2015/2 – #Vintage
Recent Submissions
- ArticleEditorial NECSUSNECSUS Editorial Board (2015) , S. 1-2
- ArticleTechnostalgia of the present: From technologies of memory to a memory of technologiesvan der Heijden, Tim (2015) , S. 103-121This article reflects on today’s ‘technostalgic’ trend in media culture by examining the various ways in which Super 8 film as a media technology from the past is re-appropriated and remediated in contemporary memory practices. By looking specifically at restorative and reflective forms of technostalgia manifest in the project BYE BYE SUPER 8 – IN LOVING MEMORY OF KODACHROME (2011) and the digital smartphone app iSupr8 (2011), the author explores how in contemporary memory practices media technologies not only construct and mediate memories but have also become the objects of memory themselves. While analysing this double mnemonic process – accounting for both the memory construction by the media technology and the reminiscence of the media technology itself – it is argued that we currently witness a new kind of memory practice enforcing an attentive shift from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies.
- ArticleThe way we watched: Vintage television programmes, memories, and memorabiliaPiper, Helen (2015) , S. 123-142This paper explores television viewing memories of a kind that have rarely been acknowledged, whether in formal histories of television or by the ubiquitous archive ‘clip show’. Much of the academic work that explicitly addresses questions of television and memory has been disproportionately preoccupied with viewers’ recall of historical events. Here, the author draws on a viewer reminiscence project to emphasise how favourite entertainment shows once integral to family life in the 1960s and 1970s are today bound up with the more complex and diffuse emotions that surround the everyday past. The author also uses the idea of ‘vintage’, specifically as a designation for something that ‘belongs’ to a certain period, to contemplate the connections between memories of programmes and the sentiments evoked by the vestiges of television-related material culture (including ‘the box’ itself and other items of memorabilia). Both reminiscence and the acquisition of vintage goods are ways of constructing the cultural past, and both differ markedly in form and outcome from the re-consumption of the television archive that is routinely promoted by broadcasters and DVD distributors. The paper will conclude that as critical re-engagement with the extant moving image text is a poor substitute for the original performance, reminiscence and vintage material culture might offer more effective insight into past engagement with television. For similar reasons the study of both memory and materiality may provide appropriate intellectual contexts to complement the study of old programmes in text-centred critical/aesthetic discourse.
- ArticleAgamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of lifeHarbord, Janet (2015) , S. 13-30Agamben’s essay on gesture is perhaps his most influential piece of work for film studies, in which he argues that cinema at its inception captures the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures, manifest in a crisis of communicability. Comparing the traces of the gesticulating bodies of Gilles de la Tourette’s patients with those in the proto-cinematic series of photographs taken by Eadward Muybridge, Agamben suggests that these are the twin processes of a biopolitical production of life; respectively, the body as the site of investigation and the exemplary body put to work. Yet the ethico-political implications of Agamben’s essay on gesture and the biopolitical production of life are relatively under-developed. This article pursues not only cinema’s relation to biopolitical capture but also the way in which cinema came to compensate for such a reductive version of corporeality by constructing the concept of an individual located as complex interiority. When gestural communication declines at the close of the 19th century meaning is relocated to the internal space within the human body; commensurate with this production of human interiority as a site of truth, cinema becomes a machine whose task is to decipher the turmoil of the inside, a process reproduced as narrative explication.
- ArticleRetro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks backBaschiera, Stefano; Caoduro, Elena (2015) , S. 143-163This article explores the definition of ‘vintage cinema’ and specifically re-evaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: faux-vintage, retro and anachronistic; by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism. It furthermore unravels the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).
- ArticleNo time like the past? On the new role of vintage and retro in the magazines SCANDINAVIAN RETRO and RETRO GAMERHandberg, Kristian (2015) , S. 165-185The article presents a cultural historical rendition of the terms vintage and retro and how the revival of the recent past based on objects of modern culture is a characteristic feature of late 20th and 21st century culture. In the words of music critic Simon Reynolds, we have entered a state of retromania, where revival has become ubiquitous and has changed the focus from new to old. Retro and vintage has been made accessible to a wider audience and is not delimited to the subcultural sphere. This development is shown and analysed through the case of two monthly magazines: SCANDINAVIAN RETRO (2011-present) and RETRO GAMER (2005-present). On the basis of these specialised retro medialisations the framing of the past through retro and vintage is discussed and suggested as being nurtured by myth and well as materiality.
- ArticleDeath, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del ReyFetveit, Arild (2015) , S. 187-207The obsolescence of analogue media along with a rapid succession of digital formats has sensitised us to the mortality of media. It has also spawned what Dominik Schrey has called ‘a golden age of nostalgia for these allegedly “dead media”’, now explored by visual artists, filmmakers, cinematographers, Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts, Polaroid fans, Instagram users, music video directors and others. Since the mid-1990s a partially-iconoclastic impulse focused on exploring the mortality of media materials has often taken the form of medium-specific noise. However, in recent years alternative strategies that counteract clarity, involving iconoclastic disruptions of the process of mediation, supported by a host of degrading techniques and strategies that thicken and foreground the medium and its materiality, have partially replaced uses of medium-specific noise.
- ArticleLearning from popular genres – with help from the audiovisual essayÁlvarez López, Cristina; Martin, Adrian (2015) , S. 209-213
- ArticleConstruction of a Heist (2014)Lindenberger, Henrike (2015) , S. 214-214
- ArticleA note on COMEDY VITTI STYLE (2015)Iannone, Pasquale (2015) , S. 215-216
- ReviewThe Lumière GalaxyPitassio, Francesco (2015) , S. 217-222
- ReviewBeautiful Data / The Democratic SurroundHagener, Malte (2015) , S. 223-227
- ReviewCinema of the Swimming Pool / Cinema as WeatherO'Brien, Adam (2015) , S. 228-234
- ReviewSelling film in the summer of 2015: Midnight Sun, Il Cinema Ritrovato, and Karlovy VarySan Filippo, Maria (2015) , S. 235-245
- ReviewMade in Peru: Lima Film Festival comes of ageBarrow, Sarah (2015) , S. 246-251
- ReviewStrong positioning on the international festival circuit: An interview with Diana Iljine of Filmfest MünchenKrainhöfer, Tanja C. (2015) , S. 252-260
- ReviewHollis Frampton's 'other work'Zryd, Michael (2015) , S. 261-266
- ReviewTheaters: Cinematic vintage magnifiedDe Rosa, Miriam (2015) , S. 267-276
- ReviewArab Pop: Whose Gaze is it Anyway?Harvey-Davitt, James (2015) , S. 277-283
- ReviewArtists’ Film Biennial, ICA 2014Satchell-Baeza, Sophia (2015) , S. 284-293