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In 1967, the self-produced fan-magazine Spockanalia was launched, creating a distinct cultural heritage practice: fan fiction or fanfiction. Star Trek fandom used these amateur publishing practices to document and expand upon major media texts. In doing so, fans produced a unique form of fiction that has provided enduring critical commentary in popular culture. This chapter surveys textual transformative works within their social, cultural, and historical contexts by overviewing major fan fiction works with Star Trek fandom. In the survey of key materials, this chapter argues that fanfiction was used as: (1) a tool for critique; (2) pleasure-making; and (3) diversity-building. Although a comprehensive list of fans’ textual engagement could never fully be documented within a single chapter, this work attempts to outline unique work produced by Star Trek fandom that shaped creative writing practices.

In late 2019, a poetry-writing “walkshop” in Pretoria/Tshwane, South Africa, was organized in collaboration with two local arts organizations. In this chapter, the walkshop is contextualized within debates on flânerie in South African cities, and attention given to the benefits and limitations of positioning it as part of this aesthetic tradition. This includes recognizing that, unlike Benjamin’s flâneur, the wandering poet is not easily identifiable in—or readily applicable to—South African’s urban environs. Close-reading the 12 poems written during the “Imagineering Tshwane” walkshop does suggest, however, that the concept of the poet-flâneur in Pretoria/Tshwane has merit. This figure can expose the mechanisms of control which limit how people use the city, and the ways in which people can and do resist them. The walkshop therefore demonstrates how flânerie amongst other artistic interventions can broaden understandings of the city in ways unavailable to the developmental discourse most often used to theorize Pretoria/Tshwane.

Originally intended to appeal to a metropolitan (and especially US) audience, El topo reached specialised audiences in international genre festivals and had a worldwide following in the contemporary context of psychotronic fandom over the last three decades. This chapter assesses the changing cult status of El Topo, and, by extension, Jodorowsky, and discusses how film cultures contribute to processes of cult canon-formation. Jodorowsky’s appeal cuts across different audiences and tastes. On the one hand, his films have propelled him into auteur status in genre festivals, while, on the other, his varied literary and artistic production has made of him an important creative force in the world of Hispanic culture. Jodorowsky’s is now right in the mainstream, appealing to middle-brow tastes.

In this essay, I take abstraction, a familiar term from discussions of experimental animation, and expand it via design theorist Johanna Drucker’s idea of performative digital materiality. In this way I explore digital images through their associations and connections with people, processes and cultural domains. First, I connect abstraction in animation to its usage in computer science, and then establish a link to performative digital materiality. Based on these connections, I draw comparisons between Where Shapes Come From (Semiconductor, 2016) and Category 4 Hurricane Matthew on October 2, 2016 (2017), a visualisation of Hurricane Matthew created by the Godard Science Visualization Studio. Both Where Shapes Come From and Category 4 Hurricane Matthew use data to drive the motion of their CG elements. Consequently, while concerned with events in physical environments, they rely on algorithms to facilitate motion and so have a digital materiality too. Though sharing a similar technique, their associations and connections each reveal different performative digital materialities. The algorithm facilitating motion in Category 4 Hurricane Matthew’s is linked to consensus building, whereas that used for Where Shapes Come From maintains the interrogative gap essential to the experimental animation’s engagement with scientific discourse.

This chapter describes the industrial backdrop out of which Filmax genre production grew in order to firmly locate the [REC] series as part of the company’s established practices of production, distribution and promotion. The second section moves on to a discussion of the central features of the series, with particular focus on the narrative world of the 2007 film, its key formal and stylistic strategies, as well as its self-conscious dialogue with horror genre conventions and traditions. The narrative and aesthetic strategy of blurring reality and fiction, of experimenting with televisual language and contemporary media culture in the horror genre, delivered an innovative film. While [REC] exploited an industrially and commercially proven genre circuit trailed by Filmax since the early 2000s, it also stood out in the context of contemporary Spanish horror film as a franchise business which expanded the [REC] brand to a range of other media as the saga developed. As a film commodity which has been distributed and exhibited globally, the chapter finally considers its critical reception – including that of [REC]’s Hollywood remake Quarantine – in Spain, the US and the UK by examining the ways in which transnational readings articulate Balagueró’s maxim “think-local-but-act-global-approach” and position the franchise in dialogue with horror film cultures.

Banaji provides an analysis of Dharmesh Darshan's 1996 commercial Hindi film hit, Raja Hindustani, at three levels. First, she assesses the film from the point of view of a spectator and asks which elements of the film or strategies on the part of its director might account for the pleasures provided. In the process, the film's overt and covert constructions/assumptions of supposedly Indian forms of gender behaviour are identified. Second, she discusses Raja Hindustani as a semiotic text, whose subtle and often contradictory audio-visual clues attempt to structure the audience's perceptions. During this discussion, aspects of the pleasure on offer in the film are juxtaposed with possible meanings accruing from particular scenes to suggest the complexity of interpretation required when making assertions about a film's ideological positioning. Banaji finally explores the ways in which what could be termed'moral messages' or discourses of gender and sexuality, which permeate the film at a broader narrative level, seem to be understood by young viewers. Transcripts from in-depth as well as brief interviews with young filmgoers are used throughout to reveal and complicate assumptions about the impact or effect such films might have on gender behaviour. In addition, an attempt is made to contextualize both film sequences and youth responses to them via a brief discussion of current sociopolitical debates and practices in India.

In recent years, the number of ‘critically acclaimed’ films in Europe, the UK and the US about dementia has continued to flourish. This chapter analyses three films, all released in 2020: The Father (Dir. Florian Zeller), The Relic (Dir. Natalie Erika James) and Supernova (Dir. Harry MacQueen). These films differ in significant ways; they cover a range of genres, from the family melodrama to romance and horror. Such genre differences produce a wide range of ‘feeling tones’, with the potential to elicit a range of affective responses in the viewer, which may, in turn, have a transformative impact on how the condition is understood culturally, socially and politically. But how far do these recent films challenge the problems that have already been identified as key questions for thinking through representations of this condition? (Or, more accurately, range of conditions.) Namely, the dangers of entrenching stigma, fear and denial and the production of ‘epistemic injustice’ that ultimately dehumanises and renders abject the character (and, by implication, anyone else) who is identified with dementia? These preoccupations reflect the critical challenges that the field of dementia studies explores. The films in question raise a range of potentially productive issues specifically for critical accounts of the portrayals of dementia on film. For example, has the perspectival shift, widely reported in press reactions to The Father, answered the critique of cinema that it has too often focused on the traumas of the caregiver and failed to attempt to represent the embodied experiences of dementia? If so, to what extent does this shift reflect a more progressive cultural narrative? Supernova explores a same-sex couple’s experiences of dementia. Does this narrative rearticulate the gendered dimensions of dementia and care that have interested critics or does the figuration of loss and grief and the invocation of suicide override these potential considerations? And, finally, wha