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This article examines the epistemological value of an intermedial approach to TV series: should TV series be associated to the discipline of film studies? Without taking the notion of the “cinematic” for granted, and without limiting the use of this adjective to mere cultural legitimation, the article briefly explores how TV series connect to the discipline of “film studies”, and how this can lead us, in a mutating, unstable cultural and media context, to reconsider the logic of our disciplinary structures, at the university as well as, more generally, in our imagination. After a brief overview of the history of the disciplines of film and television studies, the emphasis is placed on the joint evolution of technology, media landscape and academic disciplines.

Unlike the original WestWorld film, realized by Michael Crichton during the seventies, the homonymous television series could be considered to be a symptom of the collective acceptance of both the technological singularity and the theories of transhumanism. However, by reformulating some important concepts which derive from a phenomenological approach, the series generates critical insights regarding the transhumanist hypothesis and, above all, on the role played by this hypothesis in the consolidation of a post-industrial society. This essay examines the ways in which this television series built a fertile terrain for the reformulation of some concepts that, in the tradition of Science Fiction, represent solid instruments used to criticize forms of the production of value, labor, exploitation, and exclusion. This essay also proposes a possible relationship between a transhumanist hypothesis and the production of value in a post-industrial society.

Alternatives of Languages and Worlds: Multilingualism as Critique of Ideology in Contrafactual Fiction by Quentin Tarantino and Christian Kracht. Multilingualism and the alternate history genre have something in common: both phenomena are based on the construction of alternatives, in the case of multilingualism on the alternatives between different languages and communication systems, and in the case of the alternate history genre on the alternatives between real-world facts and the variation thereof within fictional worlds. This article investigates the interconnections between these two forms of thinking in alternatives by looking specifically at Quentin Tarantino’s counterfactual war film Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Christian Kracht’s alternate history novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008). I argue that the consideration of language alternatives forms part of the meta-reflection of the alternate history genre in these works while at the same time opening up a political perspective: in Tarantino’s film and Kracht’s novel, multilingualism serves as a means for the critique of ideology by rendering palpable the political threats of a worldview based on clear-cut alternatives. In the article’s final section, I plead for the establishment of stronger links between the research on literary multilingualism and the theory of fiction.

Copyright of Écrans is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Écrans is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Écrans is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Écrans is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Queer theories allow us to denaturalize the boundary between animals and humans by showing it to be a social construct. By applying them to cultural products, it becomes clear how the binary opposition “animality-humanity” actually depends on performativity. Among the many movies featuring animal characters, in this paper I analyze Crin Blanc by Albert Lamorisse (1953), by combining part of Harvey Sacks’ work on Membership Categorisation Analysis, of Carmen Dell’Aversano’s research on animal queer and of Frans de Waal’s studies. I will concentrate on the way in which the performance of animality in the representation of the character of Crin Blanc is handled, in the attempt to demonstrate that Crin Blanc actually strengthens the binary opposition of identity categories and anthropocentric hierarchies. Queer theory will allow us to understand how the repressive nature of the imposition of human categories can operate at different levels of the same human artistic product.

This paper analyses the film Mrs. Doubtfire and reflects on the representation of social categories provided by the film. The protagonist, an American male, convincingly performs the identity of a much older English woman in everyday life for weeks. Even if the success of his performance has the potential to show the performative nature of social identities, the subversive power of his actions is invalidated by other elements of the film. This article begins examining why Euphegenia Doubtfire’s identity is believed to be genuine by the other characters and following which criteria it is created; then, it takes into consideration the role played by the protagonist’s job as an actor and the implications of his decision of using his professional abilities in everyday life; lastly, it examines other devices through which his successful performance is made less dangerous to social order and the protagonist is discredited.

In this article, we question the modalities of representation of the geopolitical upheavals that have occurred since the early 1990s in Western spy cinema. To do so, we study the political issues and their spatialization in the last eight films of the James Bond saga and the six of the Mission Impossible saga, all released between 1995 and 2018. These films make it difficult to think our world outside the binary markers of the Cold War; nevertheless, they draw the outlines of a "postmodern geopolitics", with characteristics that are particularly salient after September 11, 2001 (globalization, multipolarity and new challenges linked to networked powers and counter-powers). They describe an unstable, illegible world, marked by the widespread infiltration of the power structures by increasingly indistinct enemies. They stage the anxieties linked to cyberspace, the relative disappearance of nation-states and the omnipresence of a diffuse threat against the West, emanating from psychologically unstable individuals. In short, they participate in the elaboration of a discourse aiming to depoliticize geopolitics, reducing its stakes to the necessary protection of the established order against the assaults of geographically and politically poorly defined entities.

