Post by Martha P. Nochimson

The New York Film Festival 2015 began with offerings that included two compelling, challenging films. Like the famous thought experiment by physicist Erwin Schrodinger that proposed a cat in a box that is both dead and alive because observers cannot know the totality of its situation, the films I will discuss in this first posting dissolve the boundaries between life and death, then and now, and here and there. Fittingly, what follows here today concerns either two or four films, depending, as I shall discuss both Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, in three parts, each over two hours long, which might be programmed as one or three films, and Journey to the Shore, the single two hour work of cinema to which we are more accustomed.

In Journey to the Shore (127 mins.), director Kyoshi Kurosawa enigmatically portrays the grieving period of widow Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who, while cooking, discovers her dead husband, Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), in the living room hoping to sample his favorite dish. It’s not a ghost story. K. Kurosawa is following in the footsteps of his great namesake’s Rashomon, in using metaphors from cutting edge physics to craft narrative about the human condition. We can never know enough about either Mizuki or Yusuke to make any of the usual decisions about characters. What are their goals? Their purposes? Their intentions? Indeterminable in a quantum universe of infinite numbers of randomly moving particles. K. Kurosawa points us toward this kind of universe through Yusuke, a dentist who died at sea, but whose body was never recovered, who takes Mizuki on a journey of shoreline places he had been, and in one location gives a lecture on the mysteries of particle physics. His expertise–the physics is accurately formulated–would not seem to have been acquired during his lifetime, suggesting that death is an expansive process. Since Mizuki’s horizons are literally and figuratively broadened as she moves through life with new eyes, this would seem to be true even if the death is not your own. There is nothing but the surprising, confusing, exhilarating journey for her and us to any number of literal and figurative shorelines. The liminality of this lovely film is multiplied by 10 in Miguel Gomes’ trilogy.

The three parts of Arabian Nights are Volume 1: The Restless One (125 mins.); Volume 2: The Desolate One (131 mins.); and Volume 3: The Enchanted One (125 mins.). It is a Portuguese production of breathtaking scope. The frame that encompasses the three films is the legend of Scheherazade, a quasi-historical/quasi-mythical ancient queen, who has offered herself to Shahryar, the King of Persia, to save the lives of her country women. In a monumental rage caused by the infidelity of his first wife, Shahryar had taken to relentlessly marrying the virgin of his choice, and killing her after the wedding night. Scheherazade schemes to postpone her execution (and many subsequent deaths) by telling Shahryar a story on their wedding night but refusing to finish it once dawn arrives, causing Shahryar to spare her in order to her the end of the story. She continues to regale him with unfinished stories for 1,001 nights, by which time he loves her too much to kill her. Appearing in Volume 1, Gomes reveals that he has chosen this frame because he is struggling to make a film that will encompass the great sources of narrative: history and myth. None of the trilogy’s many intertwining stories has been adopted from the old Arabian Nights; rather Gomes has adapted the spirit of the multitude of tales offered in the face of death.

In Gomes’ Arabian Nights, the misanthropic Portuguese austerity government takes the place of the misogynist Shahryar. The many stories reflect the suffering inflicted on people, animals, and the planet by modern day economics, interspersed with fables and fantasies that transpose the pain into imaginative terms. So, while Volume I contains a scenario adapted from the news story of the shutdown of the Viana do Castelo shipyards, causing thousands of workers to lose their jobs, and the ecological disaster of a plague of Asian wasps killing off bees, it also contains a fanciful village story of the trial of a handsome cockerel who is facing a death sentence for waking up the villagers too early. Volume 2 traces the path of a sinewy, old survivor who is tracked by government drones through the high grasses of rural Portugal, and also tells a fantastic tale of what at first seems to be a cut and dried trial of a woman and her son for stealing furniture from their landlord. As ordinary people, strange creatures in costume, and puppets testify, the judge, who has taken the bench immediately after successfully coaching her daughter in how to secure a husband, is confronted with an impossible tangle of causes and effects in which the theft is embedded that reduces the judge to frustration and tears. “This grotesque chain of stupidity, evilness and despair,” as she calls the mass of desperate testimonies, leads her to curse those assembled in her court, and by extension the human race. Volume 3 includes scenes of Scheherazade flirting with a beautiful but stupid man who is already the father of 200 children, and speaking of her desperate, growing fear that her husband will kill her. It also follows the progress of a competition among men who train chaffinches for a singing contest.

Time in this trilogy flows both backwards and forwards, untrammeled by linearity. There are moments when there appear together on the screen printed words, a voiceover, and images that seem to have no rational connection, but are parts of a whole united beyond the logic we usually apply. Songs from the United States and Europe, modern and ancient, sung in numerous languages appear in all the Volumes, all of which are threaded by English and Spanish version “Perfidia,” (“For I have seen the love of my life in somebody else’s arms”) to remind us of King Shahryar’s rage. What is Gomes telling us of value to us in his densely and gorgeously interwoven poetic epic?

Gomes’ masterwork demands many screenings. But we can make a start at interpretation through the clues in the Arabian Nights frame. First, we should note that none of the stories in the film concludes, not even the story of Scheherazade, since we never reach the 1,001st story. Then, most seemed headed for unhappy endings, including that of Scheherazade, who is sure her death is imminent. And that that is the most important clue. After all, we know that the king ultimately does not kill her. Gomes would seem to be putting us through a complex experience to suggest that the process of narrative itself is the healing experience of the human race. All stories intersect and interconnect no matter how disparate they may seem, and through the humanizing process of telling tales we get through our pain and fear, always headed toward a distant, imagined moment, that we may never personally see, of restorative conclusion. A marvel of human cinematic art!

