Film and Digital Media

Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. The proliferation of media objects such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The essays interrogate how the combination of fashion and the moving-image enables us to reflect upon the ubiquitous presence of fashion in our media-saturated landscape, and at the same time upon the ubiquitous presence of media in socio-cultural practices and industrial processes such as fashion. Questioning the encounter between audiovisual media and fashion brings an elective affinity to light. If fashion is central to cinema and television and gives rise to a wide range of new genres and formats, it also impacts on the forms of representation and expression of identity and the body via personal and social media, according to the prevailing customs and tastes of our place and time. This encounter is a terrain of experimentation with new trends in the media experience – ones that rely on performativity and the enhancement of the viewer/user’s agency. After all, audiovisual media are similarly about constructing a fictional (and entertaining) world and actively and creatively inhabiting it as an essential part of the actual world.

Back in the 1960s videogames were a big deal and were being played on computers. No one would have probably guessed that this form of playing would sooner or later change in a way that it would come close to the motion pictures, which was entertained in the movie theatres. However, in the 21st century, the two different entertainment media, videogames and movies, have now come to a point where they almost seem to merge together. According to Steven Shaviro, film has given way to television as "cultural dominant" for a long time ago, and television has in turn given way in current years to computer-and network-based, and digitally generated, "new media". He states, that "film itself has not disappeared, of course; but filmmaking has been transformed, over the past two decades, from analog process to a heavily digitized one" (Shaviro 130). Thus, we are witnessing an emergence of a different mode of production, than the ones who dominated the 20th century. The art of storytelling is therefore altering and the way we view movies will never be the same. In 2018, Netflix released its hyper-experimental interactive or "choose your own adventure" movie. The award-winning sci-fi series Black Mirror, has been a popular show, known for highlighting the negative effects of digital technology. Unlike the series previous seasons, which were mainly episodes, Black Mirror released a movie instead, called Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), introducing an entirely new way to experience content. This paper will examine the digitality of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Netflix 2018) and discuss issues of interaction and database cinema.

Contemporary Indian films, in their essentially digitalised realms, incorporate techniques such as the location-based multitrack “sync” recording, and surround sound design that reorder the organization of cinematic sound. These practices contrast with the earlier mono- or stereo formats by reconfiguring the linear construct of a soundtrack to produce a spatially evocative sonic environment that engages the listener with a more life-like auditory experience of the fictional site. Using significant examples from post-2000 Indian films, this article shows how earlier production practices are being replaced by “sync” sound recording and surround sound mixing with a richly spatial arrangement of site-specific ambience. The article argues that these layers of ambient sounds lead to audiences establishing their embodied experience of presence in regards to the fictional site via auditory spatial cognition and immersion in a cinematic soundscape. By situating contemporary sound production practices within the various trajectories of Indian cinema, this article contributes to the broader field of research on the key developments in constructing spatial environments for cinema.

La scrittura soggettiva permea oggi tanto le pratiche sociali quanto le piattaforme mediali, dando luogo a esperienze che invitano a rivedere da un lato i termini del dibattito sui nuovi media, dall’altro quello su autobiografia e tecnologie del sé. La pervasività dell’autorappresentazione nel contesto estetico contemporaneo, d’altra parte, è stata negli ultimi anni ampiamente evidenziata, mentre l’espressione di sé è progressivamente divenuta la modalità cardine attraverso cui si guarda alle forme mediali e all’interazione con dispositivi e tecnologie. Attraverso siti, blog e social network, la configurazione della soggettività ha trovato una molteplicità di ancoraggi e sollecitazioni, diventando attraverso il selfie vero e proprio fenomeno di massa, all’interno di un meccanismo complessivo di oversharing personale. Tali tendenze sollecitano le forme di scrittura intima più sedimentate in ambito letterario, visivo e audiovisivo – come l’auto- ritratto, l’autobiografia, il ritratto – saccheggiandole da un lato, invitandole a trasformarsi dall’altro.

“Gran parte dei nuovi media sono stati pensati partendo da una metafora cinematografica: in essi, una certa idea di cinema continua ad esistere”, sostiene David N. Rodowick in questo volume che analizza il destino del cinema e il ruolo dei film studies nella cultura estetica e visuale del XXI secolo. Il cinema ricopre, secondo Rodowick, una posizione decisiva nella genealogia delle arti del virtuale, mentre il film sta scomparendo, il cinema persiste – per lo meno nelle forme narrative immaginate da Hollywood a partire dal 1915. Vedere un film sta diventando un anacronismo poiché ogni aspetto del produrre e vedere film è sempre più digitale. Come può la teoria dl cinema reagire al terremoto digitale che ha messo in crisi la stessa natura del film? In questo mutato scenario, cosa accadrà al cinema e agli studi sul cinema? Questo libro, il primo pubblicato in Italia dell’eminente studioso anglosassone, chiarisce come le tecnologie digitali confermino il cinema come cultura audiovisiva matura del XX secolo e come stiano preparando il terreno a una nuova cultura audiovisiva i cui tratti sono ancora indistinti.