With a corpus of one hundred and ninety-three costumes sketches from the preproduction of twenty-five fiction feature films produced in France between 1945 and 1959, drawn by eight costume designers and kept at Cinémathèque française, this article studies the part of these works in the process of filmmaking after the Second World War. The sketches were aesthetic and practical objects essential to the creation of original costumes for a particular film within a collective art form. Sketches were generally made up of three elements: the essential drawing which reveals the personal style of each designer and has the role of making visible their ideas; fabric samples indicating which materials and colours were chosen for the manufacture of the pieces, making them more tangible; and inscriptions giving details to collaborators for execution and shooting.

According to figures from the latest demographic statistics, there are more than 55.000 foreign citizens in Sardinia (3,4% of the total resident population), and this number is expected to grow over the next few years. As an island exposed to frequent social and commercial exchanges throughout its history, Sardinia represents a fertile scenario for multicultural and multiracial encounter, not to mention linguistic contamination and variety. On the one hand, Sardinian literature has extensively recounted the presence of istràngius (‘strangers, foreigners’) in the island over the past centuries. On the other hand, Sardinian cinema has recently discovered the high potential of the migratory phenomenon as a current issue to narrate on screen. This paper aims to reflect upon the presence and representation of foreign people in Sardinian film and audio-visual productions, through the analysis of documentaries, short and feature films which, since the early 2000s, have shown the arrival of immigrants in Sardinia, as well as the process of cultural integration in the island territory.

Since 1991, Motus theater company (Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò) has been moving in various hyper-contemporary directions, working with Beckett, DeLillo, Genet, Fassbinder, Rilke and Pasolini. Whether their works be theatre shows, performances or installations, the body is always at centre stage: a subversive body in revolt that demands to be seen. In Chroma Keys the performance centres around the body of the actress Silvia Calderoni, who, immersed in a “green screen” setting wanders through scenes from several films, transforming herself into a presence that communicates with the images. With Chroma Keys, Motus build-up an inter-medial operation, where the tradition of the travelling theatrical performance and the “cinema of attractions” merge and interact with each other. The show was recently held at the Auditorium del Parco - Renzo Piano, L’Aquila, within Aria Teatro Festival program; on that occasion we interviewed Daniela Nicolò.

This paper aims at offering a geocritical exploration of cinema starting from The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006) and retracing the tradition of the noir film genre, taking into consideration the peculiar relations between this genre and "real" spaces and geographies. The question of Hollywood cinema representing Hollywood itself (and Los Angeles) will be considered in order to verify a fundamental difference between how "disturbing spaces" are constructed in cinema and in literature. While the geocritical approach to the study of literature usually maintains that similar "interfering" spaces are (de)constructed through "heterotopic" strategies, the case of noir film genre shows how cinema - a very singular locative medium - can effectively rely on "homotopic" strategies, instead.

The representation of animals in movies deals with an unavoidable premise which has pragmatic consequences: movies are made by humans, for humans. Therefore, since humans usually define their identity in opposition to animals, representing them as individuals implies a problematic application of human categories to animal characters’ performance. Trying to combine queer theories with Animal Studies, I propose an analysis of Wes Anderson’s latest movie, Isle of Dogs, and in particular a reflection on the relationship between animals and machines. This article focuses first on the stop-motion technique which has been used to create speaking animal characters. Then, it explores how in the movie the machines are used by humans with animals and what ambiguities can emerge. Finally, it closes with a reflection on how the dogs relate to an identity constructed and ascribed to them by human society.

Network Text Analysis (NTA) is a term used to describe a variety of software - supported methods for modeling texts as networks of concepts. In this study we apply NTA to the screenplay of American Sniper, an Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2014. Specifically, we est ablish prior expectations as to the key themes associated with war films. We then empirically test whether words associated with the most influentially - positioned nodes in the network signify themes common to the war - film genre. As predicted, we find tha t words and concepts associated with the least constrained nodes in the text network were significantly more likely to be associated with the war genre and significantly less likely to be associated with genres to which the film did not belong.

In his work Pasolini shows great interest in the past and in otherness as represented by the farmers and labourers from Friuli, underclass Romans, and the poor of the Third World. This essay focuses on the documentary Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, which can be interpreted as using the concept of the trace as it was theorized by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his Les tempes et récit, and illustrates what Pasolini meant by the idea of the survival of the past in the present. The aim of the essay is to demonstrate the importance of taking Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana as the turning point in Pasolini’s career, marking the change from his early representations of the Friulian and the Roman to the later apocalyptic writings of Scritti corsari and Petrolio.

Recensão crítica do livro The Persistence of Hollywood, de Thomas Elsaesser (2012).