NEXT WEEK: “The Banality of…..”

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Martha P. Nochimson is a film and media critic, and the author of David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (University of Texas Press, 2013). More about her work can be found here.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal. 

A breath of fresh air is blowing through the 52nd New York Film Festival. Often the early films are the least interesting offerings of the festival, leaving the press waiting for what is to come. This year a number of the initial screenings have left me wondering whether they can conceivably get any better.

On the second day of the press screenings, we were treated to Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, Goodbye to Language, 70 minutes. It is thrilling, and arguably at least as much of an indication of the future of film as Breathless was in its day. 84 year-old Godard is still kicking like a colt, using 3D now to continue his tradition of cinema without normative plot and characters, with the exception of a dog of indeterminate breed, who might be considered, by some, the film’s star. By means of a sequence of images and aural cues that are both linear and non-linear by turns, Godard explores many motifs in his short film: the oppressiveness of political authorities, books, movies, music, and the absurdity of human endeavor. Interspersed with a parade of people, some of whom become familiar to us, but none of whom we ever know, and certainly none of whom have any sustained goal or dramatic action, are images of the above mentioned dog moving through a forest, or around and in a lake. The people mill around in urban locations often blocked by gates that resemble prison bars, and they are sometimes suddenly and pointlessly seized by men in suits carrying guns, most of whom are rendered helpless by resistance of any kind. Sometimes, the characters talk philosophy in toilets while defecation is taking place, punctuated by appropriate sound effects.

Part of the intelligence of the film is conveyed through the juxtaposition of people and dog, but most of it is in the visual and sound design. Sounds rush at the audience at unexpected moments and Godard’s 3D creates evocative multiple physical planes, much as deep focus did for Jean Renoir in his masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. Except 3D technology permits Godard to articulate these levels with even greater force as he presents us with events taking place simultaneously on numerous layers of foreground, middle ground, and background. As a result, life and technology happen on many levels at the same time, creating a 360 degree impression of the modern world. The specific sequences are impossible to remember after one screening, and, of course, DVD will not be an option for many people as few of us have 3D players at home. Multiple trips to theatres will be necessary.

But what one takes away from Godard’s darkly comic tone and 3D-heightened sensibility, even after one screening, are questions about what can be known of the outside world by any individual–or dog. (The film is inclined to believe that the dog is most aware.) For example, when at the end the dog sits in repose, a human voice absurdly wonders whether he is depressed or thinking of the Seychelles. To drive home the point that he is unknowable in human terms, the dog appears to leave the film, walking into the woods, but suddenly comes bounding back. We comprehend nothing of his actions, but many may feel comforted by his being, as we are not by the presence of people. Move over Schrödinger’s cat.

Godard’s latest cinematic triumph makes one wonder what Hitchcock could have done with 3D if he had stopped throwing things at the audience through this technology in Dial M for Murder, but rather had played with deep space as Godard does. Imagine the scene in Notorious if he had used 3D instead of an extreme close-up to call attention to the poisoned cup of espresso Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) drinks from. And the mind boggles at the thought of what Welles might have done using 3D instead of deep focus.

Hong Sang Soo’s Hill of Freedom, a third day offering, also has its charms and its revolutionary aspects. In this 66-minute romantic comedy based on quantum mechanics, Mori, a Japanese man visiting Korea to find his lost love, reads a book called Time, about how we have invented a normative image of space and events in time that doesn’t exist. We know nothing further about the book, but the structure of the plot demonstrates its thesis. The film opens on Mori’s lost love picking up a packet of letters he has mailed in one envelope. She is not well, stumbles on the stairs and drops the undated letters, which she then can only read in random order. As she does, Hong brings to life Mori’s epistolary narration of his adventures in Korea with charming, funny people before our eyes, and perhaps finally his reunion with her. The characters shuttle between a cafe called Hill of Freedom, and the guest house in which Mori is staying. We know where we are, but not when. And without a strongly defined time line we ultimately don’t know if we are choosing to believe that we have seen a happy ending, or whether that desired ending was only a dream. Hong’s film is provocative, human, and delightfully entertaining.

Finally, there is Misunderstood, 103 minutes, the first film on our press schedule, directed by Asia Argento, daughter of famous horror film director Dario Argento, about Aria (Giulia Salerno), the nine year old daughter of a famous (fictional) movie star. In this stunning, funny, and heart wrenching film of her boom and bust life under the uncaring stewardship of two thoroughly narcissistic parents, its principal child actress, probably eleven years old, astonishingly imbues the film with an innocent gravitas as its central character. Beyond the obvious suggestions here of Argento’s biography–Asia/Aria, whose father acts in horror films—Misunderstood rises above family narrative as an indictment of a materialistic age shot through with a devastating form of spontaneity, wallowing in immediate desire, and absolutely lacking maturity. Calling Godard’s dog.

Stay tuned for part two of this series.

12 Years a Slave is a groundbreaking cinematic adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative written by Solomon Northrup, and memorably acted by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British born actor of Nigerian ancestry. It is the first slave narrative to be filmed. It is also the first film about slavery in America to be written and directed by artists of African heritage—McQueen is British-born and of Jamaica ancestry and writer John Ridley is an African-American born in Wisconsin. It is not the first to expose the savage treatment inflicted on slaves imprisoned by the plantation system, but it may be the first to convey it from the point of view of the slaves rather than that of a sympathetic Caucasian observer. It appears at a felicitous moment, when it is most needed to remind us all what it means for the wealth of the highest social class to be derived from the oppression of another segment of the population.

