In the final scene of Visages Villages/Faces Places (2017), then-octogenarian filmmaker Agnès Varda and artist JR make the long train journey from Varda’s Paris home to visit Jean-Luc Godard in Rolle, on the north-west shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Godard is not at home when they arrive; instead a cryptic message is taped to his door, addressed to Varda, one of his oldest friends. Upon reading

Erratum to Sarah Street, ‘Designing the ideal film studio in Britain’, Screen, vol. 62, no. 3, Autumn 2021, pp. 330–58. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab034

Hito Steyerl’s 2007 artist’s film Lovely Andrea is organized around Steyerl’s unlikely search for a lost erotic image of herself taken in the style of Japanese rope bondage (nawa shibari) in 1987, when she was a film student in Japan. Lasting for 30 minutes, the film is shot in a lo-fi documentary style and is replete with images appropriated from across time, space and media. Several of these remixed

From a high angle we see a figure seated behind a table, clothed in black, with his forearms resting on the table-edge. The figure rolls some papery substance between his thumb and forefinger. The substance emits a powdery vapour; it is twisted, tucked into the hand, like a magician concealing a handkerchief, then unfolded, smoothed and stretched taut, at which point we glimpse an image of a face,

Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa (eds), Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 256 pp.

Maya Deren opens the preface to her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti with an admission of defeat. Armed with Guggenheim funding, she had gone to Haiti in 1947 with the express purpose of making a creative film ‘in which Haitian dance, as purely a dance form, would be combined (in montage principle) with various non-Haitian elements’.11 As described in her grant application, the film would

One of cinema’s foundational films, Thomas Edison’s 60-second actuality film Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) documents the tragic circumstances surrounding the first appearance of an elephant on screen. As the title makes explicit, the film records the killing of an Asian elephant named Topsy, a circus performer, in front of a small crowd at Coney Island. Topsy was fed poisoned carrots, electrocuted

Apichatpong Weerasethakul – for anglophone cinephiles and film scholars the most famous contemporary Southeast Asian filmmaker – creates a kind of cinema that is not only Thai, Southeast Asian, Asian, global, ‘glo-cal’, slow, worldly and transnational, but also planetary. Because of its emphasis on the relationship between humans and the nonhuman, as well as its signature images of animals, ghosts

May Adadol Ingawanij is a writer, curator and teacher, and Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster, UK, where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. She features in ArtReview’s 2021 Power 100 list.

Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), a film about people who make use of items that have been discarded by others, Vietnamese moving-image artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi has described herself as a ‘gleaner’ by virtue of her ecological approach to producing moving-image works.11 Nguyễn uses montage to explore processes of historical erasure through

The concept of the Capitalocene is, I believe, especially relevant for contextualizing how contemporary Southeast Asian film and artists’ moving-image practices respond, allude or relate to climate and ecological change. As the introduction to this dossier suggests, the Capitalocene draws attention to the relationship between climate change, the long history of the region’s colonization by western

Zygmunt Bauman points out that between 1950 and the early 2010s, the estimated number of displaced people, or ‘people in transition’, increased from one to 12 million, ‘but as many as 1 billion refugees-turned-exiles and ensconced in the nowhereland of camps are predicted for 2050’. ‘[Refugee] Camps ooze finality’, he writes, ‘not the finality of destination, though, but of the state of transition

The history of colour cinematography is entangled with representation of racial difference. As Kirsty Sinclair Dootson notes, ‘Even the briefest survey of landmark films made by American market-leader Technicolor evidences that […] people of colour were routinely exploited as part of the system’s chromatic appeals: from the Orientalist fantasy used to debut its two-colour system Toll of the Sea (1922)

European Research Council10.13039/100010663832346

The relatively recentc emergence of more participatory and interactive models of screen media consumption has led some to the view that cinema-going is ‘dying’.11 Assertions of this ‘death’ are predicated on the existence of faster, more convenient ways of distributing and exhibiting films, such as video on demand (VOD), streaming, and other internet-based facilities. In developing economies there

Already by the end of the 19th century, Lumière had begun sending his cameramen all over the world to gather new moving images and fix them on film. But as Henri Langlois has elsewhere lucidly demonstrated, they failed to realize how accustomed they were to filming everything through impressionist eyes. They sought out images of people in motion, sailed on a gliding gondola to capture Venetian palaces

On the very same day that Thomas Edison debuted the Vitascope, the US Supreme Court negotiated the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson. Headlines such as ‘Edison’s Vitascope cheered’ and ‘Supreme Court rules against Plessy’ were frequently juxtaposed with each other, inevitably connecting motion pictures and race with modern life.11 These interconnections between race and modernity have been productively

Lotte Eisner was a woman of many talents: a writer, archivist and curator who could draw on wide-ranging interests and a stupendous knowledge that went far beyond film history into other, varied fields of culture, including literature and philosophy, theatre and architecture, music and the visual arts. The three books she wrote on the history of the cinema – The Haunted Screen first published in French

For Lotte H. Eisner, F. W. Murnau was ‘the greates[t film director the Germans have ever known […] He created the most overwhelming, the most stunning images on the German screen.’11 If we look back carefully at The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt and at Murnau, we can see that Eisner presents the director’s achievements in an entirely different

A rainy afternoon. Headlights flicker across Unter den Linden’s grey asphalt surface. To shelter from the rain, you escape into the Staatsbibliothek. Its towering atrium displays the patina of pastness considered obligatory in this country for official establishments. The clear implication is that there is no fun to be had in scholarship. On this raw, sham-spring day, your visit proceeds up the unheated

Brian R. Jacobson (ed.), In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020, 308 pp.

Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah in ParisGerman Academic Exchange Service10.13039/501100001655

HideakiFujikiAlastairPhillips (eds), The Japanese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute/Bloomsbury, 2020, 624 pp.

In her memoirs, Lotte Eisner recalls with amusement a meeting with Alfred Weiner, the Film-Kurier’s publisher, in which she was scolded for a disparaging review she had written. Because the Film-Kurier depended in part on the placement of advertising by film producers, Weiner cautioned her, it was not good business to run negative reviews. He advised Eisner to stick to reviewing films she would be

Janet Bergstrom is Research Professor of Cinema Studies at UCLA, and primarily engages in archivally-based research on European directors who worked in more than one national cinema, such as Murnau, Renoir, Sternberg, Hitchcock and Lang. She has published visual essays along the same lines on DVD, and is writing a book on the development of Murnau’s mise-en-scene.

German Academic Exchange Service10.13039/501100001655German Screen Studies NetworkBirkbeck Institute for the Moving Image

PeterSnowdon, The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring. London and New York: Verso, 2020, 304 pp.

Arts & Humanities Research CouncilAH/N009487/1Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge

There is a curious sequence towards the end of the first episode of Babylon Berlin (Sky1, Das Erste, 2017– ), when Detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) exits his office at the Police Headquarters, Rote Burg, Alexanderplatz.11 On the street, the low chatter of pedestrians and thrum of traffic reflect Berlin’s vibrant nightlife. Employing film noir’s iconography, street lamps partially illuminate the

One of the key factors behind the critical and commercial success of Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–19) has been the ability of show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to popularize the alternative secondary fantasy world in which the show’s narrative takes place. Adapted from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice novels, Game of Thrones sits alongside other franchises such as Star Wars (1977–

‘Whatever your ancestry results, don’t get too attached to them. They could change.’11 Is it possible to feel genetic attachment? A number of television programmes suggest that DNA is central to a core sense of self. Long Lost Family (in the USA) and television commercials for Ancestry.com advance the idea that genes are key to identity and affiliative feeling. In the process they mobilize what I call

Rachel Berryman is a PhD student in Internet Studies at Curtin University, Perth, studying virtual influencers and their role in the visual social media landscape. An independent scholar, Rachel has presented conference papers internationally, and has co-authored, with Misha Kavka, research on intimacy, affect and celebrity on YouTube for the Journal of Gender Studies and Convergence. She previously

On a late afternoon in May, the crew rushed to get the last shot of the day done before the sun set.11 The shabby square in the popular neighbourhood of La Kalsa, Palermo, had been filled with props and cordoned off by the production team, assigned to keep the gathered onlookers away from the set. The scene being recorded is a flashback, set in the early 1980s, depicting a slaughter committed by future

TimBergfelderEricaCarterDenizGöktürkandClaudiaSandberg, The German Cinema Book: Second Edition. London: British Film Institute, 2020, 624pp.

On a cold, remote island, a huge colony of chinstrap penguins makes its home at the foot of an active volcano. As seen on television in Planet Earth II (BBC, 2016), the dramatic scenery appears treacherous and intimidating, but every day chinstrap parents must venture out into the surrounding water to gather food for their young. From over a million of these penguins, the television camera eventually

TomRice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, 343 pp.

Significant advancements to the production, speed and affordability of genomic sequencing technologies over the past two decades have engendered a booming industry of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT). Originating with mail-order testing services in the late 1990s, this industry has evolved into an expansive digital enterprise valued at more than US$1 billion.11 Customers can purchase DTC-GT

YamamotoNaoki, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020, 248 pp.

AllysonNadia Field and MarshaGordon (eds),Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 430 pp.

‘Some money miss road guy.I doubt if I alone can drain hs wallet.need help urgently.’ So reads a text that Damisa sends to ask six of her college friends to come and join her on her date. A close-up of her BlackBerry fills the screen as we watch her cherry-red painted nails tap out the message and hit send. She continues to text for a minute, laughing now and then, before her bored date chides her

The four essays in this dossier explore the different ways in which television and online media mobilize science to produce, legitimate and sustain intimate affiliations and their varied affective and emotive dimensions. The era of Big Data, the environmental crisis and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic have increasingly drawn attention to the work of science and scientists, but here we are less

Television is a technology of intimacy, bringing things close,11 but it also promises to match people up – with advertisers, with programmes, with other people. Historically this matching has been an inexact mechanism, with television providing content to a broad public and leaving the viewers themselves to sort out questions of compatibility. Even in the more recent age of narrowcasting, streaming

On 18 September 2019, the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency in South Korea announced that it had arrested a suspect in the so-called Hwaseong serial murders, identifying 56-year-old Lee Chun-jae as the perpetrator of the brutal rape and murder of 10 women between 1986 and 1991.11 The nation’s shock at this statement was compounded by the fact that the killer had eluded law enforcement for so

Jørgen Bruhn is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnæus University Sweden. His most recent monograph, written with Anne Gjelsvik, is Cinema Between Media. An Intermediality Approach (2018).

Shortly after the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931, groups of cultural activists left Spain’s urban centres for its rural regions, with the aim of bringing culture to those areas’ poorest inhabitants. The participants in these ‘pedagogic missions’ organized theatrical events, recited poems, distributed books and sang songs in places that had previously been considered as locked in

Martin-JonesDavid, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 258 pp.

IsaacsBruce, The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 269 pp.

Perpetrator cinema is a new global phenomenon, an unprecedented 21st-century boom in films that deal with genocidal or other mass-killing events by focusing on the perpetrator figure as their main protagonist or interviewee.11 In many respects it sheds light on the 21st-century emergence of the new psychological-social-political era of the perpetrator. None of these films, however, is based on a direct