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As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
70 2 Refining studio realism By the early 1960s, television was more established in both reach and form, yet despite significant technological shifts its production processes remained largely unchanged. Actor experience had increased, yet an analysis of studio realism during this period as the result solely of actors’ increased familiarity with the medium is complicated by external factors; primarily, the advent in British television and film of social realism. Though frequently linked with a particular ‘type’ or sub-​genre of television drama, e.g. the work
– in its various forms – had maintained a five-hundred year dominance in the industry, resulting in deeply entrenched practices, values and identities that at first proved hard to shift.12 Hence we can see that letterpress had undergone significant technological shifts in previous centuries, but, crucially, a letterpress-machinist’s labour process remained somewhat ‘hands-on’ throughout this period. This was chiefly because the process of setting up the press remained highly labour-intensive, and because printing presses endured as autonomous units, usually under the
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
begun in the USA with the de-regulation of the television industry in the 1980s. The movement towards a fragmented market that also carries with it the technological shifts, such as, first, DVD, then Blu-ray, multi-platform access, streaming technologies and the web, opening up much greater levels of fan–producer interaction. An interaction that can be considered both positively, as a democratisation of the production process
; (2)Â professional practice; and (3)Â political economy. An important place to start when considering the spread and impact of images of warfare is to consider the technologies available at the time, as well as the extent to which contemporary analyses of their impact are skewed by underplaying significant technological shifts that take place over very short periods of time. When we return to the clips from Iraq and Afghanistan uploaded in 2006 and 2007, for example, it would be fair to ask:Â what would happen if the heavy fighting in Iraq were taking place today, and
this tier suggests that it has not been coded as masculine and that a different code is operative. Interestingly, recent technological shifts towards electronic digital imaging seem to cause printmakers to unconsciously reach for a masculine gendered code and refigure the field as printmaKING. Witness the recently adopted use in North America of the French word giclée 17 to
relating to technological shifts and the understanding of what different media represent, and that it is no coincidence that the phenomenon of archive art emerged in the midst of these discussions and reformulations. Photography at the turn of the twenty-first century is thus fraught with different and contradictory sets of associations. On the one hand, photography is considered exemplary of the indexical sign and thus capable of delivering objectivity and truth, but there are also persistent ideas relating to mystical connections to past events and characters. Notions
. In the mediation of Chinese identity, artists and audiences are impacted by computer screens far more than Chineseness: theoretical, historical, political they are by cinema and film. Moreover, photographic and videographic forms in the technological shift have become essential for any artistic practice, in the understanding that all artworks will end up on the computer/smartphone/ tablet screens of social media. As a clear example, the artist Cao Fei had staged the scene of new media for the inaugural moment of interpellation beyond interpellation by