At the outset, Northrup is a free man, a citizen accepted and valued. Despite the indisputable fact of the plight of other African-Americans in his time, his confidence in his own security as an American makes him trusting enough to believe that a pair of men who line their pockets by drugging free black men for southern slave markets are genuine when they wine and dine him under the guise of offering him professional advancement. McQueen likens him to Pinocchio being seduced by the promise of a life of glamour by the evil slavers in that story. Make no mistake, 12 Years a Slave is about a remarkable man, his ordeal (adapted from Northrup’s memoir), and the courage and intelligence he summoned in order to survive the vicious institutions of a racist nation. But collaterally, it also reflects the blindness of individuals to the big picture.

Black and white, northern and southern, all people are but pieces of the larger pattern of the toxic slave “industry,” which rules them despite their individual intentions and situations. The scarred bodies of the black slaves and their enforced separation from their loved ones display most blatantly the tenor of the times. But slavery also takes a toll on its purported beneficiaries. The best, “Master” Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), lives caught between his sympathies for a persecuted people and his terror that acting on such feelings might threaten his own position as a plantation owner. The worst, “Master” Epps (Michael Fassbender), wallows in the culture of domination at the price of his being as a man, only able to express sexuality and brotherly camaraderie with his slaves. The northern abolitionists hold their breath as they arrive to rescue Solomon, after an equally frightened itinerant Canadian carpenter, named Bass (Brad Pitt), alerts them to Solomon’s plight. The plantation system is a confirmation of the interdependence of all and the disaster for everyone of a legal mandate to tyrannize a specific subgroup.

The Northeastern states, though clearly imperfect, shine in 12 Years a Slave as the Promised Land. But one of the many interesting mysteries of the film is that, because we spend roughly ninety percent of the time in plantation hell, “free” New York state also glitters like a dream floating atop a possibly more innate reality of pernicious greed. Solomon’s escape, leaving thousands still in bondage, feels like a cancer in remission that might recur unexpectedly. The most astonishing individual courage can never neutralize the acid of an unjust society, and that may be the most painful truth McQueen has to offer.

In All is Lost, another individual wakens from a dream of self-determination. The film is an ocean-voyaging American “divina comedia,” and a rebuttal of The Old Man and the Sea, a book that further elaborates on Hemingway’s bedazzled admiration for macho grace under pressure. In this film, hell, purgatory, and heaven are one and the protagonist’s confrontation with the ocean is a lesson about the perils of macho worship of elite, white American privilege and can be seen as an intriguing and contrasting companion piece to 12 Years a Slave. The film features only one character, identified as “our man” (Robert Redford). Fit and intrepid, he has the time, money, and inclination to intentionally isolate himself, and sail the largely uncharted Indian Ocean alone. “Our man’s” idyllic leisure, however, soon becomes as oppressive to him as Northrup’s abduction and evokes a different pervasive cultural infection.

The film begins like Dante’s epic with “our man” stating in voiceover that he has lost his way. It ends, like The Divine Comedy, with an image of salvation. In between, “our man” fights the ocean encroaching on his yacht, damaged by the flotsam from the wreck of a commercial cargo ship. He is a paragon of individual fortitude, Thoreau’s ideal individualist, a John Wayne of determination. But unlike in the American literature of self-reliance, this is not enough. Once “our man” is cut off from others, hope rests only in the re-establishment of connection. McQueen’s vision of the tragic cultural invention of a black slave population is complemented by Chandor’s image of the grandiose cultural fantasy of a naturally heroic white elite. American hubris abounds.

In the fourth and final installment, we watch NYFF take on love, and perhaps shed some light at the end of the tunnel.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Given the spatial limitations of this report, and as an American student of European origins who began her graduate education in the UK, I hope that my transnational background can assist in evaluating the benefits of this year’s Console-ing in England. With American media often at the foreground, learning of some of the most noteworthy British broadcasting is vital.

During Charlotte Brunsdon’s plenary talk, “The Television City,” the celebrated scholar first compared the representations of the cinematic city with its sister medium once considered inferior. She then focused on London in particular as both the local site in series such as EastEnders as well as a global presence on BBC News, in contrast to more generic outlets such as CNN and Al Jazeera.  She expanded on the use of London first as a multi-cultural, near-utopian trope in the 1980s sitcom set in the Peckham-Rye neighbourhoud, Desmond’s. Another major example she cited is the Victorian feel of London in crime series such as BBC One’s recently remade Sherlock, despite its actual filming in Cardiff. She recalled the establishing klick-klack sound of heels on cobblestone roads amidst a foggy backdrop that usually indicates the unfortunate demise, usually murder, of a beautiful woman, often a troubled prostitute.

This understanding of London as a social, political, cultural, and economic hub of the specific and local as well as the vast and global contributes to the overall impetus of British academia to analyze media in both the micro and macro sense.

This notion especially resonated following the foundational panel on Fandom, one of the most burgeoning areas of media studies today, when Teresa Forde thoughtfully queried Suzanne Scott on the Americannes of her presentation on “Fake Geek Girls.” For any US scholar present, or any follower from afar who read Charlotte Howell’s corresponding tweet, “One of the best parts of attending #cp2013 in the UK is that American scholars (like myself) are forced to interrogate our implicit Americanness,” a collective light bulb loomed over our heads on the need to further discuss our work in the interest of national identity in a global intellectual landscape.

