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Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema by Garrett Stewart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 320 pages. $90.00 hardcover, $40.00 paperback. The usefulness of theoretical books on cinema has been [...]

This article examines the struggle over the meaning of atomic science and nuclear power in mid-century French film culture, including popular and art cinema, newsreels, television, and industrial films produced by the French atomic energy commission. It considers the nuclear as a representational problem, rooted in the enduring iconicity of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the difficulty of making atomic science's value visible. Building on recent criticism of France's 'Trente glorieuses,' it focuses on the less-than-glorious image of nuclear power that filled French screens during the 1940s and 1950s, especially in two films released in 1950: René Clair's popular but largely forgotten, La beauté du diable, a Faust adaptation-cum-nuclear allegory, and Nicole Védrès's seldom-seen (but recently restored and re-released) La vie commence demain (the follow-up to her better-known Paris 1900 (1947)), which uses a who's who of French arts and letters—including Sartre, Gide, Prévert, Picasso, Le Corbusier and Jean Rostand, among others—to denounce nuclear weapons while imagining a future enlightened by peaceful atomic science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micromachined heterodyne mixers using antenna-coupled superconducting tunnel junctions (SIS-junctions) as mixing elements have been developed and tested. The results showed that the SIS junctions remain robust during thermal cycles between room temperature and 4.2 K. The device, which is designed for operation at 90-115 GHz and 180-230 GHz, consists of SIS junctions fabricated on a thin SiN membrane that is positioned inside a horn receiver.

The article examines the career of filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff, an Estonian immigrant who migrated to Paris, France, and highlights how a concern for the ecological conditions of a modernizing world influenced the content and form of Kirsanoff's films. Topics covered include eco-cinema modernity based on the distribution of the sensible, interest of Kirsanoff in time-movements, re-definition of modernity by French philosopher Jacques Rancière and history of French ecocinema.