Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim’s literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple itinerary, there exist itineraries for Babylon and for biblical conquest that do a very dif…[Read more]

Archives are full of ghosts—the ghosts of music long-forgotten, technologies now superseded, practices that have faded away with time. This talk examines music used to accompany and signify the supernatural the silent film, as well as what can be learned by excavating the ghosts of musicians’ lives and careers now held in archives both at the Uni…[Read more]

Archives are full of ghosts—the ghosts of music long-forgotten, technologies now superseded, practices that have faded away with time. This talk examines music used to accompany and signify the supernatural the silent film, as well as what can be learned by excavating the ghosts of musicians’ lives and careers now held in archives both at the Uni…[Read more]

This article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]

This article treats the cultural meaning of rabbinic toilet rules from their Tannaitic instantiation through to later developments in Palestine and Mesopotamia. It argues that these rules draw their corporeal and mental bearings from the Jerusalem temple, in inverse and opposite directions to prayer deportment. It shows how the juxtaposition of…[Read more]

An insight view of Brigadier Mokhtar Karim, who has the honour of working in all three arms of pre-partition British Indian Army as an officer. The forefather of Hot-air ballooning in Pakistan and raiser of Pakistan Army Aviation Wing. He has the honour of being the pilot of one of the two “Air Observer Post” Observer planes present with Pak…[Read more]

While found documents have long been marshalled as evidence in documentary, several recent films have interrogated the found document’s evidentiary status and raised questions about the ethics of appropriation. This essay examines two films — Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) and Jane Gillooly’s Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013) – in rela…[Read more]

This paper explores the ways in which Natalie Bookchin’s video loop installation entitled Mass Ornament (2009) both replicates and diverges from the notion of the mass ornament articulated by Siegfried Kracauer in the 1930s. By appropriating YouTube videos of many anonymous amateurs dancing alone in their homes and synchronizing them so that the d…[Read more]

Found footage filmmaking often generates novel juxtapositions and produces new meanings unintended by the footage’s original makers – meanings that are, in other words, “inappropriate.” One response to many such films is laughter. Through an examination of several experimental found footage videos made in the past decade, this chapter explore…[Read more]

Explores Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” as if it were experienced by many viewers of a particular type — SCM’s: suburban, collegiate young men — as a feeling out of how they might contrive themselves so that their future development would not place them as identifiable as losers by he-men pulp figures they’d learned early represent…[Read more]

British composer Laura Rossi is perhaps best known for her work providing new scores for
silent films, including The Battle of the Somme (1915), The Battle of the Ancre (1917), and a
selection of very early cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare (1899-1911) that appeared as
Silent Shakespeare in 1998. Rossi is also the composer of scores for many…[Read more]

A survey of different approaches to the concept of a subjective (or post-subjective) camera.

A central element of the core folk horror texts (The Wicker Man (1973), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968)) is the idea of rural communities as retaining pre-Christian practices and beliefs. When uncovered by a modern outsider who is returning to the countryside, these revelations disrupt their world view. Folk horror texts d…[Read more]

“It’s time to…declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture,” wrote computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz in his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” (2008). Swartz was criticizing the privatization of scholarship already in the public domain, and seeking ways to make this work accessible to everyone. This essay exami…[Read more]

Contemporary developments in the medium of the moving picture, particularly in relation to the general digitisation of media, are bringing about substantial changes to long-held conceptions of both its theory and its practice. This thesis asserts that a significant factor in these, both historically and in terms of potential development, is the…[Read more]

Between 1908 and 1927, when sound film became standard, numerous American publications for both those involved in the film industry and the general public, such as Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, and Exhibitors Herald, included regular columns by cinema conductors, composers, and arrangers like Samuel Berg, Ernst Luz, and Clarence Sinn…[Read more]