Topics on British women figures were some of the most memorable that cultivated knowledge on national consciousness. Hannah Hamad spoke of how “The Austere Celebrity of Mary Portas” is yet another indicator of recessionary nationalism in the vein of recent pageantry such as the Royal Wedding, Queen’s Jubilee, and the 2012 London Olympics.  Faye Woods explained how Clare Balding, “a slightly posh lesbian, nearing middle age, with a sensible haircut,” became a British national treasure during her Olympics coverage for the BBC and Paralympics for Channel 4.

Miranda Hart

Coming from a similar background as Balding, comedian and showrunner of sorts Miranda Hart was the subject of two out of the three presentations during the Comedy and Femininity panel. Chris Becker’s American perspective on Miranda’s use of traditional sitcom conventions argued for its value alongside the cultural primacy of acknowledged single-cam quality shows, using Elana Levine and Michael Newman’s Legitimating TV as the reference for cultural legitimation of Hart’s work. Rosie White expanded on Hart’s place in both the zeitgeist of British TV and women’s performativity. Forde’s talk positioned Julia Davis’ work as transgressive TV in Nighty Night, Hunderby, and Lizzie and Sarah, noting the auteur-like qualities of the actress, writer, director, and producer’s distinctively dark comedic proclivities.

The History of Television for Women in Britain: Highlights, Insights, and Future Agendas panel detailed the De Montfort and Warwick University partnership on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that uses both archival and audience response methods to examine what TV meant for British women during the 1940s to 1980s. Helen Wood and Helen Wheatley’s presentations conveyed their goal to produce the British equivalent of the historical work of Lynn Spigel on the relationship between women and American television, and Hazel Collie and Mary Irwin’s collaboration showed the merits of the new methodologies in archival work along with in- depth interviews of TV audiences of the time to understand what the medium meant to women of the era.

Beyond the UK, Console-ing Passions at 21 brought forth some of the best scholarship on the intersection of gender and sexuality, with new views on both femininity and masculinity— from talks on The League to pro wrestling to Bronies—alongside race, ethnicity, national identity, class, as shown on fictional, reality, and news TV, social media, the internet, video games, and so much more, all packed into three days of 30+ panels.

Additionally, I greatly valued international perspectives such as Ireland through the lens of a dubious investigative series from my co-panelist Madeleine Lyes, Indian surrogacy as discussed by Sujata Moorti, and subdued Latin identity in tween programming as highlighted by Mary Beltrán.

As a first time Console-ing presenter, being a part of such an international conference, that further confirmed the rich breadth of valuable work being done in the expansive feminist media studies community across the globe, will remain one of the most invaluable experiences of my academic career.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’sAntenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

The generations of television studies scholars formed the structure of the day’s events: the morning was devoted to small-group and two-on-one workshopping of a few select graduate student papers with the visiting scholars. The afternoon session of scholarly presentations was devoted to the generation of television studies, a genealogy of the field with Horace Newcomb at the center. Organized by Jay Hamilton and UGA graduate students Evan L. Kropp, Mark Lashley, and Brian Creech, the symposium marked Newcomb’s retirement as both a full-time faculty member and as director of the Peabody Awards. The presenters reflected the celebration of the man and scholar: colleagues David Thorburn and Tom Schatz, and former students Amanda Lotz, James Hay, Alisa Perren, and Jeff Jones.

Both former students, Lotz and Jones focused on the integration of Newcomb’s contributions to the field into a common sense of television. Lotz began the afternoon session by discussing Newcomb’s article “Magnum: The Champagne of TV?” as a useful map to the field of television studies. She cited the article as the first use of the term “cumulative narrative” to describe the metaplot that extends over the full series but is separate from seriality, and used that metaphor to articulate the cumulative narrative of television studies from “Magnum: The Champagne of TV?” Within that article she could see the metaplot of the field, including: the politics of pleasure, the negotiation of narrative technique in a production economy, the provision of an alternative to rigid ideological analysis, and the way in which various aspects of television to be studied exist in conversation with each other. Where Lotz reflected on the ways the Magnum article had constructed a way of studying television that has become generally normalized for her, Jeff Jones expanded that normalization of Newcomb’s ideas to a general ontology of television with his focus on the concept of the cultural forum. Although the idea of television as a cultural forum has become so commonsense that it can sometimes seem irrelevant, Jones argued that it is still central to the way that we understand television, citing the recent attributions of changing popular sentiment on LGBT rights to its televisual representations.

Schatz and Perren took up Newcomb and Alley’s The Producer’s Medium as a significant influence on how television studies negotiates questions of authorship. Schatz focused on the tension between the film-studies mode of auteurism and the importance of writers and producers in television, peppered with anecdotes of his own friendship and colleagueship with Newcomb as an example of how film studies and television studies converge more than is sometimes thought. Perren also articulated the significance of The Producer’s Medium while calling for contemporary scholars and discussions of showrunners to continue to learn from that text. She argued that The Producer’s Medium positions producers/showrunners as a baseline for understanding broad continuity and changes in television and how there are still many issues of cultural gatekeeping regarding the powerful position.

