, Tomkins and his colleagues Carrol Izard and Paul Ekman focused mostly on the face as “an organ for the maximal transmission of information, to the self and to others” and concluded that “the information it transmits is largely concerned with affects.” This is the point on which narrative film studies has focused. [Randall Halle, 'Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame', MLN, Vol. 124, No. 3, April 2009 (German Issue), pp. 683-707; hyperlinks added]

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body … [Brian Massumi, 'Introduction' to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, xvi, cited by Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005]

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalising upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation and distribution. They generate subjectivity and they play a crucial role in the valorisation of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. [...]
What does it mean to describe such processes in terms of affect? Here I follow Brian Massumi ([Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press] 2002, 23-45) in differentiating between affect and emotion. For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions. [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

There is not one ‘affect’, nor even one economy, ecosystem or ecology of affect(s); just as there is not one reading of one text. Post-cinematic effects, yes; Shaviro makes an important observation. But affects? I’m not so sure why or how they would be different from everything that postmodern theorists have long been saying about postmodernity. The ultimate question, to me, is whether approaching the world in terms of affect offers anything specific for cultural theory and the understanding of culture and politics. [Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect (August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011)]

It is almost too easy to speak of affect—as if, by using this term, one had cleansed all the embarrassment and messiness from the experience. To use “affect” in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reflexive—that is, self-augmenting and self-attenuating—character of emotionality. [Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction ', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)]

Today, Film Studies For Free makes one of its regular, little, curatorial contributions to a particular Film Studies theoretical debate. This time, it's the turn of an exploration of some much-fought-over keywords pertaining to film and media theories of feelings and related bodily and psychological experiences and behaviours - most notably, the terms 'Affect' and 'Emotion'.

The 'Affective Turn' is a rich, if at times rather complex or befuddling, vein of film studies thinking, with an array of approaches ranging from the historical-political (e.g. von Moltke's article), to the cognitivist (for example, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith) through the psychoanalytic (for example, see Groves' essay) and the (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian (for a good, clear introduction, read Anna Powell's article).

As always, in the below list of links to openly accessible online studies, the ever pluralist FSFF doesn't come down on any one theoretical side. But this collection does go out especially to all those who have been curious about, or confused and dumbfounded by, the undoubted buzzword quality, particularly, of 'affect' in Film and Media Studies in the last ten to fifteen years.

Marco Abel, 'Intensifying Affect', Electronic Book Review, October 2008

Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs, ' Media, Affect and the Face: Biomediation and the Political Scene', Southern Review 38.2 (2006)

Philip Bell, 'Cultural Studies as Neo-Psychology: Comments on B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (2002)', Porceedings of Hawaian International Conference on Social Sciences, 2003

Jamie Skye Bianco, 'Affective | Reading | Affect', draft for Cross Media Movements [date unknown]

Lisa Blackman and John Cromby, 'Affect and feeling', International Journal of Critical Psychology, 21, 5-22 (2007)

Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', Jacques Rancière, July 26, 2011

Will Brooker, 'Brief Tears I: Gin Talking' in Michele Byers and David Lavery (eds), On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature, and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)

Giuliana Bruno, 'Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Archictecture and Film', Talk at Institut de la Ville en Mouvement, 2001(?)

Giuliana Bruno, 'Motion and Emotion: Film and Haptic Space', 13.2, 2010

Sarah Cefai, 'Unhappy Families [Review of Sara Ahmed, The  Promise  of  Happiness , 2010]', Cultural Studies Review, 17.1, March 2011

Hsiao-hung Chang, 'Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 31-50

Eu Jin Chua, '[Review of] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.', BMRCL, 6.2, Fall 2007

Annabel Cohen, 'Music as a Source of Emotion in Film', in J. Sloboda and (Eds.). Music and emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 245-268

Amy Coplan, 'Catching Characters' Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

Eric Crosby, 'An Aesthetic of Wonderment: IMAX and Affect ', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 6, 2007

Gilles Deleuze, 'The Affection-image: Face and Close-up', Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 (Google Books Limited Preview)

Jens Eder, 'Ways of Being Close to characters', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

Kathrin Fahlenbrach, 'The Emotional Design of Music Videos. Approaches to Audiovisual Metaphors', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 4, 2005

