Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

The phenomenological interrogation of light as material weight in the visual perception of architectural space

In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked. This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media platforms such as Tumblr and Wattpad, this collection develops a critical understanding of the integral role collaboration plays in contemporary media and culture. It draws attention to diverse kinds of creative collaboration afforded via the intermediation of digital platforms and networked publics. It considers how these are incorporated into emergent market paradigms and investigates the complicated forms of subjectivity that develop as a consequence. But it also acknowledges historical continuities, not least in terms of the continued exploitation of ‘support personnel’ and of resulting artistic conflicts but also of alternative models that resist the precarious nature of contemporary cultural work. Finally, this volume attempts to situate creative collaboration in broader social and economic contexts, where the experience and outcomes of such work have proved more problematic than the rich potential of their promise would lead us to expect. The Editors: James Graham is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University, London. Alessandro Gandini is Lecturer in Digital Media Management and Innovation in the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College, London.

Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’;
a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and
contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent
literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable
generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and
filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic and televisual genres
and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters
new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a
critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working
definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the
history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the
essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental
nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect,
allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation,
irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s
reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and
perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet
avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and
photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s
historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s
project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on
Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye (1967) to Histoire(s) du cinema
(1988-1998) – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical
discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4
investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun
Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images
and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging
available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary,
cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how (from
Montaigne to Farocki) knowledge and history (whether in the form of text or image) is
archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate
citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their
respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the
capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well
as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical
correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a
consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual
practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism,
the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and
archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts.

Compilation and critique : the essay as a literary, cinematographic and videographic form

In the early years of the twentieth century, the unique new medium of motion pictures was the focus of significant theorization and experimentation at the fringes of the American advertising industry. Alongside the growth of the nickelodeon, and the multiple shifts in the American cinema’s business model in the ‘transitional era,’ various individuals at the margins of the advertising industry attempted, and most often failed, to integrate direct consumer-goods advertising regularly into motion picture theaters. Via techniques as diverse as the glass slide, the commercial trailer, and the advertising wall-clock, cinema patrons of the 1910s witnessed various attempts by merchants and manufacturers to intrude upon their attention in the cinema space. Through research in the trade presses of the cinema, advertising, and various consumer goods industries, along with archival ephemera from the advertising companies themselves, this dissertation explores these various on and off-screen tactics for direct advertising attempted in silent cinemas, and their eventual minimization in the American cinema experience. Despite the appeal of the new, popular visual medium of cinema to advertisers, concerns over ticket-prices, advertising circulation, audience irritation, and the potential for theatrical ‘suicide-byadvertising,’ resulted, over a mere fifteen years, in the near abandonment of the cinema as an advertising medium. As a transitional medium between the 19 th century forms of print and billboarding, and 20 th century broadcasting, the silent cinema was an important element in the development of modern advertising theories. INDEX WORDS: Advertising, Silent cinema, Transitional era, Film exhibition, Film spectatorship, American cinema, Magic lantern, Trailer, Animation

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=communication_diss

Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising

List of Plates. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Film Color. Coloration in Early Cinema, 1895 1927. The Rise of Technicolor, 1915 35. Chromatic Cold War: Black-and-White and Color in Opposition. Technicolor Is Natural Color : Color andRealism, 1935 58. Chromatic Thaw: Hollywood s Transition to Color,1950 67. 2. Surface Color. Color in European Film, 1936 67. Chromatic Ambivalence: Art Cinema s Transition toColor. Painting with Light : Cinema s Imaginary ArtHistory. Unmotivated Chromatic Hybridity. Monochrome Purgatory: Absent Color in the Soviet Bloc,1966 75. 3. Absent Color. Black-and-White as Technological Relic, 1965 83. Black-and-White Flashbacks: Codifying Temporal Rebirth. Black-and-White Films, 1967 2007. Nostalgia and Pastiche. 4. Optical Color. Cinema s Newtonian Optics. White Light: Hollywood s Invisible Ideology. Darkness Visible: From Natural Light to Neo-Noir , 1968 83. Cinematography and Color Filtration, 1977 97. Case Study: Seeing Red in Psycho. 5. Digital Color. Crossing the Chromatic Wall in Wings of Desire. An Archaeology of Digital Intermediate, 1989 2000. Digital Color Aesthetics, 2000 9. Conclusion: Painting by Numbers? Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color

Jacques Aumont has noted that, throughout screen history, filmmakers have tended to regard colour as something to be controlled.1 Between the rise of Technicolor in the mid 1930s and the emergence of digital cinema in the late 1990s, this typically involved controlling the colours that appeared in front of a film camera through techniques including production design, costume design, lens filtration and coloured lighting. Since the spread of Digital Intermediate (DI) in the early to mid 2000s, screen colour has owed at least as much to computer-based postproduction processes as it has to camera-based production processes.2 In this essay I explore colour as the focal point of a renegotiation of the historical roles of what are anachronistically still called the ‘production’ and ‘postproduction’ sectors of the film industry. I do so by means of a case study of the recent activities of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). Though the Society's membership numbers barely three hundred, it has for many decades been a prominent advocate of the ‘art of cinematography’ and of the interests of the cinematography profession as a whole.3 Using articles from its widely read trade journal, American Cinematographer, I explore some of the strategies used by the ASC over the last decade to preserve the privileged creative status of the Director of Photography (DoP) in the context of rapid technological and industrial change.4 These strategies have typically focused on colour. By exploring the various interactions between the ASC and the postproduction sector reported in American Cinematographer, as well as the rhetoric used to report them, I address the following question: if colour is something to be controlled, who controls it?

/pdf/the-look-and-how-to-keep-it-cinematography-postproduction-3n6dyfcn0u.pdf

The ‘look’ and how to keep it: cinematography, postproduction and digital colour

This article explores cinematic boredom. It investigates how feature films exemplify prevailing cultural attitudes towards boredom, and suggests that dominant cinema's fear of being ‘boring’ reflects a cultural refusal to address the implications of time passing. Most feature films kill time. The article analyses how and why they do so, and then explores what happens when a film refuses to kill time. By engaging with temporality, a film may risk being called ‘boring’ but it may also perform the important cultural role of encouraging us to reflect on the limited time-span of our own lives.

/pdf/dead-time-cinema-heidegger-and-boredom-1s4vdf6ab6.pdf

Dead time: Cinema, Heidegger, and boredom

Over the last years, interactive digital media have greatly affected the logics of production, exhibition and reception of non-fiction audiovisual works, leading to the emergence of a new area called ‘interactive and transmedia non-fiction’. While the audiovisual non-fiction field has been partially studied, a few years ago emerged a new field focusing on interactive and transmedia non-fiction narratives, an unexplored territory that needs new theories and taxonomies to differentiate from its audiovisual counterpart.

/pdf/transgressing-the-non-fiction-transmedia-narrative-40stvbax50.pdf

Transgressing the Non-fiction Transmedia Narrative

This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we...

/pdf/exploding-binaries-point-of-view-and-combat-inthe-thin-red-215za3k9xm.pdf

Richard Misek

Papers

Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color

The ‘look’ and how to keep it: cinematography, postproduction and digital colour

Dead time: Cinema, Heidegger, and boredom

Transgressing the Non-fiction Transmedia Narrative

Exploding Binaries: Point-of-View and Combat inThe Thin Red Line