Hay and Thorburn turned to the future of television studies and how Newcomb’s contributions to the field have paved the way for many possible avenues of media studies. Hay focused on how the intellectual formulation of television studies might lead the way to media studies of formerly invisible media, like smart appliances. He laid a hypothetical path from TV: The Most Popular Art toward a “critical refrigerator studies.” Thorburn, however, sees a full stop to the television that Newcomb had studied. He said that the first great age of television is over, and the next great age will be profoundly different. Regardless of what the next age of television looks like, however, he positioned Newcomb as a great scholastic gardener, never trying to recreate himself but instead cultivating a forest of scholars who will be able to tackle this new era.

At the close of the session, Horace Newcomb spoke about his history with television, both as a scholar and a teacher. As one of those “grandchildren” of television studies, to see Newcomb speak so passionately about himself, the medium, his work, the field, and his position in it was inspirational and electrifying. “I write about television because it changed my life,” he said; “growing up in Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s, television gave me a different world  . . . television is practical politics.” He ended the day by articulating his educational theory by way of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I am the teacher of athletes,

He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

Between the morning workshops and the afternoon papers, the colleagues, scholars, mentors and mentees gathered in Athens, Georgia stood as proof of that width, honoring Horace Newcomb by spending the day engaging with the field he helped shape.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

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Responsible Tweeting

In the past my approach to conference tweeting has been a mix of straightforward reportage, meta-commentary, and non-conference related conversations with fellow conference participants. But when tweeting under the @CJatSCMS handle, I took more time and care in composing each tweet, waiting until I found an effective and accurate way to summarize a point in 140 characters before hitting the enter key and keeping editorializing to a minimum. In other words, the pseudo anonymity of the @CJatSCMS account made me less concerned with my personal Twitter brand (i.e., snark) and more concerned with the transmission of information. Which is, I suppose, how it should always be when recounting the scholarship of others. Likewise, in the weeks leading up to the conference, everyone involved with the @CJatSCMS account agreed on a loose set of Best Practices (including requesting permission before tweeting panel/workshop content). Asking permission seemed to ease presenters’ minds about the prospect of having their work reported to a broader audience.

Less Tweeting

When live tweeting a TV event like the Oscars I generally aim for speed, volume, and humor. If you don’t move fast, your voice gets lost in the furious river of tweets moving past your screen. In the past my conference tweeting followed a similar speed/volume model. However this time around I discovered that fewer tweets packed with more information (i.e., “thick tweets”) are ultimately more useful in the conference setting since most people reading the Twitter stream are searching the conference hashtag (#scms13) for information, not a play-by-play. Indeed, the very conditions of the shared account forced me to lower my own tweet volume. On Thursday afternoon, when all five @CJatSCMS “reporters” were tweeting at full capacity (thus exceeding Twitter’s 100 tweets per hour limit), we found ourselves locked out of the account (the dreaded “Twitter jail”). This meant that we all had to tweet more sparingly the next day, thinking even more carefully about what and when we would share information.

The Labor of Digital Reporting

As Suzanne Scott notes in a recent blog post about experiencing SCMS remotely: “SCMS is a space to test our new ideas, and learn from old ones, and it makes sense to develop a corresponding digital space that evokes those same principles that we embrace for 5 days a year in perpetuity.” This year, more than any other, the digital space of the conference came to life for me. The official Twitter feed was a conduit for valuable scholarly exchanges, providing access to the conference to those not physically present, and then relaying their thoughts and questions back into the spaces of the conference. In many ways, I felt like I was part of an actual news team, with the attendant desire/responsibility to report on what was happening at each panel. Indeed, numerous panels and workshops at this year’s conference (including “Publishing on Digital Platforms” [B21], “Digital Humanities and Film and Media Studies” [J23], and “Gender, Networking, Social Media, and Collegiality” [E23], to name just a few) were examining these questions of academic labor: what do we count as labor in the world of digital and social media, what is the “value” of that labor, and how do we document it? To me, live tweeting the conference felt like labor in the same way that serving as secretary for a university committee feels like labor.

Ultimately, the experience of tweeting as a “CJ Reporter” has led me to reconsider the delicate work of tweeting about the scholarship of others, the necessity of establishing clear guidelines and best practices for conference tweeting, and the value of digital labor. I look forward to SCMS 2014, when hopefully even more groups — representing various academic journals, blogs, special interest groups, or even individual departments — will establish their own reporting teams. A proliferation of these group Twitter accounts at future conferences could encourage more rigorous online conversations about the scholarship being presented, generate twitter feeds that can tackle a more diverse range of panels and workshops, and, hopefully, further justify the value of the labor performed within the actual, and virtual, spaces of the conference (as well as our home institutions).

I’d like to continue my discussion of aspects of 2013’s Berlinale begun in an earlier post with the Ivorian film, Burn it Up, Djassa shot rapidly and very cheaply on the streets of Abidjan and directed by first-timer, Lonesome Solo which employs the Nouchi dialect and an on-screen narration by storyteller and local celebrity, Mohamed Bamba. The pace and rapid dialogue join with the on-the-fly shooting to produce a sense of excitement as the filmmakers strive to give a sense of ghetto life. At the opposite extreme, Reaching for the Moon, Bruno Barreto’s biopic on Elizabeth Bishop is a lush, extravagant, but effective melodrama, powered appropriately by witty dialogue and sumptuous images. The Look of Love is another entertaining, well-wrought biopic from the prolific Michael Winterbottom and favored actor, comedian, Steve Coogan, who is excellent as smut-king, Paul Raymond. Much of my attention was drawn to the detailed recreation of a period Soho, while the story emphasizes Raymond’s relationship with his daughter and the ultimate emptiness of his life despite wealth and all the trappings of glamour.

