ABSTRACT Recent cultural representations of the Windrush Generation – economic migrants from African Caribbean nations who were invited to live and work in Britain between 1948 and 1972 – and their descendants have overwhelmingly represented British citizens of African Caribbean descent as ‘victims’. This is unsurprising; the so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’ in the late 2010s saw hundreds of members of

In Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film, David Huckvale traces body horror in cinema back to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, who states that a human takes pleasure and suffers pain only by means of the senses or the organs of the body (p. 1). Such a corporeal philosophy, Huckvale continues, strongly anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche, who was eager to have a positive attitude

In the introduction to The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, the late Gilberto Perez proposes that rhetoric offers a distinctive lens through which to conduct critical scholarship since it occupies a space between the poetics of construction studies and the responses of reception studies. For Perez, current trends in filmic analysis favour both philosophical and ideological perspectives. With this

Shane Denson’s virtuosic new book introduces discorrelation as a concept for broaching the aesthetic, technical, and philosophical issues encompassed by the term “post-cinema”. Denson distances himself from scholars who characterise post-cinema as essentially non-indexical or aesthetically chaotic. Instead, he locates the primary distinction between cinema and post-cinema in the computational technologies

Lúcia Nagib opens Realist Cinema as World Cinema with a statement: “[t]his book is about films and filmmakers committed to reality” (p. 15). Realism for Nagib less concerns the Bazinian ontological link between film and referent, but rather deals with how and when such indexicality becomes essential in a film. This approach enables Nagib to study realism as “modes of production” (p. 22) that permeate

More than twenty years on from its from its initial release, Terrence Malick's 1998 epic, The Thin Red Line, still makes for captivating and challenging viewing.1 Adapted from James Jones's 1962 novel of the same name, The Thin Red Line signalled Malick's return to fully-realized filmmaking after a two-decade hiatus, and proved to be the inaugural work in a tonal triptych which also included The New

Since its inception the enigmatic and attractive nature of avant-garde animation has resided in both its seeming rejection of any overarching interpretation of the artwork per se and, ironically, the formulation of temporary understandings that come to the audience’s mind with every new viewing. The geometric and linear abstractions so prevalent in these works, when presented in sequence, generate

This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Robert B. Pippin and Slavoj Žižek over the proper interpretation of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in relation to the philosophical project of G. W. F. Hegel. Pippin and Žižek are each leading contemporary scholars of Hegel, while each also shares an abiding interest in film.1 Both Pippin and Žižek agree that Hitchcock’s Vertigo exemplifies

The art historian T. J. Clark, who examines the status of the female nude in 1860s France, posits that by the 1860s the genre of the nude established centuries previously – the body as an abstract ideal, with the nude desexualising the human form – was “disintegrating” (Clark, 1999, p. 128). To illustrate his point, he contrasts Ingres’ Venus Rising From the Sea (Vénus Anadyomène) from 1848, where

Timothy Treadwell is the protagonist of Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man (2005) and he presented himself as an environmental activist and “bear protector” who, during thirteen successive summers, travelled to the Katmai National Park in Alaska, a grizzly bear territory, to camp in the wilderness and trying to “bond” with the bears, which he considered to be in danger. In addition to being

When we think of humility in fiction film (if we think of it at all), we might imagine quiet and unassuming characters or religious figures, often in the background or as sage advisers to the bolder lead characters. In contrast, the genre of biographical film, or for short the biopic, focusses by its very nature on the lives of outstanding, mostly secular, historical individuals.1 Moreover, mainstream

Carl Franklin’s well-known film, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), has been discussed, praised, and analyzed in a variety of illuminating ways. Scholars have, for example, written about this work’s efforts to use neo-noir to explore race, making it film noir with a difference; they have noted its distinction from earlier African-American films noirs through its thoughtful use of history as well as alternative

This working paper focuses on women in leadership roles in the Entertainment Department of BBC North, based at New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road, Manchester and subsequently at Media City UK. In so doing, it considers the role of the department’s founder, Janet Street-Porter, and her leadership of the then Youth Programmes department in the late 80s/early 90s. Drawing on interviews with six women

Past studies of broadcasting histories sometimes excluded and rendered invisible the work of women, concerned as such histories often were with recounting the achievements of pioneering men or detailing institutional chronologies through themes of technology, bureaucracy, leadership and innovation (Abramson, 2003; Burns, 1986; Crisell, 2002; Herbert, 2004). Studies of individual broadcasting institutions

