NECSUS Issue 5 on Traces: Kracauer, Carax, Farocki, Elsaesser, mobile interfaces, film sound and much more

Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA
dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:

• Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities by Thomas Elsaesser
• Mapping the rise of the iPhone: Between phones and mobile media by Ginette Verstraete
• Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega
• Empire is out there!?: The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film ‘Up’ by Dietmar Meinel
• Representation or misrepresentation?: British media and Japanese popular culture by Perry Hinton

Special section: Traces

• The navigational gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface by Nanna Verhoeff and Heidi Rae Cooley
• Poetics and politics of the trace: Notes on surveillance practices through Harun Farocki’s work by Miriam De Rosa
• Webcams as cinematic medium: Creating chronotopes of the real by Paula Albuquerque
• Assembling traces, or the conservation of net art by Annet Dekker
• The Third Party Diary: Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites by Lonneke van der Velden
• Microphysics of a rationalist utopia: Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary by Andrea Mariani
• The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in ‘Holy Motors’ by Saige Walton
• Animated maps and the power of the trace by Giuseppe Fidotta
• Enhanced echoes: Digitisation and new perspectives on film sound by Jasper Aalbers

Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)

• Globalisation and television formats review by Jaap Kooijman
• Soundscapes, sound clash review by Nessa Johnston
• Shadow economies and digital disruption review by Chris Baumann
• The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closes review by Miklós Kiss
• Impossible dreams: Europe and love in cinema review by Fiona Handyside

Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)

• Oberhausen: An interview with Lars Henrik Gass by Enrico Camporesi
• Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos review by Ana Gilbert
• Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival review by Lydia Papadimitriou
• Initiating regional talents: 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival review by Ivan Velisavljević
• Past memories for a new future: 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia review by Enrico Vannucci

Exhibition reviews:

• Fassbinder Frankfurt review by Senta Siewert
• The biennale as a device: 4th Athens Biennale review by Eva Fotiadi

Surveillance Film Studies

Call Northside 777 (Henry Hathaway, 1948). Take a look at
Hannah Gregory's great visual essay on this film

Today, the compulsively unsecretive, positively Panoptic, Film Studies For Free focuses on 'surveillance film studies'. Do cast a beady eye, therefore, at the unsuspiciously Open Access scholarly resources linked to further down the page.

The post has been inspired by the thrilling chronometric proximity of an interdisciplinary conference, taking place next week, on the “Cultures of Surveillance” at University College London (September 29-October 1), with keynote lectures by the very brilliant professors Tom Gunning and Simon Cole.

The full programme can be found here. Anyone interested in these topics should also check out some related and highly innovative work online by the amazing film and humanities scholars at UCL at the following four websites:

• Autopsies Research Group including the Autopsies of Surveillance Project
• The Cinetourist (aka Roland-François Lack)
• The Blow Up Moment (also by Roland-François Lack)
• The Daily Map (also by Roland-François Lack)
  

• Objects Under Surveillance Museum Roundtable, University College London, January 19, 2011 Videos [m4v] of the event can be viewed by clicking on the images below.

Intro. & Simon Baker / Sue Woods & Katy McGahan  /  Neil Paterson  /  Discussion                  

• Wesley Aelbrecht, '2 Into 1 (Gillian Wearing, 1997)', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Anders Albrechtslund, 'Surveillance and Ethics in Film: Rear Window and The Conversation', JCJPC 15(2), 2008
• Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld, 'The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment', Surveillance and Society, 3(2/3), 2005: 216-221
• Chris Darke, Letter from London [on surveillance culture]', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 8, April 2003
• Deirdre Devers and Stephanie Wilson, 'Let Me Entertain You: Designing for Surveillance and Online Gaming', DIGRA Proceedings, 2009
• Stephanie Fuller, '"Your papers?": Objects of Surveillance at the US-Mexico Border', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Hannah Gregory, 'Surveillance on Film: Call Northside 777', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Nic Groombridge, 'Crime Control or Crime Culture TV?', Surveillance and Society, 1(1), 2002: 30-46
• Nic Groombridge, 'Crime Control or Crime Culture TV?', Surveillance and Society, 1(1), 2002 
• David Harper, 'The Politics of Paranoia: Paranoid Positioning and Conspiratorial Narratives in the Surveillance Society', Surveillance and Society, 5(1), 2008: 1-32 
• Nicholas Holm, 'Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering Modalities of Paranoia and Conspiracy in Surveillance Studies', Surveillance and Society 7(1): 36-48, 2009 
• Andrew Hultkrans, 'Surveillance in the cinema: here's looking at you, kid', Stim, 7.1, 2006
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society - CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) 2(2/3), 2004: 464-473
• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Peter Marks, 'Surveillance Screens and Screening in Code 46', SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture, vol 5 number 1 May 2008
• Peter Marks, 'Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies', Surveillance and Society, 3(2/3), 2005: 222-239
• G.T. Marx, 'Seeing hazily (but not darkly) through the lens: some recent empirical studies of surveillance technologies', Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 2005
• Serafino Murri, 'Visual Irony as Virus in Panoptic Structures: Logic of Fact and Anti-Truth in Chris Petit’s “Surveillance”', ctrl[space, October 2, 2001
• Simon Rothon, '‘Through the Grapevine’? Listening Devices and Acts of Surveillance', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Simon Rothon, 'Objects of Surveillance: The Parabolic Microphone', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Jessica M. Silbey, 'Videotaped Confessions and the Genre of Documentary', Suffolk University Law School Faculty Publications, Paper 35, 2006
• The Politics of CCTV in Europe and Beyond', Special Issue: Surveillance and Society, Vol. 2 (2.3), 2004
• Giovanni Tiso, 'The spectacle of surveillance: Images of the Panopticon in science-fiction cinema', Research Paper, 2000
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Surveillance, space and performance: informing interstitial subjectivities in Head On', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Torture porn and surveillance culture', Jump Cut, No. 51, Summer 2010
• Kristin Veel, 'Surveillance Narratives – from lack to overload', Humanity in Cybernetic Environments, Edited by Daniel Riha. Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010
• Catherine Zimmer, 'Surveillance Cinema: Narrative between Technology and Politics', Surveillance and Society, 8(4), 2011: 427-440