This paper considers the use of Boym’s formulations of reflective and restorative nostalgia as a productive lens for viewing the tensions within folk horror texts and their appeals. Considering folk horror texts such as The Wicker Man, Midsommar and The Living and the Dead, the paper will demonstrate that Boym’s two conceptions help to draw out…[Read more]

I will mainly focus on a collection of films made between 1972 and 1985 by the Staatliche Filmdokumentation (SFD)—the State Film
Documentation unit—which survived as part of the collection of the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR (SFA), the former national film archive
of the GDR.

In this chapter, I make two interconnected observations. I first consider how musicals inhabit and promote a ‘post-truth’ worldview similar to those reflected in current populist resurgences throughout the West. I argue that it is musical theater’s penchant for the unreal that in recent decades has given it traction within both secular,…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: ‘Lone Star’ (John Sayles, 1996) es una película sobre la etnicidad y sobre el peso del pasado tratado aquí de manera reflexiva. Es un tema inevitablemente presente en las películas norteamericanas (o en muchas de ellas) pero a menudo sólo como parte del trasfondo, o evitado en el desarrollo de la historia principal. Aquí está…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Dos hombres en lados opuestos de la ley están infiltrados —en la Policía y en la mafia— pero hierven la violencia y la sangre derramada cuando la información sale a la luz, y se envía a cada topo a averiguar quién es el enemigo interior. ‘Infiltrados’ es una película de Martin Scorsese que explora la ‘paradoja del espía’, a…[Read more]

By taking water as a viewpoint, this dissertation reveals that the urban communities of seventeenth-century Holland were highly subsidiary in nature. Individual townspeople, men and women alike, knew how to fend for themselves, incidentally having recourse to other inhabitants, businessmen, corporations or magistrates. Together, they constituted a…[Read more]

The project ‘The Sculptor Speaks’ takes its source from a 1961 tape by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Unearthed at the British Library, the tape’s initial purpose was for a pre-recorded talk with slides for the British Council. Every recording is a priori an archival object, which can potentially resound anew through a contemporary carrier, p…[Read more]

Review of Mike Wayne’s “Marxism Goes to the Movies”.

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

Abstract: Insofar as Walter identifies with this myth, his rational imperative is profoundly interrupted. However, this representational interruption also operates on a larger level. Since the film opens and closes with the western actor Sam Elliott (The Stranger) and is shot through with western stylistic motifs, it can be seen as striving toward…[Read more]

This chapter examines the portrayal of Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes in Stephen Frear’s film Philomena (2013) and the biography on which the film is based, the British journalist Martin Sixsmith’s account of Philomena Lee’s life and search for her son, who was given up to an American couple for adoption under coercive circumstances. Enforced a…[Read more]

As with many of the Kinoks’ films trains often appear in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. Used to create dynamism, criss-crossing the screen, often at dramatic angles, and acting as a counterpoint to previous and following scenes. Train sequences also signpost a journey to Odesa by the eponymous cameraman. The paper…[Read more]

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is a staple of film studies courses and academic papers but there has been no research until now into the important ‘co-stars’ of the film, the movie cameras. This paper discusses in detail the Debrie Parvo and other cameras used by the film’s cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman.

The definitive timeline for the early screening of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece has been established for the first time. This illustrated paper looks at the details of the first showing of the film in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, and Germany. The earliest (pre-release) review of the film in 1928 has been translated into English for the first time,…[Read more]

Following extensive research and detective work, most of the locations used in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece have been discovered. Described by leading film academics as ‘extraordinary and exciting research’ and ‘a huge step ahead in knowledge of the film’ the paper describes each location in detail including contemporary and current views. The…[Read more]

In July 1944, the Red Army was advancing through Eastern Poland when they discovered the first traces of the camps. On reaching Lublin they found an enormous compound behind barbed wire in the city’s suburb of Majdanek. Embedded with the Soviet army were film crews, who made the first images of a Nazi camp, among them the “flight survivors” Olga a…[Read more]

This article examines the link posited by Virilio and others between the camera shot and gun shot, arguing that this link operates differently in the context of Soviet vs. Western fantasies of agency, community and technology. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of…[Read more]

The contribution of women to the development of societies and medicine around the world cannot be overstated. Their contribution to medicine is great; this is seen, in particular, in their role among other physicians, obstetricians, nurses, herbalists, and assistant physicians. Despite the significant contribution of women to medicine and health…[Read more]

This paper analyses the sitcom “Friends” (1994-2004) and its performance motifs.

Analysis of the episode from television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Who Are You?” (4.16).