ABSTRACT Focusing on two teenagers grappling with the difficult reality of Naples, Agostino Ferrente’s Selfie (2019) is a powerful depiction of an entire community at a significant time, when limited perspectives and the pervasive presence of organized crime – with a value system that is intrinsic to the Camorra – deeply influence the present and the future of a generation. Shot by two 16-year-old

This is a working paper on women and the early BBC television service, prior to September 1939. It considers women in four main areas of work: in production roles, in secretarial/clerical support work, in Makeup and Wardrobe, and as on-screen announcers. Apart from the latter two, which were developed especially for television, it shows a clear link with radio practices, particularly the possibility

Cooking on television after WWII mainly addressed ‘the housewife’ audience, while women themselves were presenting television cooking programmes. History has largely forgotten the presenter Joan Robins, who appeared alongside Philip Harben and Marguerite Patten on BBC broadcasts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Robins specialised in ‘common-sense’ cookery, nutrition, and health, including a controversial

ABSTRACT While Australian cinema is generally defined by the feature filmmaking tradition, at least since the 1970s, ‘utilitarian filmmaking' represents a significant but barely visible portion of screen culture in Australia, a portion that has had an emphatic but unexamined influence on the media industries, education systems, industrial relations, research culture and national culture. Recent scholarly

ABSTRACT The mirror scene that produces an eerily mismatched reflection is a staple of both trans and speculative films. Jay Prosser and Jack Halberstam have examined this trope, the latter asserting trans mirror scenes allow a disruptive ‘trans look’ for a non-trans audience. This essay takes up the trans gaze, but the process reverses. Rather, non-trans characters can become readably trans by way

ABSTRACT Through close analysis of the supporting role played by black jazz musician Jon Batiste on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, this article examines how the legacy of minstrelsy shapes late night comedy in the twenty-first century formally, spatially, and acoustically. For the majority of The Late Show’s history, Batiste has primarily operated as a voice without a body, or an acousmêtre, incorporated

Abstract While many celebrate Mae West as a sex symbol and feminist icon, she wrote herself into a mentoring role during the Great Depression as well. Few remember that West wrote or cowrote most of her own scripts, and in those parts—as well as in other nonfiction writing—she counseled women, young people, even a congregation. Among the messages in her themes, characterizations, plotlines, and dialogue

ABSTRACT Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky, 2017–) depicts Germany’s Weimar Republic by way of complex genericity, drawing especially on the era’s internationally recognizable associations with film noir and the musical. While this reflects its position in a transnational “quality” television landscape, its generic frameworks also draw out ambiguous historical tensions difficult to capture in a realist mode

ABSTRACT This article argues that MGM’s 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz allegorizes both cultural and political responses to teen pregnancy in the 1930s, a decade which not only saw other movies address similar woman’s rights issues, but also saw legislation which eased restrictions on abortion. Part of the film’s universal appeal is its ability to represent unmarried, pregnant women from all economic

This article presents a range of hitherto unheard women’s testimonies of their experiences working in the BBC Drama Plays department during the 1970s and 1980s. It incorporates the subjective interview testimony of nine women who all worked on BBC1’s prestigious strand of one-off dramas, Play for Today (1970-84) to reveal commonalities and differences in their gendered work experiences. This incorporates

This working paper explores the significance of the work of the assistant head of BBC Television Talks and Features, Grace Wyndham Goldie, in the development of current affairs and documentary television which took place at the BBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Wyndham Goldie was central to these processes. She was passionately committed to the creation of a ‘neutral’ current affairs television

ABSTRACT Contemporary LGBTQ film festivals are often held to a standard of nostalgic radicalism based in U.S. independent film cultures of the early nineties, and found diluted and assimilationist as a result. In an effort to track the complex circulation of affect still present within LGBTQ film festivals, this article troubles this critique of commodification and investigates the networking of LGBTQ

ABSTRACT Created for the Uses of Cinema conference (SSAAANZ, Monash University, November 2018), the video Film for a Purpose (13 minutes, 2018) offers a précis of my research with the ARC Discovery project ‘Utilitarian film in Australia 1945-1980'. The video essay ironically deploys certain tropes of the sponsored film - the green screen, the authoritative presenter, the wallto-wall narration, the

ABSTRACT ‘Utilitarian’ films - those not for the purposes of art or entertainment - include instructional films addressing workplace safety. Large quantities of these were made in Australia between WW2 and the advent of video and were viewed by many workers in different industries. Their content, social significance and relationship to a wider dispositif of media and labour is therefore a fertile source

(2022). Wonder, horror, mystery: letters on cinema and religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 298-302.

