Film and Television

In “Sense8 : A Roundtable,” eight scholars think through key questions regarding one of today’s most impressive trans-produced mainstream media productions, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Netflix series Sense8, which has yet to receive substantive scholarly attention. We analyze how Sense8 both follows and breaks from the Wachowskis’ prior approach to narrative; offers a distinctly trans* engagement with the histories of cinematic and televisual genres; often relies on western colonial conceptions for its global imagination and marginalizes characters of color; and theorizes contemporary media spectatorship in its appeal to affect and eroticism. We do so believing Sense8 to be an important cultural interlocutor, not only with regard to the exploration of transgender representation but also questions of sexuality, race, and capital in the global present. However, we also share a conviction that the series’ potentiality still leaves substantial room for growth. We take a critical approach to our collective analysis, seeing in the series a glimmer of the kind of global utopian envisioning very much needed in our ceaselessly dystopian present.

Vorliegender Text leistet erstens einen Beitrag zur Beantwortung der Frage, wie sich das Fernsehen selbst versteht, indem beobachtet wird, in welchen Formen das Fernsehen das intrikate Verhältnis von Endlosigkeit und Endlichkeit – als Kern der eigenen Medialität – in Szene setzt. Vom Ende her über das Fernsehen nachzudenken ist zweitens deshalb geboten, weil es im Gegensatz beispielsweise zum Ende von Spielfilmen oder Romanen bisher zu selten geleistet wurde. Drittens soll der gängigen Mediendifferenzierung widersprochen werden, die das Fernsehen im Vergleich zum auf das Ende gepolten Film, als Endlosmedium definiert, dessen einzelnen Segmente allenfalls aufhören, in dem aber „fast nichts endet“ (Lorenz Engell). In vorliegendem Text wird hingegen argumentiert: Zumindest Fernsehserien denken permanent über ihr Ende nach – und zwar gerade, weil sie auf Endlosigkeit angelegt sind.

The invaluable place of the youths in any given society cannot be overemphasised. As future generations of the society and leaders of tomorrow, what concerns the youths should be a matter of utmost concern to every well meaning citizen, and thus must be given adequate attention. This explains why many studies have tried to probe the negative effects of television and video films on viewers, especially the youths. In Nigeria, as in most developing and developed societies world over, apart from parental influence, television has become perhaps the most potent influence on the beliefs, values and behaviours of youths. In recent times, there are too many foreign and homemade violent programmes which are mixed bag of crime, sex, horror and violence. The video medium too is not excluded in this pervasion of vices and violence. The fact that the class of people mostly attracted to and influenced by these antisocial activities are the youths, calls for serious concern; more so, since violence has come to assume a serious global concern in today's world. In the light of the above, the study adopts the qualitative research approach and the interplay of the Cultivation Analysis and the Social Cognitive Theories to critically examine the negative effects of youths' exposure to violent television and video film contents and their ramifying implications on our socio-cultural wellbeing as a people, as well as proffer valuable recommendations geared towards possible solution to this worrisome trend. a graphic portrait of the overwhelming ubiquitous rhythm of violence that is prevalent in modern day television screens among other visual platforms all over the globe. As Hepburn posits: … the prevalence of violence in broadcasts is a serious concern. Television programming in the United States is considered the most violent in advanced industrialized nations. Violence is common in TV entertainment-the dramas that portray stories about crime, psychotic murderers, police cases, emergency services, international terrorism, and war. The dramas are played out in highly realistic scenes of violent attacks accompanied by music and other sounds that churn up emotions. As the realism and gore in the screen images of TV entertainment have intensified, local news cameras have also increasingly focused directly on the bloody violence done to individuals in drive-by shootings, gang attacks, and domestic beatings. Why must these visual details be presented in the news? Why does a typical television evening include so many beatings, shootings, stabbings, and rapes in dramas designed for "entertainment"? Hepburn, perhaps, in an attempt to, possibly justify the reality of this rhythm of violence contends that producers of programming ascertain that scenes of violent action with accompanying fear-striking music can be counted on to hold viewers' attention, keep them awake and watching, and make them less likely to switch channels. This is all in an attempt by the producers to gain and maintain a large number of viewers; since a programme has more commercial value if it can hold more viewers, and programmers attempt to ensure high viewer attention with these doses of violent action in the program. However, the sober and perhaps highly thought-provoking pertinent question which this study joins Hepburn to raise on a rather universal scale is: "How does all of this violence affect young people?"