Contemporary studies about film adaptations of literary texts face many obstacles when it comes to compare two different media. They either tend to establish how faithful the film adaptation is to its textual source or they consider the literary text as canonical, which as such cannot be transposed to any other form. This contribution aims to cross the borders of adaptation studies and offers an intermediai comparison between the Grimms’ tale Sneewittchen, first published in 1812, and Blancanieves, a black and white silent movie directed by Pablo Berger and released in 2012. Regarding Blancanieves not only as an adaptation of the Grimms’ text(s), but also and above all as a reconfiguration of numerous media forms (film, photography, opera, among others), reveals how the Spanish director differentiates himself from the German tale and creates a new story with renewed meanings which echo the current social, economical and political situation of Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While conventional 9/11 documentaries focus on the most known and visible images of the attack, three films that work against this tendency, 9/11 (2002), 11'09''01 - September 11 (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), avoid the television news coverage of the towers and portray the attacks primarily through sound. These films avoid or scantly interject the too familiar footage, working instead with the audio track’s ability to convey the horrors of the event. By emphasizing sound, these films address a challenge familiar to documentary studies: how to appropriately represent a historical event whose tragic scale makes aesthetic representation questionable.

Author(s): Jelisaveta Blagojević Title (English): Unthinkable: Ethico-political Fiction in the Present Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 29-33 Page Count: 5 Citation (English): Jelisaveta Blagojević, “Unthinkable: Ethico-political Fiction in the Present,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 29-33.

Author(s): Lamija Kosović Title (English): Sensation and Embodiments of Virtual: In Contact with the Real Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 73-87 Page Count: 14 Citation (English): Lamija Kosović, “Sensation and Embodiments of Virtual: In Contact with the Real,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 73-87.

Author(s): Lee Edelman Title (English): White Skin, Dark Meat: Identity’s Pressure Point Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 99-113 Page Count: 15 Citation (English): Lee Edelman, “White Skin, Dark Meat: Identity’s Pressure Point,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 99-113.

Author(s): Kubilay Akman | Кубилај Акман Title (English): The “Temple” of Reversed Mystery. Hyper-criminological and Biopolitical Dimensions in Minority Report Title (Macedonian): „Храмот“ на обратната загадочност. Хиперкриминолошките и биополитичките димензии во Малцински извештај Translated by (English to Macedonian): Kalina Janeva | Калина Јанева Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1-2 (Summer 2008 - Winter 2009) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 171-199 Page Count: 29 Citation (English): Kubilay Akman, “The ‘Temple’ of Reversed Mystery. Hyper-criminological and Biopolitical Dimensions in Minority Report,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1-2 (Summer 2008 - Winter 2009): 171-199. Citation (Macedonian): Кубилај Акман, „‚Храмот‘ на обратната загадочност. Хиперкриминолошките и биополитичките димензии во Малцински извештај“, превод од англиски Калина Јанева, Идентитети: списание за политика, род и култура, т. 7, бр. 1-2 (лето 2008 - зима 2009): 171-199.

Author(s): Doro Wiese | Доро Висе Title (English): HalluciNation. The Entanglement of Race, Gender, and Nationality in Varuh Meje - Guardian of the Frontier Title (Macedonian): ХалуциНација. Заплеткувањето на расата, родот и националноста во Варух Меје - Чувар на границата Translated by (English to Macedonian): Ognen Čemerski | Огнен Чемерски Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2-3 (Summer 2007 - Winter 2008) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 269-294 Page Count: 25 Citation (English): Doro Wiese, “HalluciNation. The Entanglement of Race, Gender, and Nationality in Varuh Meje - Guardian of the Frontier,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2-3 (Summer 2007 - Winter 2008): 269-294. Citation (Macedonian): Доро Висе, „ХалуциНација. Заплеткувањето на расата, родот и националноста во Варух Меје - Чувар на границата“, превод од англиски Огнен Чемерски, Идентитети: списание за политика, род и култура, т. 6, бр. 2-3 (лето 2007 - зима 2008): 269-294.

The goal of this article is to investigate the way in which the relationship between cinema and the First World War has been explored in film studies, identifying some of the research trends dominant in recent decades. For film scholars, the First World War is a turning point: not only does it coincide with the historical affirmation of a cinema based on linear narratives, but it was also instrumental in to credit the cinema as a high cultural phenomenon, as well as an effective mass media. The Great War has also catalyzed genres, production routines, institutional policies, and new structures of the industry.

The aim of this article is to study the Précis d'initiation au Cinéma (The Handbook of cinema), which focuses on the teaching of cinema in French schools. Henri Agel, the author, is amongst the first who introduced cinema teaching in secondary schools. The Précis d'initiation au Cinéma, co-written with his wife Geneviève, was the first introductory manual to film language for secondary level teaching. For this reason, it is important to investigate the educational and ideological choices of this book to gain a proper understanding of the development of film studies and Catholic cinephilia. In order to show the emergence of one of the major approaches to teaching film studies in France, we will examine three strands in the Précis d’initiation au cinéma: historical, didactic and ideological.