The Cine-Files: cinema and terrorism

Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn cinema and terrorism. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Tư, 18 tháng 12, 2013

New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos' article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape

This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.
[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]

Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation.

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos' essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.

Moving Through Videogame Cities Bobby Schweizer
The Impossible – Or How I Learned Thailand Was Filled with European Tourists Jose Gallegos
Absolute Anxiety Test: Urban Wreckage in The Dark Knight Rises James Gilmore
Dimensions of the Digital City Oscar Moralde
Space-Wars: Mapping the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games Matthias Stork
Negotiating Transitional Spaces in Classic Games Harrison Gish
Invisible Walls: Narrativizing Spatial Limitation in Ico and Assassin’s Creed II Bryan Wuest
Perpetual Game Space in Crime City: Game Design in the Age of Social Network Gaming Andrew Young

Thứ Sáu, 6 tháng 1, 2012

40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Framegrab image of early action heroine "Fearless" Nadia (née Mary Ann Evans) in Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936). Read Rosie Thomas's 2007 article on this film.

Today, Film Studies For Free focuses on, and links to, some remarkable film and digital media studies essays commissioned and edited by the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

The Sarai Programme was initiated in 2000 by a group consisting of internationally renowned cinema scholar Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram (both fellows at CSDS) and the members of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a Delhi based group of media practitioners, documentarists, artists and writers.

Sarai's mission is to act as a platform for discursive and creative collaboration between theorists, researchers, practitioners and artists actively engaged in reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia. Its areas of interests include media research and theory, the urban experience in South Asia: history, environment, culture, architecture and politics, new and established media practices, media history, cinema, contemporary art, digital culture, the history and politics of technology, visual/technological cultures, free and open source software, social usage of software, the politics of information and communication, online communities and web-based practices.

The below collection of articles -- painstakingly drawn from the numerous, openly accessible Sarai Readers produced by the collective -- reflect the above interests, but have been curated here by FSFF because of their particular, potential relevance to scholars of cinema and related moving image and digital media studies.

Thứ Sáu, 10 tháng 9, 2010

Screening 9/11 and its aftermath in film and media studies

Image from In America (Jim Sheridan, 2002), the first film to be (partly) shot in New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Seán Crosson's article "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people'..." (2008)

The absence of the Twin Towers from the post-9/11 New York City skyline posed a number of dilemmas for the creators and producers of television shows and movies that were ‘symbolically’ set in New York City after 9/11. Whilst the World Trade Center towers had been destroyed, editors in studio lots in California faced the prospect of the late 2001 ratings season commencing with stock reels of New York City that prominently featured the Towers prior to 9/11. This posed an odd dilemma for the producers of television shows such as Friends, Sex and the City, and Spin City, programs in which the Twin Towers often appeared as a backdrop and a powerful signifier of being in New York City. The response seemed universal – the Twin Towers must be removed from the tele-visual pop-cultural locations. They needed to be purged, exorcised and air- brushed out of the shot. But by airbrushing out the Towers, the producers have purged post-9/11 television of more than just the steel and concrete of the iconic buildings. I suggest that this purging is powerful, a little odd, and deeply symbolic. In order to recover, perhaps some space – and some forgetting, if only temporary – was needed. But I argue that the missing Towers also represented a missing terror, a missing city. It was as though the creators and producers of some post-9/11 television believed that the world’s viewers would have no stomach for seeing images of a pre-9/11 New York City – a city that in many respects no longer existed. Perhaps the problem lies in how the destruction of the Twin Towers was witnessed – live on TV, in real-time, as heinous, immediate and real violence. It was ugly, sickening, horrific, terrifying. Yet it was also difficult to look away. [Luke John Howie, 'Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 3, No 3 (2009)]

It is the eve of another anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.

Film Studies For Free respectfully remembers the tragic and traumatic events of nine years ago tomorrow, and other closely related ones since, with a list of links to important, insightful, and openly accessible studies of the cultural depiction and (re)media(tiza)tion of the 9/11 attacks, as well as of their aftermath.

Thứ Ba, 11 tháng 5, 2010

Once more with paranoia: conspiracy film studies

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer [aka The Ghost] (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Not only has Film Studies For Free's author been catching up with a slew of contemporary 'conspiracy films' (The Ghost [Writer]; State of Play; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others); she has also been transfixed, like many of her (otherwise politically divided) country-people, by the real-life conspiratorial, and other, dramas of a national, post-electoral, political process.

Tired of biting her nails and shouting at the telly, she took to comfort blogging. Here, then, is an FSFF entry appropriately prepared, given its subject, under duress and on tenterhooks: a list of links to openly accessible and predominantly scholarly studies of the conspiracy film.