Film, Media and Music
This article examines the cultural politics of American soccer fandom, with specific attention paid to the ways in which the sport is positioned and platformed by the major sports networks, including, especially, cable televisions biggest player in the United States, ESPN. The networks‘ failure to exploit soccer as a marketable commodity can be traced to a persistent American futility at the sport on the international level, but it evinces as well a larger American cultural problematic, one in which ethnocentrism and isolationism is disguised, as it often is, as American exceptionalism.
Cinenova was relaunched in 1991 from the pre-existing womens distributor, Circles, which had operated throughout the 1980s. In keeping with their founders feminist politics, both Circles and Cinenova were run via a non-hierarchical management structure and focused on the distribution, promotion and exhibition of films and videos made by, for and about women. As the funding and economic climate became harsher during the 1990s this organisational model was severely tested, as Cinenova‘s workers were forced to try and survive on a more commercially viable basis. This article uses Cinenova‘s management committee meeting minutes of 1991–97 to explore how its management practices impacted on its operation and effectiveness.
Who were the French who wouldnt go to movies? The question was a vexing one in France after the Second World War, to which the film industry and the national government sought answers. In 1948 the Gaumont Film Company commissioned a survey of who went to the movies, who didnt, and why. In 1954, the Centre National de la Cinématographie, acknowledging La crise du cinéma, published an ominously titled Inquest about movies and the French public. Thus audience studies in France took on national importance, and created a sociological and psychological profile of viewers that could be used to enhance business practice and government policy.
Film production at Paramount Pictures during the so-called classical era required the mobilisation of massive material and human capital that depended on institutional systems of surveillance, knowledge creation and control ranging from departmental affiliations to the pre-printed budget forms. This article focuses on those pre-printed budget forms as technologies of knowledge and power, revealing that the necessities of creating and managing coalitions of expert labourers created alternative power centres and spaces where being the object of surveillance was itself a source of power. It concludes by discussing the implications of this ecology for the historiography of Hollywood.
This article examines fictional film narratives from the perspectives of a chrono-urbanism, concerned with the ways in which cinema maps the unfolding of time in cities. It examines how films treat the urban night – as territory, as one side of a boundary, as a substance which falls upon the city. These treatments are explored by examining a limited corpus of single-night narratives, films whose narratives unfold over a single night. Drawing on a variety of recent texts that trace the history of the night in cities, this article distinguishes between different narrative patterns within which the urban night unfolds and becomes meaningful.
Film studies is currently undergoing a needed and healthy expansion of methodologies and critical approaches, including media, cultural and technology studies. This is crucial not just for examining cinemas present but also its past. Using format theory, this article opens up our understanding of what cinema has been, rather than what it should have been. It does this by documenting the minor technological footprint of movie theatres when compared to the expansive one consisting of 8mm and 16mm small-gauge projectors. In the United States by 1980, these portable devices,outnumbered commercial theatres by an estimated factor of 1000:1.