Korean cinema was, unsurprisingly, well-represented: White Night (Baek-Ya) is a low-key gay revenge movie, set over the course of a single night, with a slow pace that gradually draws the viewer in, and some fascinating shots of night-time Seoul. E-J-yong’s Behind the Camera, on the other hand, is a thoroughly self-reflexive story of a film directed over Skype by a director who may or may not have been in the country. The film features many Korean film celebrities as themselves and is ultimately about its own making. However, the film can be as frustrating for audiences as for the cast and crew who have to make do with a director who controls both too little and too much. It played with Busan film festival founder, Kim Dong-Ho’s rather self-indulgent short, “Jury”, about a dysfunctional festival jury, which also features Korean stars and directors as themselves–along with Tony Rayns, who does not like any Asian films and would rather just eat!

A few more formally-challenging, experimentally-minded discoveries from the Forum section of the festival will likely prove the most personally significant works I saw in Berlin. I had not previously known the films of Buenos-Aires-based Matías Piñeiro. His 65-minute Viola, records the performance of and rehearsals for a performance of excerpts from Shakespeare, and a couple of surrounding events in the lives of cast-members. Described in the catalog as “playful” and “spirited” I watched it only because it fitted into my schedule. Magnificent use of the close-up, often in conjunction with long takes, draws out not only the relationship between performance and everyday life but also between words and images, emotions and actions. While Piñeiro threw further interesting light on his film in discussion, the same could not be said for João Viana, who evidently wanted his The Battle of Tabatô (A Batalha de Tabatô), shot in black-and-white with occasional red, to speak for itself. It did so powerfully as it recounted a man’s return to Guinea-Bissau for his daughter’s wedding and his inability to erase memories of his wartime experiences there. Sound and mise-en-scène are used effectively to suggest states of mind and a fascinating balance between dream and reality. African traditions of agriculture, good governance and music, described at the opening of the film, infiltrate the story, and my yearning to hear more of the music for which the Madinka town of Tabatô is renowned was eventually satisfied. Viana also presented a short, “Tabatô” based on the same events, an elliptic version of the longer film, but apparently shot first.

Meanwhile “Cuba” (Filipa César) drew on material from the Guinea-Bissau film archive, as it poetically illustrated Amílcar Cabral’s work as an agronomist and leader of the Guinean liberation movement. The material in the archive, mostly raw footage shot during the sixties, has recently been digitized in Berlin and we can expect further samples to be released. “Cuba” was appropriately screened alongside Octavio Cortázar’s classic post-revolutionary short, “For the First Time” (“Por Primera Vez,” 1969), a moving record of the mobile cinema movement. Several aspiring directors from Guinea-Bissau worked with mobile teams in Cuba, learning a trade that reflected Cabral’s call for art not arms to fight colonialism. Another famed documentary short that has long been hard to find, Syrian Ossama Mohammed’s “Step by Step” (“Khutwa Khutwa,” 1978) also screened, providing a dramatized commentary on how the hard country life is swapped for an urban experience that offers few ways to escape poverty other than joining the military. Although purely experimental work is unusual in the main shorts program, I did get to see newcomer Masihiro Tsutani’s “Between Regularity and Irregularity.” Appropriately described in the program as a “sea of images and sounds,” it was a rare privilege to see such a non-narrative visual and aural feast in the excellent facilities of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. Tsutani trained as an engineer and first became fascinated with sound, represented here mostly by atonal industrial music without harmony or melody to accompany images somewhat reminiscent of Stan Brakhages’s non-representational work.

To conclude a word about the Berlinale classics retrospective screenings, which readers may want to look out for: the new digital 3-D version of Dial M for Murder (1954) had its European premiere, as did the restoration of On the Waterfront (also 1954). There was an international premiere for the restored Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), accompanied by a screening of Tokyo Family (Tokyo Kazoku), a new film from Yoji Yamada that celebrates Ozu’s classic. Finally The Student of Prague (1913) in a reconstructed version form the Munich Film Museum was screened with a new musical accompaniment.

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The Berlin film festival or Berlinale, held in Berlin every February is an extensive, well-organized, festival centered since German reunification on the Potsdamer Platz, where two theater complexes filled with big screens and the magnificent Berlinale Palast provide the core venues. I was lucky enough to go to this year.

Amongst competition films, of which I did not see all that many, Harmony Lessons (Uroki Garmonii), the Khazak entry, partially funded by Germany’s World Cinema Fund, and directed by first-time filmmaker Emir Baigazin was perhaps the most enthralling. A harrowing vision of institutionalized bullying in a rural school, then a prison, the film deserved the award for cinematography it received. Avoiding on-screen depictions of the murders, the film substitutes the opening slaughter of a sheep and the torture of cockroaches by the main character, a picked-upon schoolboy. The film is thus a depiction of life as a battle for personal survival in which all must play with whatever abilities they have available to them. As such, it offers little hope for change. The city kid who turns up seems at first to offer an alternative but is quickly drawn into the fray, and appears himself to survive mostly through his dream of escaping reality to a theme park/arcade. The end of the film offers no hope for change as new kids step up to fill the roles of repression vacated by those killed or arrested. Baigazin proved a highly articulate interview, and is certainly a figure to watch.

