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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2013
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 11, Issue 2-3, 2013
Volume 11, Issue 2-3, 2013
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Video-making, Harlem Shaking: Theorizing the interactive amateur
More LessAbstractThe aim of this article is to interrogate the recent YouTube phenomenon of ‘Harlem Shake’ (2013) as an interactive amateur video-making collective. I argue that the significance of the meme from an amateur film studies perspective lies in the realm of three overlapping areas of: the productive interaction that occurs among amateur creators online; the generic adherence to the narrative, technical and aesthetic ‘rules’ that define the trend; and the problematization of personal control that comes to light as a consequence of both co-creation and global exhibition. Through a detailed discussion of the traditional distinctions between amateurism and professionalism, public and private media-making, and the notion of YouTube as a democratizing yet monetizing platform, I argue that ‘Harlem Shake’ reflects the consumption of culture amid the Web 2.0 generation and that its semiotic code represents the underlying structure of the paradoxical landscape on which it has burgeoned.
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Impossible family portraits: Users, new media technologies and the writing of amateur media history
By Susan AasmanAbstractWith the shift from analog to digital the field of amateur media widened as the technologies of image production, distribution and screening altered considerably. The many transformations of home moviemaking chart it as something that used to need a film camera and film, a detailed development process, a projector and a darkened room, into something that today can be done with a mobile phone. New terms have come along to describe these diverse amateur practices like home video, video diaries or user-generated content. It is time to re-evaluate these practices that so far have been marginal to media history. This article aims to open the space for new perspectives on the history of amateur media by tracing the changing relations between new technologies and different uses of amateur film and video. Charting why and how people choose to use specific technologies at particular moments and how economic, social and cultural factors influence these choices could help us to understand how some technologies became embedded in our lives and others not. The suggestion put forward in this article is that we can only gain more insight if we are less medium specific on the one hand and more case specific on the other.
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Close to home: Privatization and personalization of militarized death in Israeli home videos
More LessAbstractSince the mid-1990s, Israeli television has broadcast soldiers’ memorial videos made by families commemorating their lost loved one. The videos are broadcast only one day a year during the National Memorial Day as part of an orchestrated, nationwide commemoration and mourning. In Israeli society these video productions are deemed private and personal, therefore existing outside political, economic, institutional and aesthetic discourses. This article argues that the positioning of family-made video productions outside the social sphere obscures the politics and economies of Israeli cultural memory. To evaluate the social impetus of family-made memorial videos, the article traces the history of their emergence in the public view and highlights two parallel processes of privatization: the privatization of commemoration and memorialization in Israel, and the privatization of the Israeli public broadcast system. It also explores the appropriation of such home movies by state institutions (the archives in particular) and official historiography, and proposes three concepts for the discussion: intimacy, fetish and cliché. It concludes by interpreting the videos’ intimate storytelling within the public, digital and broadcast sphere as a cultural and ritualistic speech-convention that projects political viewpoints and understandings.
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Of national ‘Significance’: Politicizing the home movies of the US National Film Registry
By Daniel MauroAbstractAmongst archived collections of motion picture materials, home movies occupy an enigmatic position. The National Film Registry of the United States is a high-profile collection that includes home movies and, in the act of collecting, radically reframes the perceived cultural value and politics of the films. Established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, the National Film Registry aims to collect films that are ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’ and preserve them in service of maintaining a US film heritage. Yet do the home movies selected represent a ‘significantly’ national symbol? This article examines the private and public trajectories of the home movies selected for the Registry, arguing that the films are selected with the primary goal of mobilizing particular political narratives according to the ideologies and biases of the National Film Preservation Board and Librarian of Congress. Furthermore, this article examines the ramifications of such political selections on the shaping of a US national film heritage. These issues are discussed through three key analyses: (1) an examination of the politics of collecting and canonization with respect to the goals and operations of the Registry as evidenced through publications and accounts of key figures involved in the selection of the home movies; (2) tracings of the trajectories of the individual home movies as they developed from private films into pieces of public history; and (3) a consideration of how the selection of these home movies more broadly affects the construction and consumption of a US national film heritage.
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Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8
More LessAbstractAt stake in this article is the very act of writing on expanded cinema. Provoked by Gene Youngblood’s canonical offering of fluid state of media as it moved out of the exclusive domain of celluloid to a range of practices that include video, computer and so on, I look at practices in India that exhibit a similar movement out of the movie theatre. It is one matter to identify the practice of expanded cinema but it is quite a different matter, perhaps more challenging, to translate those practices intro a form that is attentive to the works. This article draws on Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8 (2005). How to approach a film, when to leave a video, and how to meander through a gallery space are some of the pathways adopted in this article, modes of exploration that return to the act of writing.
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From the roof top into the mine
More LessAbstractThis article focuses on two of my films: Through the Dark Mine (Abraham, Film Tales, Bangalore, 2013) about the Kolar Gold Field Mines (1864–2001), and I Saw a God Dance (Abraham, Film Tales, Bangalore, 2012) – a short documentary film about the charismatic dancer Ram Gopal (1912–2003). The title of the article, ‘From the roof top into the mine’, reflects my attempt to juxtapose these two ostensibly different films, crafted out of found-footage, in order to see how they work side by side, metaphorically and historically. Both films illustrate mid twentieth-century modes of living and inform on the century’s modern and industrial practices such as film, dance and industrial gold mining. Working with and writing about the found footage used in making these two films represents in my opinion a form of archaeology of marginal practices in film. My composite films share a particular geographical area, and I have edited them as to create a visual path to experiencing the interiors of a gold mine and the intricate intimacy of the dancing form proposed by an exceptionally talented and beautiful gay performer. In writing this article, which is structured as a free-style essay, I developed new perspectives on my initial interpretations of the original visual material, and also on the formal concerns surrounding the structure and aesthetics of experiential and experimental film.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 20 (2022)
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2020)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007)
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Volume 4 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2002 - 2003)