Jonathan Frome , 'Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

Patrick W. Galbraith, 'Moe: Exploring Virtual Potential in Post-Millennial Japan', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, October 31, 2009

Wendy Gan , "0.01cm: Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express." Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2003

Gary Genosko, 'A Tale of Two Virtuals', TOPIA 10, Fall 2003

Anna Gibbs, 'Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect', Australian Humanities Review, December 2001

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Signifying Nothing: "Culture", "Discourse" and the Sociality of Affect', Culture Machine, Vol. 6, 2004

Alessandro Giovannelli, Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2004

Rebecca Gordon, 'Remakes, Genre, and Affect: The Thriller-Chiller-Comedy as Case Study' Paper at MLA Conference, 2007

Sneja Gunew, 'Subaltern Empathy: Beyond European Categories in Affect Theory', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 11-30

Torben Grodal , 'The PECMA Flow: A General Model of Visual Aesthetics', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

James J. Gross and Robert W. Levenson, 'Emotion elicitation using films', Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 9, No. 1. (1995), 87-108

Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006

Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003

Gay Hawkins, 'Documentary Affect: Filming Rubbish', Australian Humanities Review, September 2002

William Hope, Excerpt from Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006)

In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect [August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011]

Barbara M. Kennedy, 'Choreographies of the Screen', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2002

Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen (eds), Conference proceedings for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies (Media Studies, Turku 2000)

[Contents: Anu Koivunen, Preface: The Affective Turn?; Sara Ahmed, Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment; Ana Paula Baltazar, Architecture as Interface: Forming and Informing Spaces and Subjects; Jennifer Lyon Bell, Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography; Rosemary Betterton, Spaces of Memory: Photographic Practices of Home and Exile; Joanna Bouldin, The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and the Rotoscope in Betty Boop; Hannu Eerikäinen, Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex’, Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse; Taru Elfving, The Girl in Space-time Encounters with and within Eija-liisa Ahtila’s Video Installations; Amy Herzog, Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory; Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas, Inventing “African Solutions”, HIV Prevention and Medical Media; Sanna Karkulehto, Effects and Affects of Queer as Folk; Martta Kaukonen, ”I Must Reveal a Shocking Secret” Transvestites in American Talk Shows; Jane Kilby, Tracking Shock: Some Thoughts on TV, Trauma, Testimony; Emmy Kurjenpuu, Women’s Magazines Meet Feminist Philosophy; Minna Lahti, “I Thought I Would Become a Millionaire” – Desire and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley, California; Mari-Elina Laukkanen, Ladies for Sale. The Finnish Press as a Profiteer; Ilmari Leppihalme, Do Muscles Have a Gender? A Female Subject Building her Body in the Film Pumping Iron II: The Women; Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, The Three Faces of Eve:the Post-war Housewife, Melodrama and Home; Tapio Mäkelä, Re-reading Digitality through Scientific Discourses of Cybernetics: Fantasies of Disembodied Users and Embodied Computers; Norie Neumark, E/motional Machines: Esprit de Corps; Kaarina Nikunen, Dangerous Emotions? Finnish Television Fans and Sensibilities of Fandom; Sanna Ojajärvi, Visual Acts - Choreography of Touches, Glances and Movements between Hosts and Assistants on Television; Susanna Paasonen, Best Wives are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s; Megan D. Pincus, Must They Be Famous Vaginas? The Effect and Affect of Celebrity on The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2001; Liina Puustinen, Gender for Sale, Advertising Design as Technologies of Gender; Leena-Maija Rossi, Why Do I Love and Hate the Sugarfolks in Syruptown? Studying the Visual Production of Heteronormativity in Television Commercials; Christine Ross, Depression and Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium: The Work Of Diana Thater; Janne Rovio, The Vintage Van Damme Look; Moira Sullivan, Lesbographic Pornography; Rebecca Sullivan, Biotechnological Embodiment: Gender and Scientific Anxiety in Horror Films; Heidi Tikka, Missing the Point - Situated User Experience and the Materiality of Interaction; Julia Turnock, A Cataclysm of Carnage, Nausea, and Death: Saving Private Ryan and Bodily Engagement; Pasi Väliaho, An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma; Hans Wessels, The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective; Jennifer Willet, Imagining the Self]