transformations, technique should not determine content, and it is content which must regulate the application of technique. By György Lukács [It is a stylistic feature of Cinema Nuova to break up the flow of an article by positioning a key quote from elsewhere in the article near the beginning of the
The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs is an exciting, new open access journal
hosted jointly by The Humanitarian Affairs Team at Save the Children UK, and
Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires MSF (Paris) and the
Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. It
will contribute to current thinking around humanitarian governance, policy and
practice with academic rigour and political courage. The journal will challenge
contributors and readers to think critically about humanitarian issues that are
often approached from reductionist assumptions about what experience and
evidence mean. It will cover contemporary, historical, methodological and
applied subject matters and will bring together studies, debates and literature
reviews. The journal will engage with these through diverse online content,
including peer reviewed articles, expert interviews, policy analyses, literature
reviews and ‘spotlight’ features.
Our rationale can be summed up as
follows: the sector is growing and is facing severe ethical and practical
challenges. The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs will provide a space for serious
and inter-disciplinary academic and practitioner exchanges on pressing issues of
international interest.
The journal aims to be a home and platform for
leading thinkers on humanitarian affairs, a place where ideas are floated,
controversies are aired and new research is published and scrutinised. Areas in
which submissions will be considered include humanitarian financing, migrations
and responses, the history of humanitarian aid, failed humanitarian
interventions, media representations of humanitarianism, the changing landscape
of humanitarianism, the response of states to foreign interventions and critical
debates on concepts such as resilience or security.
increasingly encounter media content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. This includes everything from rumours and exaggerations on social media, through to partisan journalism, satire and completely invented stories that are designed to look like real news articles. Although this media content varies enormously, it is often grouped together under nebulous and all-encompassing terms such as ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘post-truth’ media. Scholars have started to pay serious attention to the production and impact of all these forms of
It is widely argued that engaging with a fiction involves imagining its content. Yet, the concept of the imagination is rarely clarified, and it is often used incorrectly by theorists. A good example, this paper argues, is Gregory Currie‘s simulation theory, and its claim that imagining the content of a fiction consists of simulating ‘the beliefs I would acquire if I took the work I am engaged with for fact rather than fiction’. The paper, following the philosopher Alan R. White, argues instead that imagining consists of thoughts about the possible.
Drawing on internal studio correspondence, multiple screenplay drafts and the final film, this essay reconstructs the production history of Cornered to explore the ways in which Scott both compromised with and challenged the studios expectations and interventions. I argue that although Ceplair and Englund are correct in their assessment that studio meddling shaped the films political content in significant ways, Scotts complex negotiations during the films production ensured that Cornered remained a powerfully anti-fascist film.
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explores the different aspects of nineteenth-century culture, in search of a historical reality to which people can awake in a revelatory act of political consciousness. However, the uncanny effects of his archival approach impinge on this revelatory and sublime process. Rather than revealing the political, economic, and technological latent content of the past, representations of the material object confront consciousness with the unfamiliar and abject forms of the repressed collective unconscious. The Gothic tropes of Benjamin‘s text are the traces of the melancholy haunting his concept of a demystifying revelation of historical and material truth.
Filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell (Blue Artichoke Films) has made empathy the centre of her practice as an alternative porn filmmaker. This blend of artist manifesto and academic essay illuminates the three ways in which empathy is a driving force at every level of her artistic efforts. 1) Structure: Using a foundation of cognitive film theory and specifically the work of Murray Smith, she builds empathy into the structure and content of her films themselves. 2) Production: She prioritises empathy in her production process on the set with cast and crew 3) Society: By creating and spreading empathetic pornography, she aims to introduce more empathy into society at large.
During a twenty-five year period, spanning the Second World War and his move from England to America, Hitchcock showed a particular preference for plots involving an unjustified accusation against the films central character. The 39 Steps (1935), Young and Innocent (1937), Saboteur (1942), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), The Wrong Man (1956) and North by Northwest (1959) are all variations on the same pattern with different thematic emphases. This article discusses the narrative logic and moral content of this ‘innocence plot’, running through Hitchcock‘s films from the mid-thirties to the late fifties.
An analysis of 21 Grams (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003) that uses the film to illustrate a number of trends in the contemporary American independent sector, including both its situation in the industrial landscape and its most distinctive formal qualities. Industrially, the film, distributed by Focus Features, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, is identified as a product of the zone of overlap that exists between all-out independence and attachment to the major Hollywood studio-distributors. A hybrid identity is also suggested,at the level of form, in a mixture of fragmented narrative and hyper-realistic visual textures with more conventionally melodramatic content.
Focusing our understanding of Hollywood and HUAC on questions of presence and content is to apply paradigms of authorship and genre which were critical by-products of the cultural transformation to which HUAC contributed, and will as a result have limited critical purchase on its causes. What might break this critical impasse would be the discovery of something outside the circle; something not easily, or at least not yet, assimilated into its cycle of repetitions. Such a remainder can be found in a film which is arguably one of the most important productions of the period: Edward Dmytryk‘s ‘lost’ film of Italian/American author Pietro di Donatos novel Christ in Concrete (1949).