Now that I’ve switched from Comcast to AT&T, and seem to only watch pre-recorded programs off the DVR, I’ve become a little more attuned to the importance of the commercial break. We may say we hate it, but when it’s gone, or artificially eliminated rather, it’s hard to shake the feeling that something important is [...]
In a remarkable scene in the first season of The Wire, Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) follows “Stringer” (Idris Elba) the consigliere to what turns out to be an NYU macroeconomics course. It’s an astonishing discovery — for the viewer, of course, but also for McNulty. When he checks the placard on the door, he [...]
Thanks to a post by Chris Cagle of Category D, we now know we have one week left to submit a paper proposal for the Quotation, Sampling, and Appropriation in Audiovisual Production panel, which will “address film and other media’s formal strategies of quotation, appropriation, sampling, version, remixing, etc. as methods of critique.”
250-word proposals by [...]
In a post praising Flicker Alley’s continual release of otherwise unavailable films, Kristin Thompson reminds us that Abel Gance’s 1922 epic, La roue, long overdue on DVD, was released last year. Though Gance is most well-known for his Napoleon, La roue is often thought of as his greatest picture.
A case in point is the new [...]
Though the two lectures comprising Pierre Bourdieu’s short work On Television (1996) more or less exclusively focus on news programming, and predate the blogosphere, if not the internet — which is important to the extent that so much of what he has to say here concerns ownership of the means of information production, — the [...]
In a recent World Picture article entitled “The Obviousness of Cinema,” Rosalind Galt, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006), takes us on a thoughtful, encyclopedic tour of the [...]
On the subject of the development of the screen and interface, Virilio notes the strange, historical moment, now difficult to appreciate, when “the surprise effect came from the sudden appearance of pictures and signs on a monitor”, rather than from some kind of direct perception (War and Cinema 72). It is, then, only natural that [...]
In his recent Reason article on “justice porn” Greg Beato notes, in passing, that the realistic sets of tv courtrooms reimagine real courts as so many “fetish props” assembled.
“But instead of emphasizing their status as private arbitrators who offer a different approach to dispute resolution than the U.S. court system, they present themselves as that [...]
Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).
And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in [...]
A post and discussion over at Sparkle*Matrix, entitled “‘even dead women can look sexy …’“, expresses the requisite horror and indignation over the America’s Next Top Model photo shoot where the contestants were tasked to simulate dead, but sexy, poses. Sparklematrix links to a slideshow matched with the judges’ comments, to swiftly expel any doubts [...]
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