Empirical studies of the determinants of the ratings of new television series have focused almost exclusively on factors known after a decision has been made to broadcast the series. The current study directly addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, we first develop a parsimonious model to predict the audience size of new television series. We then test our model on a sample of 116 hour-long, scripted television series that debuted on one of the four major US television networks during the 2009-2014 seasons. Our key predictor is the size of the main component of the text network developed from the script of the pilot episode of each series. As expected, this size measure strongly explains the number of viewers of the new series' first several episodes.

Antigypsyism is a state of normality on the big screen. To examine this issue from various perspectives, acclaimed scholars and junior researchers, filmmakers and human rights activists, both Roma and non-Roma, gathered in Berlin in 2018 and presented their research outputs, shared personal testimonies and discussed films at the inter- national conference “Antigypsyism and Film”.

The present bilingual volume is a documentation of the conference proceedings. It contains academic articles and essays as well as interviews with filmmakers grouped in four thematic sections: antigypsyism in film, the question of ethics, strategies of subversion and antigypsyism in comparison to other forms of racism.
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Antiziganismus ist Normalität auf der großen Leinwand. Um dieses Problem aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven zu untersuchen, versammelten sich Wissenschaftler und Nachwuchsforscher, Filmemacher und Menschenrechtsaktivisten – Roma wie Nicht-Roma – 2018 in Berlin zu einer internationalen Tagung: “Antiziganismus und Film“. Sie präsentierten ihre Forschungsergebnisse, teilten persönliche Zeugnisse und diskutierten Filme. Der vorliegende zweisprachige Band dokumentiert diese in ihrer Form bisher einzigartige Tagung.

Der Tagungsband umfasst wissenschaftliche Artikel und Essays sowie Interviews mit Filmemachern, unterteilt in vier thematische Abschnitte: Antiziganismus im Film, Fragen der Ethik, Strategien der Subversion und Antiziganismus im Verhältnis zu anderen Ressentiments.

Este libro comienza con una extensa y reveladora entrevista inédita en la que Matthew Weiner, creador de Mad Men, nos confiesa sus filias, fobias e influencias, y nos desvela el verdadero origen de esta producción. A continuación, Enrique Vila-Matas recupera un inquietante episodio juvenil para hablarnos del eje secreto de la serie y de cómo ésta lo reconcilió con el corazón invisible de todo relato. A ellos se suman un conjunto de autores que analizan de forma ágil y lúcida los principales temas de Mad Men: de los claroscuros del capitalismo a la literatura norteamericana contemporánea que tanto ha influido en sus guiones, del ascenso del feminismo y los derechos sociales de las minorías a la conversión de la realidad en un nuevo y absoluto objeto publicitario.

The past decade has seen a surge in the scholarship of queer China and Sinophone studies, which has productively explored the geocultural travelling and transformation of Western-originated queer theories and identity politics as powerful, generative tools in both the social-political and scholarly dimensions of diverse Chinese-speaking contexts. Along this line, this article, as the introductory piece to the special issue ‘Making a queer turn in contemporary Chinese-language media studies’, proposes a radical queer theorization, reading and critique of today’s Chinese-language film, television, pop music and related celebrity and fan cultures. We connect queer China and Sinophone studies with (the too-often Western-centric) queer media studies to question the assumed absence or minoritarian position of queer media productions and fantasies in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. Through unravelling various roots and routes in which visual-aural media forms, formats and imaginaries form discursive intervention into, if not close association with, the hetero-patriarchally structured societies and media industries, we show the research possibilities and directionalities opened up by recognizing the co-presence of and continual negotiation between queer and normative fantasies surrounding gender, sexuality, nationhood, ethnicity and class in Chinese-language media production, circulation and consumption.