Beyonce calls Lemonade a “visual album.” There’s been buzz about the image of Beyonce smashing up cars, and a lot of talk about the autobiographical themes of the lyrics (lines like “better call Becky with the good hair” have been getting attention for the way they call out Jay Z’s mistress). But this 65-minute film’s songs, text and sound design haven’t been talked about in relation to its images. Lemonade’s unusual form—a long-play music video—gives it the capacity to draw connections between the personal pain of infidelity and America’s terrible history of racism. Twelve video clips are linked by brief passages comprised of poetry, visual tableaux and sound collage. These interludes lean toward avant-garde aesthetics. One thing avant garde aesthetics and music video share is the capacity to hold several vantage points in suspension. In Lemonade this capacity allows the work to embody opposites: love and hate, engagement and alienation, forgiveness and revenge.

This article stands for innovative learning
opportunities to social inclusion by film education.
The theoretical model is a combined structure coming
from approaches and projects of social inclusion
through film education. The aim is to describe and
analyze the film education process in a project
outside the school. This research is based on a
participant observation research conducted on
children in a Brazilian slum. Cinema, as other art
forms, is a political and ideological tool that can be
used with different purposes. Film education is a
strong mediator to facilitate transformative learning,
changing one’s dysfunctional views and beliefs about
oneself and the world by revising their frames of
reference (Mezirow & Taylor, 2009). Films have a
unique ability to promote empathy towards a role
model, and promote resilience in situations similar to
those the role model goes through. Furthermore,
media, such as films, is capable of reaching people
that might otherwise be uninterested (Buckingham,
2007; Gonnet, 2007; Silverstone, 2005; UNESCO,
2013).

Peter Gabriel and other allies created WITNESS nearly 20 years ago – shortly after the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. At the time, our founders asked: ‘What if every human rights worker had a camera in their hands? What would they be able to document? What would they be able to change?’ Since 1992 WITNESS has engaged with the risks, opportunities and possibilities for action that emerge from the power of moving images – training and supporting human rights activists worldwide to create real change through our methodology of ‘video advo- cacy’. Yet now an increasing number of people worldwide have cameras. Participants, witnesses and perpetrators are all filming. Videos (particularly mobile video) make it possible to document and publicize human rights struggles – from monks marching for freedom in Rangoon and the election protestors in Tehran, to individual voices speaking out against injustice on YouTube. However, despite the growing online circulation of images of human rights violations, of victims and survivors, there is limited discussion of crucial safety, consent and ethical concerns – particularly for people who are filmed. Issues around consent, representation and re-victimization and retaliation have emerged even more clearly in an open and networked online environment. Video is being reworked, remixed and recircu- lated by many more people. New possibilities for action by a global citizenry have arisen, but these carry with them real dangers. The human rights and technology communities can help lead the way in confronting these challenges. The article concludes with suggestions for approaches based on norms, technology solutions, and other ideas that could be deployed to begin to address these emerging issues.

This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates establishing the authenticity of source material and that rapid dissemination of digital files through distributed networks may compromise the agency of victims. Furthermore, we raise questions about how so-called “conflict porn” that depicts graphic violence is received by Internet audiences. We offer a number of basic ethical principles for remixers of citizen journalism to consider in the post-Arab Spring milieu.

Through the example of Lang’s film M (1931), this essay suggests the necessity of a new cinematic
criticism that would meaningfully integrate the classical film heritage with the
 contemporary visual turn to new media. The essay explores the cognitive
basis and techniques of the identification and visualization of a murderer in M, demonstrating that Lang’s cinematic constructivism prefigures the “thoughtware”
 of digital filmmaking. By portraying and conceptually "capturing" a murderer through the construction of visibility, Lang challenges the basic characteristic of the cinematic medium, its
photographic relation to reality behind the camera. The director presents the murderer’s
image as an optical artifact that gradually emerges on a three-
dimensional canvas, and thereby draws on visual models
from other media and pre-cinematic devices. Though the ‘three-dimensional’ effect thus achieved leads the viewer to contest and question the claims of realism that film inherited from
 photography, Lang’s critique passed unnoticed: worse yet, by creating a hyperreal
simulacrum of a murderer, Lang demonstrated techniques of manipulation that would erupt in fascist and anti-fascist propaganda films yet to come. By way of response to this unfortunate historical precedent, the author invites reflection about the possible forms of visual self-reflexivity and distanciation within the contemporary paradigm of three-dimensional digital visibility.

During my five years of research on the uses and grammars of video in the context of revolt then war in Syria, many images have touched me, overwhelmed me. Others have shocked me, wounded me. And yet out of this visual, aural and emotional accumulation, three videos stand out. They permeate my memory and my thought. Each inscribed in its own way in a grey, intermediate zone, where vision is blurred and the modes of perception are redefined. In this precarious place, it is difficult to draw the boundary between an intentional filmic gesture, marked above all by the desire to testify; and non-mastery, linked to the contingency of the event, or rather, to its embodied experience. Liminal images, signifying the paradoxical uniqueness of these videos, where points of contact flourish randomly between subjective experience and history-in-the-making, between body and event, life and death.

