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Walid Raad's quasi-fictional yet historically driven The Atlas Group has been a touchpoint for many contemporary discussions around the roles of archives in contemporary art. Raad's project focuses on the Lebanese CivilWar, often from the standpoint of perturbations in collective historical memory. This article argues that despite its ostensible claims to archival documentation, The Atlas Group's archival status can be considered an extension of its fictional apparatus. The Atlas Group reveals formal structures that resist standard archival patterns of organization and depend rather on various forms of time-based circulation, distribution, and presentation. The Atlas Group can be considered a partly performative enterprise from which various apparatuses of transmission have receded, but haunt, the project. The Atlas Group's contents often register latent infrastructures of cinematic projection and time-based narration that have been absented from collective experience. This infrastructural withdrawal relates directly to the historical conditions of conflict and war that the project addresses. Here, this phenomenon of withdrawal amid war's aftermath is discussed in connection with other artistic practices that touch on the Lebanese regional context, such as those of Oraib Toukan and Jalal Toufic. By exploring how The Atlas Group challenges established conceptions of the image, the article also considers how the project intervenes in new debates within media theory. Drawing on scholarship, Raad's lecture-performances, and the artist's accounts of The Atlas Group's historical and artistic context, this article argues that Raad's project engages a deep contestation of the terms on which imagemaking unfolds in the midst of proliferating digital technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the popular bullet-titling practice in contemporary China – typing and sending a layer of horizontally scrolling comments superimposed onto moving images. It first explicates bullet-titling practice as a retaliatory action against the tactile effects of moving images, reconceptualizing cinema's tactile quality and recovering its association with bullet-like intensity through the notion of tacti(ca)lity. Tracing the changed perception of touch in relation to the emergence of the touchscreen interface, the author then delineates the transformation of bullet-titles from offensive weapons against the optical attacks of moving images to a venue for real-time conversation and communication among spectator-cum-bullet-titlers. The article ends with a discussion of bullet-titles' construction of pseudo-real time, which constitutes a viewing community of 'diachronic simultaneity' that assimilates all temporally and geographically dispersed spectators into the unfolding 'now' of video playback. This 'nowness' reconciles contemporary media consumption's contradictory demands for globalized simultaneity and individualized flexibility, obliterating us anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filmmaking has become an increasing focus of interest within geography, the geohumanities, and related fields. The use of film ranges from enhanced forms of ethnographic fieldwork to the production of feature-length documentaries shown at international festivals. The making of documentaries has become an increasingly significant research method in itself that has the potential to become a widely recognized type of interdisciplinary research output. How should we interpret the role of film in relation to wider epistemological debates over the production of knowledge? How can we contextualize the methodological turn toward film within the broader historiography of filmmaking and the cinematic apparatus? This article argues that documentary film has a distinctive role to play in expanding the research imagination, enhancing pedagogic practice, reaching new audiences, and producing unique cultural artifacts. At the same time, however, the use of film is also entrained in complex debates concerning the verisimilitude of representational practices and the wider institutional context for the production and evaluation of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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.)

Despite its apparent claims to modernity in style and subject, James Ivory’s Howards End can be viewed in terms of a deconstructionist approach that pays attention to the presence of themes and figures of spectrality. First seen as an opposition between characters who embody contrasting existential attitudes, spectrality also—above all—governs their mode of presence and presentation on screen. Ultimately, this reveals Ivory’s subtle way to intimate the elusive nature of his own creation as mere projection.

Summary: In engaging the visual aspects of public diplomacy, this article has three objectives. First, it introduces the notion of visual diplomacy — the ways and means by which images are used by plural diplomatic actors to transmit ideas to audiences, producing and circulating meanings that serve particular purposes, with the aim of influencing, shaping and transforming relations between actors and across publics. Second, it examines how the spectacle of diplomacy is enacted by focusing on a particular case of commissioned cinematography of Cypriot public diplomacy. Third, it engages visual diplomacy cinematically, employing Deleuze's insights on the cinematic apparatus, and by producing an essay film, The Blessed Envoy , linked to this article. The film reuses, through creative montage, nine official documentaries of Cypriot public diplomacy, revealing the key narratives and hidden transcripts that the visual material disseminates, thus encouraging a reflexive focus on the use of imagery in diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 film Uncle BoonmeeWho Can Recall His Past Lives (Loong Boonmee raleuk chat)in terms of its representations of transmigration and reincarnation, with a particular focus on its use of Super 16 mm film at a time in cinema history when photochemical film is experiencing its own existential transformation. This formal strategy is considered as both a corollary of the film’s central themes and a broader historiographic exploration of the very nature of cinema at the point of its evolving film-to-digital representational base and a broader ‘life cycle’ of birth, death and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The exhibition delves into the history and evolution of cinema, shown through the lens of the machines and technology that made the filmmaking process possible. It reveals how technological progress brought about new forms, and conversely, how esthetic pursuit—the desire to see new images—gave birth to new devices and techniques. http://www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/de-Méliès-a-la-3d-la-machine-cinema-356.html.

Copyright of Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana 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.)

This brief essay on the zoom shot is something of a companion essay to Paul Willemen's more famous “Detouring through Korean cinema”, published inInter-Asia Cultural Studies(Vol. 3, no. 2: 167–186) where he explored the consequences of the freeze-frame. The zoom is viewed as a rhetorical device, a signifier of narratorial performance, and as such evokes a long-discussed question of literary theory, namely the “marks of enunciation” associated with narratorial performance. As an emphatic, gestural marker of such a performance, the zoom breaks the illusion of the impersonal, invisible narrator required for the suspension of disbelief, and is therefore explored here as marking a shift from an auditive-professional storytelling pre-modern culture to the practice of an industrialised form of narrator performance. It is therefore a residual signifier of pre-modern forms of storytelling, but one found as much within Europe as in other supposedly “underdeveloped” economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Black feminist independent filmmaker Julie Dash responds to mainstream cinema's marginalization of women of color with her film Daughters of the Dust (1991). Using the ideology of the visible to her advantage, Dash transforms cinematic conventions of slow motion and close-up into vehicles for audience gaze and ‘Black looks,’ privileging the image of Black women. Through her use of nonlinear narrative devices and mythic images. Dash undermines the conventions of realist text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]