Scholars of crime fiction continuously discuss what Nordic Noir series have in common, arguing that it is a genre, a brand and a style respectively. Instead, this article explores Nordic Noir as an atmosphere, observed through the concept of stimmung, and argues that affective world-building in TV-series should be analysed beyond matters of style and narrative. Based on an analysis of The Bridge (2011–2018)

I opened the editorial of the first BBC centenary special issue on something of a downbeat note, relating the existential challenges the institution currently faces. Early 2022 has offered little to inspire optimism. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries (offering a strategic distraction from a seemingly endless stream of bad publicity for the UK government) announced via Tweet on Sunday 16 January a freeze

ABSTRACT This essay constructs a post-auteurist historiography of the French New Wave centred on the role of the producer. Examining the scattered recollections and contradictory accounts of producers Pierre Braunberger, Anatole Dauman, Georges de Beauregard, Mag Bodard and Christine Gouze-Rénal, the author builds a case for considering the New Wave’s director-oriented legacy, its aura of genius creators

ABSTRACT After WW2, with the onset of the Cold War, by virtue of an Anglo-Australian Joint Venture, Australia became a centre for scientific research into rockets and long-range weapons (including Britain’s atomic warheads) testing. By the mid 1950s a new outback town - Woomera had been created in the Australian Desert to conduct the tests. Each test generated 1,000s of images and 50,000 pictures could

ABSTRACT This article analyses Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables as a depiction of a generational conflict in a contemporary banlieue. The film stresses that age-related mistreatment is an abuse of power in parity with ethnic discrimination and social exclusion. When local authority figures are prepared to sacrifice a boy to secure their power game, the young banlieusards retaliate with violence. The uprising

ABSTRACT In the mid-1980s a Royal Commission was established to investigate the conduct of the British nuclear testing program in Australia (1952–1963). It sought to document the impact on military participants, nearby Indigenous communities and downwind rural and urban populations. Amongst the evidence presented were official documents, photographs and films recording the atomic detonations. This

ABSTRACT In film studies in recent years, we have seen the (re)emergence of two fields of enquiry, both of which concern this essay. (1) The interest in what we have termed ‘client-sponsored, instructional and governmental filmmaking existing outside the conventional theatrical contexts by which cinema is usually defined’. We have seen a number of conferences and anthologies appear that attest to this

The United Kingdom and Spain represent two distinct models of media pluralism, and their two different approaches have traditionally been the subject of comparative studies. This article extends this comparison to the question of cultural pluralism through the study of sign language on public television as a mechanism of representation and accessibility for Deaf viewers. Through a content analysis

ABSTRACT The reception of François Truffaut’s 1975 film L’Histoire d’Adèle H., dealing with the obsession and descent into madness of the daughter of Victor Hugo, has recurrently focused on its critical engagement with Romantic melodrama, as well as its literary and ‘romanesque’ dimensions. This article argues that the term ‘romanesque’ has camouflaged the film’s active engagement with both cinematic

One area where, along with other UK broadcasters, the BBC has been seen to consistently fail to make headway is in its inadequate representation of minority groups within British society. This study fills a gap in the literature understanding black programming on the BBC. It assesses this programming through a qualitative analysis of the views of 94% of those who produced the current affairs programme

Idents, the logos appearing in the continuity between programmes, are ubiquitous yet easily missed aspects of channel branding. Focusing on BBC One and BBC Two as case studies, this article traces the evolution of the images and sounds of idents over the past three decades. The approach brings to light the creative contributions of graphic designers and composers by combining data from in-depth interviews

In its Annual Plan for 2021/22, the BBC announced that it would cease to make new content for BBC Four, instead relying on repeats and archive programmes to fill the channel’s schedule. The decision might seem to be a pragmatic response to the corporation’s financial constraints, but will it really lead to the channel becoming ‘the home of the most distinctive content from across the BBC’s archive’

(2022). ‘Bad’ women of Bombay films: studies in desire and anxiety. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 292-294.