This volume closely examines the near-ubiquitous images of state security walls, domes, and other such defense enclosures flashing across movie screens since 2006, the year of the ratification of George W. Bush's Secure Fence Act. This study shows that many of the films of this era enable us to imaginatively test the effects of these security mechanisms on citizens, immigrants, refugees, and other sovereign states, challenging our commitment to constructing them, maintaining them, staffing them, and subsidizing their enormous overheads.

With case studies ranging from Atomic Blonde and Ready Player One to Black Panther and Elysium; Walls Without Cinema serves as a timely counterpoint to the xenophobic rhetoric and abusive, carceral security conditions that characterize the Trump administration's management of the Mexico-U.S. border situation.

Connected to our new exploratory research project " Rethinking Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In-Betweenness " funded by the UEFISCDI, and following up on the topics of our previous conferences, we would like to bring into focus the idea of " in-betweenness " set in a wider context of contemporary visual culture, and to re-evaluate its relevance regarding the state of the art in researches on intermediality. Digital media have not only prompted a reassessment of the relationship of the " old " and the " new " through their extraordinary capacity for absorption and remediation, but have literally flooded our life with their ubiquity and sheer excess. The technological convergences of devices producing and displaying media, the fusions, expansions, relocations taking place have effectively challenged our perception of media differences. If the idea of intermediality is based on the assumption of a productive interaction of media, then there should be no more pressing issue regarding intermediality studies today than fine-tuning its core concept of in-betweenness to the phenomena of the so called post-media age, in the spirit of Raymond Bellour's concept of l'entre-images (i.e. images-in-between/inter-images), in which novel forms are continuously " hollowed out from within surrounded by the new forces that irrigate it " (2012: 21). On the other hand, however, as recent theoretical approaches imply by viewing media products embedded in their palpable, real-life environment (i.e. in the dispositifs we experience them, in their phenomenology that links them to our bodies, or in their concrete, historical and socio-political context), the relevance of intermediality is not limited to what happens to media, but it extends, even more importantly, to what happens through the in-betweenness of media and what is the agency of in-betweenness in our contemporary multimedia environment. Besides the analysis of new configurations, we should also examine what is inscribed and communicated through various intermedia relations and what new types of passages are established in-between art and life, in-between the emotional, spiritual and the material, as well as the imaginary and the real, and so on. We invite proposals to unravel the complex new relationships that define our contemporary visual culture, and to map new, relevant areas of in-betweenness that may enrich our knowledge of intermediality today.

This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates establishing the authenticity of source material and that rapid dissemination of digital files through distributed networks may compromise the agency of victims. Furthermore, we raise questions about how so-called “conflict porn” that depicts graphic violence is received by Internet audiences. We offer a number of basic ethical principles for remixers of citizen journalism to consider in the post-Arab Spring milieu.

We explore Blade Runner 2049 through a series of subtle filmic moments. These moments contribute to an implicit narrative about the role of the senses, particularly tactility, in the development of human consciousness. This is navigated through the trajectory of the main character, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Agent K, from replicant to a state of open-ended awareness. K (Ryan Gosling) as an evolving entity goes from existing as a synthetic being to experiencing the fragility and volatility of “being human”; in doing so, he encounters barriers within a wider, all-encompassing nature. The film is linked to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which we identify pivotal moments in K’s consciousness that are aligned with poetic concepts in this text. We contend that Blade Runner 2049 is a form of metacinema and is structured as an interrupted game, a spatial journey composed of layers, ruptures, and bifurcations expressed through barriers. These concepts will be discussed in this article.

Medienbeziehungen sind für die Herstellung medialer Identität fundamental. Seit der Frühzeit des Films wurde dessen mediale Spezifik im Medienvergleich konstituiert. Intermedialität, Remediatisierung und Medienreflexion sind verschiedene Konzepte, anhand derer das Vorkommen anderer Medien in Filmen untersucht wird, wobei sich der Fokus von der Voraussetzung von Medienspezifik zu deren performativer Herstellung verschiebt. Transmedialität interessiert sich dafür, medienübergreifende Phänomene zu denken , Multimodalität hingegen damit die mediale Einheit des Films zu problematisieren.

Contemporary Indian films, in their essentially digitalised realms, incorporate techniques such as the location-based multitrack “sync” recording, and surround sound design that reorder the organization of cinematic sound. These practices contrast with the earlier mono- or stereo formats by reconfiguring the linear construct of a soundtrack to produce a spatially evocative sonic environment that engages the listener with a more life-like auditory experience of the fictional site. Using significant examples from post-2000 Indian films, this article shows how earlier production practices are being replaced by “sync” sound recording and surround sound mixing with a richly spatial arrangement of site-specific ambience. The article argues that these layers of ambient sounds lead to audiences establishing their embodied experience of presence in regards to the fictional site via auditory spatial cognition and immersion in a cinematic soundscape. By situating contemporary sound production practices within the various trajectories of Indian cinema, this article contributes to the broader field of research on the key developments in constructing spatial environments for cinema.