Closed Curtain (Pardé) is follow-up in many ways to This is Not Film, in which Jafar Panahi with the help of long-time collaborator and fellow director, Kambozia Partovi, continues to get around the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed upon him. Highly self-reflexive, this film seems like a version of the script, Sea, described in This is Not a Film. The opening section with Partovi as a mysterious figure who must ensure that nobody knows he is in the house leads to a plot-point that is in turn buried by a movement into the world of filmmaking and the appearance of Panahi as himself. Nevertheless, the film registers rather as if Panahi is marking time—perhaps it could be no other way in the circumstances. To some degree I felt the same about Hong Sangsoo’s latest, Nobody’s Daughter, Haewon (Nugu-ui Ttal-do Anin Haewon). Intrusive zooms and camera movements draw attention to the artifice and balance the view of everyday reality with the world of film, and unusually the central character whose viewpoint we largely share is a young woman, Haewon, but there is otherwise little here to make the film stand out from Hong’s recent work.

While the above films may struggle to get substantial audiences even in art houses, On My Way (Elle S’en Va), written for Catherine Deneuve (by director Emmanuelle Bercot) and dominated by her, is a crowd-pleaser: very funny in places, well-written and plotted, it almost earns its happy ending and will likely play well in such venues. Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria was another well-received competition film similarly focused on a central female protagonist attempting to retake control of her life, while Golden Bear winner, Child’s Pose (Pozitia Copilului), which I did not see, is also a tribute to its lead actress, Luminita Gherghiu.

In the Panorama section I was impressed by So Much Water (Tanta Agua), a Uruguayan effort about a 14-year-old girl and her relationship to her father and younger brother. Set at a somewhat run-down spa, the constantly damp weather and the feelings of lassitude that dominate are reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienega. Habi the Foreigner (Habi, la Extranjera) is a strange but engrossing Argentinean film, produced by Lita Stantic, that tells how its central character, a 20-year-old woman, drawn into Islamic culture in Buenos Aires, takes on a new identity as Habiba. Her motives for this pretense are lightly sketched, but evidently represent her attempts to fashion her own sense of self, and the film thus raises questions about how identity is constructed, tested, and maintained for all of us. Both films are the work of young female directors (Ana Guevera Pose and Leticia Jorge Romero, and Maria Florencia Álvarez respectively).

Fifi Howls from Happiness (Fifi Az Khoshhali Zooze Mikeshad) is a documentary about Iranian artist Bahman Mohassess, who had disappeared completely from public view but is tracked down to an apartment in Rome by director, Mitra Farahani. Mohassess is a highly entertaining interview and we grow to appreciate him more and more as he welcomes Farahani into his house. Together they decide to try to sell his work and get a new commission. The build up to seeing Mohassess paint again ends anti-climatically however as he dies just before putting brush to canvas. The film is self-reflexive, incorporating its subject’s suggestions on how it should be shot on the soundtrack while his instructions are reproduced in the image. (I’ll be back in a second post to discuss some more films including some of the less publicized, more experimental projects.)

Aca-Media (officially:  “Cinema Journal Presents Aca-Media”) is a new monthly podcast covering current media studies scholarship, issues in the media industries, questions in pedagogy and professional development, and events in the world of media studies. Believe it or not, nothing quite like that existed yet.  The terrific (and soon to be late great) Critical Lede podcast had become an invaluable way to keep up on communication scholarship, but its strong focus on rhetoric made it always slightly tangential to the concerns of film and media scholars.  Industry-themed podcasts like The Business and Tech News Today are good for news and exploration of current issues, but don’t have the specific academic perspective that Aca-Media seeks to offer; ditto the “media critics” type podcasts like my new favorite, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour.  Finally, one wants to like Toby Miller’s Cultural Studies podcast, but his (admirable) commitment to a transgressive aesthetics usually makes the show, for me at least, unlistenable.

That left a hole in the podcast universe—if I’ve missed a good one, please let me know in the comments—at the same time that CJ’s new editor, Will Brooker, took over with the goal not necessarily of exploding the traditional limitations of print-based scholarly publishing but certainly of finding new ways to overcome them.  The best word here is remediation, in both senses: correcting a deficiency and transporting content across media.

Cinema Journal will continue in its venerated form, but Brooker’s aim is to have it anchor an array of non-print outlets for media-related scholarly discussion:  online extensions of the journal, of course, but also blogs including this one, hybrid blog/magazine platforms like Flow, experiments in publishing like In Media Res, and now the Aca-Media podcast.  The formality and officialness of such relationships will vary from case to case, but the goal is a relatively coherent network of academically minded media studies scholarship: a “CJ-verse,” as Brooker puts it in our first episode.

What is remarkable to me is how many of the elements of a media studies aca-sphere are already in place and working well—if you peer through the technological superstrate, you find a vibrant network of media scholars who are doing qualitative, critical, and culturally minded film and media studies, and who are already well connected to each other through a range of listservs, Twitter, conferences like SCMS, Facebook pages like “Teaching Media,” etc.  It is tremendously exciting to see the energy and the dynamism of this space, and if there is perhaps a danger in such a community becoming too insular, the advantage is a lively conversation that is able to remain legible even as it multiplies and proliferates and remediates.

Aca-Media’s role in this conversation, as it is emerging in these early days, is to speak to the needs of film and media scholars across their professional lives:  keeping up with scholarship and currents in the media industries, exploring issues in pedagogy and professional development, and providing an outlet for discussion of events affecting the community (for example our coverage of the tribute to the late Alexander Doty in our first episode).  The producers (Christine Becker, Michael Kackman, Todd Thompson, and me) are striving towards professionalism (relative amateurs though we may be at this point—I’ve already had to republish episode 1 on the iTunes feed due to a rookie mistake), but we also want the podcast to be inclusive and community-oriented with correspondents, vox populi segments, and guest hosts.  (In fact, click here to find out how you can participate as early as episode 2.)