ABSTRACT This article examines the transformation of the femme fatale figure from classic noir to neo-noir film and to contemporary television. Exploring the reasons for this transformation and its implications yields fresh revelations about the new femme fatale. Using Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) as the focal point, we examine the intertextual allusions to this classic in two postmodern

This article focuses on BBC Four’s original music programming, considering documentaries which, according to the channel’s commissioning guidelines, ‘tak[e] a musicology approach’ to give audiences a ‘privileged view’ of ‘how the music was made’. It focuses on two case studies: Tunes for Tyrants: Music and Power with Suzy Klein (2017) and Being Beethoven (2020) . Drawing upon original interviews with

This Provocations article reviews some key moments in the history of Children’s BBC, now, since 2019, combined with Education. It refers to important and occasionally controversial programmes, such as Grange Hill, Newsround and Horrible Histories and draws on recent interviews with former head of Children’s, Anna Home, current head of Children’s In-house Production, Helen Bullough, and former head

(2022). ReFocus: the films of John Hughes. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 294-298.

ABSTRACT In addition to playing characters, stars can represent a story and this is true both of individual stars and star couples. The story of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Yvan Attal – one of France’s most famous couples – unfolds both onscreen and offscreen and is articulated in a play of signification across various representations. Gainsbourg and Attal have made several films together, including three

Following the news detailed in the BBC Annual Plan 2021/22 that BBC Four will cease to broadcast original content and will revert to an archive-only channel as a cost-cutting measure, this article endeavours to understand the legacy of the channel as it was, as it is and what it could become.

Although BBC Four has been lauded for its dedication to more esoteric content and artforms, since the channel was introduced there has concern for the range and depth of arts content on the BBC’s terrestrial services – BBC One and BBC Two. As journalist Stuart Jeffries warned at the launch of the new channel: ‘We shouldn’t let great art disappear into BBC Four’s cultural ghetto and let the mainstream

ABSTRACT The world is precarious and changing, yet we continue to find ways to order and understand these entanglements; taming the complexity out there. In linear documentary, shots by necessity need to be ordered and fixed by the edit, whilst some shots do not make the cut at all. Due to the affordances of the online network, multilinear documentary allows multiple possible arrangements of audiovisual

(2022). Bibliography for French and francophone cinema and television 2021. French Screen Studies. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT While there are several publications in the field of documentary studies that deal with the digital disruption and innovations, the sub-field of emerging media needs constant re-examination as modes of production, dissemination and exhibition are exposed to significant changes and interact with documentary film in its various established and new facets. Smart Storytelling leverages contemporary

In recent years, media production studies have grown into a thriving field of research, which has given rise to a discussion of the theoretical and methodological approaches it employs (Paterson et al, 2016; Frandsen, 2007; Bruun, 2010, 2016b). This article is a contribution to this development. The focal point is a discussion of how time and timing are important in media production research. The article

ABSTRACT Against the background of a widespread language skepticism among film theorists and practitioners, this article aims to highlight the evocative potential of spoken words in cinema. Focusing on an aesthetic device dubbed ‘suggestive verbalization’, it demonstrates how character speech can powerfully appeal to the spectator’s sensory imagination: language allows film viewers to imagine – in

(2022). Documentary film festivals Vol. 1: methods, history, politics/Vol. 2: changes, challenges, professional perspectives. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 16, Special Issue: Smart Storytelling. Guest Editor: Max Schleser, pp. 189-191.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the frameworks of co-creation between artists and AI in the context of documentary studies. As a result of emerging AI-focused experiments in documentary and transdisciplinary arts practice, we examine the nature and scope of AI as a collaborator with a focus of documentary projects exhibited and showcased at international documentary festivals. An introduction to emergent

This paper analyses the way in which traditional broadcasters are reorienting their strategy to reach young audiences. From this starting point, we analyse the three specific offers launched very recently by Spain's leading audio-visual groups for youth audiences. The online platforms constitute an attempt to compete with the new internet-distributed video offerings that are gaining increasing ground

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the way experimental documentary film practitioners may utilize the methodology of the bricoleuse in order to create films. I refer to my experiments in documentary film practice – mediations of memory, place and subjectivities – where I deploy hybrid filmic strategies of critical realism and fictional enactment. The bricoleuse may use footage obtained through pocket

ABSTRACT Sound is often recognised as critical to the success of 360° film, but in a new medium fraught with technological challenges and time constraints, there is little research to guide sound designers in their creative practice. As practitioners engage with this new 360° format, the wisdom and techniques developed from decades of documentary sound practice promise more compelling viewing experiences;