This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

The poetics and esthetics of “natural occupancy” are relevant to the ways in which settlers’ colonists artistically and discursively produce their subsequent cultural formations. I focus on the decade of the 1950s to chart specific settler ideologies of ownership that emerged in
Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948. What are the v…[Read more]

This paper analyzes Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and how it relates to a new paradigm of trans-national blockbusters. I analyze the film using a cultural materialist lens with respect to the filmmaker’s previous films and their outward (international) trajectory. This methodology highlights a larger trend that we are now seeing with large-scale…[Read more]

Vertov’s early years in film: the Kino-Nedelia newsreels, the work on the agitational trains, the anti-religious propaganda films.

Vertov in 1917, and an investigation of some of his shaping contexts: musical practice, Futurist poetry, early non-fiction filmmaking, and Marxism.

Dziga Vertov’s education during the early years of World War: his changing personal situation as a war refugee, the connections he made at the Institute, the ideas that exerted an influence.

On Dziga Vertov’s early life and the city (Bialystok) and situations in which he grew up.

The article focuses on the restoration of the collections of paintings and drawings of E. E. Cummings in Brockport, New York. It is inferred that the Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection has sustained a mass of damage over the last 25 years, and that efforts for its conservation have consistently been delayed. It discusses the contents and the…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

On many occasions cinema has chosen to shoot movies in locales other than the ones in which the events of the films are supposed to take place in. This could be due to various reasons, namely cheaper production costs, or inability to gain access to the original place. The choice of location, however, tries to provide a mirror image of the…[Read more]

Media representations of Arabs and terrorists.

n her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they…[Read more]

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]

The changes that have been witnessed by media in the Arab world have redefined media’s initial role as a source of information. With the advent of satellite television new realities, namely the dismantling of communication boundaries, have emerged. At first, such advancements posed a challenge to government bodies, specifically in the Arab region;…[Read more]

A video essay about title sequences from films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. An exploration of motion graphic design from analog to digital.