We also aim to augment Cinema Journal with those qualities that radio is especially good at providing: the immediacy of the human voice, the personality of spoken conversation, the “intimate publicness” of individualized address to a community of scholars that, we hope, will embrace this venture.

This post is part of a new, ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

At the limits of life stand the enigmas of birth and death; in-between we careen around confusedly. Logic and reason are not up to this truth, but the imagination stands strong. Or so said Michael Haneke, Raoul Ruiz, and Leos Carax at the New York Film Festival this year.

Haneke’s Amor begins violently. The front door of a beautiful Paris apartment cracks inward. A burglar? No, the police, who discover a female corpse surrounded by flowers, and an open window. Thus, we know immediately of the deaths of Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emannuelle Riva), two music teachers in their eighties. The rest of the film is an explanatory flashback about Anne’s stroke, its roots in the trauma of a previous attempted criminal break-in, and its inauguration of an oxymoronically tedious-yet-intense process of dying.

As Anne’s condition worsens, Georges becomes increasingly unable to tolerate the desecration of his image of his wife. A frightening dream—in the style of a Rene Magritte painting—in which Georges chokes himself suggests the nature of his turmoil, as does his stubborn, repeated replacement of Anne’s deteriorating body with images of “the way she was.” There is no plot to the progress of Georges’s anguish at life’s effacement of his ideal Anne, or his final disappearance into the thin air of the open window. Instead, our sustaining imaginations must connect the dots, from the wild bird who flies through the apartment window to the response of daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), after her beloved parents pass—which may be somewhat analogous to the response of those of us who remember the youthful beauty of the now aged Trintignant in A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouche, 1966) and Riva in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959).

Death and the imagination are also the subjects of exiled Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz’s Night Across the Street (La Noche de Enfrente), his last film before his demise on August 19, 2011. The film, which portrays the final days of protagonist Don Celso Barra (Sergio Hernandez), is a playful mélange of Ruiz’s childhood preoccupation with pirates and the sea; the influence of Chilean authors Hernan del Solar and Jean Giono; and traces of David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard.

Don Barra is escorted from this world to the next by three charming and witty companions: Jean Giono (Christian Vadim); his boyhood self (Santiago Figueroa); and Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra), the fictional pirate from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Barra’s discovery of which of these characters is going to kill him renders death an imaginative, tender act by an agent who could not be further from the conventional image of the black-cloaked nemesis. Who would not want to leave this absurd life for the eternity indicated by Ruiz’s sweeping shots of sea and earth? We are in the care of the director’s conception of the highest earthly power: imagination.

A final highlight of the festival was Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, which is not about a personal death, but rather about the disappearance of a reliable, solid reality. It begins when the filmmaker surreally enters a shabby movie theatre, in his pajamas, after being wakened roughly from sleep. He then embarks on a Chekhovian mission to show us life “not as it is or as it ought to be, but as it is in dreams.” Mission accomplished, as Carax’s stunning images wash over us.

We first see protagonist Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) in a naturalistic setting, dressed in an elegant business suit, exiting from a palatial modern home, biding farewell to “wife and children,” entering a stretch limo driven by Céline (Edith Scob), a willowy, middle-aged woman, and perusing the contents of a folder, as might any business man. However, this limo is mysteriously appointed as if it were a theatrical dressing room. So begins a day in which M. Oscar is revealed as a protean figure, who assumes numerous inexplicable shapes for his “clients.”

M. Oscar’s first stop is at an indeterminate location in which he dons a silver-studded black body suit that covers him from head to toe, and performs erotic contortions with a woman in a similar red body suit. Other assignments, which increasingly confuse the real with performance, include Oscar’s impersonation of a filthy sewer denizen, who kidnaps a model from a high fashion photo shoot; his stint as a man who meets an old love who shockingly kills herself; and his role as the father of an anxious young girl. With each visit, his relationship to Céline, which is both formal and sympathetic, is further articulated without revealing its exact nature. And when, at last, M. Oscar “returns home” it is not to the mansion or “family” of the opening shot. Indeed, his new “family” is not even human. Céline, then, meets up with other drivers as they all return limos to the Holy Motors garage and go home. Is the world full of such assignments? Does anything exist that is remotely like a home? Only the cars know, and they’re not telling.

M. Oscar’s day is pervaded by both extreme weariness and riveting performative energy. It breaks into fragments that bristle with specificity, but never cohere. It threatens our most fundamental distinctions: animal blurs with human and mechanism; intelligence slips into visceral urge and back; past, present, future, fantasy, and reality alternately fuse and separate. And, somehow, the doors of perception are cleansed.

CODA: After 25 prodigious years, Richard Peña is stepping down as Chairman of the NYFF selection committee and Programming Director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Kent Jones will be the new committee Chair and Robert Koehler the new Programming Director. Peña’s amazing tenure was summed up during a press conference with Abbas Kiraostami as they reminisced about Pena’s visit to Iran. Kiarostami had hoped to show Pena that there were ordinary streets and houses in his country, not just the ethereal vistas of his films. But, as Kiarostami drove onto his block, they were greeted by the dreamlike spectacle of two dozen sleeping camels.

Same time, next year.