DOCSLIB.ORG

The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography Film

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography Film This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 24 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography Paul C. Adams, Jim Craine, Jason Dittmer Film Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315613178.ch2 Deborah Dixon Published online on: 28 Aug 2014 How to cite :- Deborah Dixon. 28 Aug 2014, Film from: The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography Routledge Accessed on: 24 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315613178.ch2 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 2 Film Deborah Dixon Introduction Scholars in disciplines such as media and film studies have time and again invoked a “geography of cinema,” by which is largely meant the political economic settings within which film is sponsored and produced, and the differential scales of activity exhibited by the entertainment industry, as well as the re-presentation of specific locations on screen, and the role of such scenes in setting the emotional tone for a character, culture, or plot device. Research emerging from geography, however, is arguably distinctive by virtue of the fact that “space” and “place” are at the forefront of their analyses, and, moreover, that film becomes a means of nuancing these terms, and of exploring new “spatial turns.” Certainly, and in concert with scholars outside of the discipline, geographers have looked to film as a case study, a metaphor, an analogy, a symptom, and a causal factor. But also, geographers have looked to cinematic film as a site for exploratory and innovative thought and practice around some of the discipline’s key terms, or “primitives.” In large part, this disciplinary interest is driven by a recognition of and desire to understand the “extent and reach” of cinema industries, its “globalizing” effects, and its role in “subject formation.” Whilst cinematic film as an object of analysis boasts numerous characteristics, there is no doubt that the primacy of the visual in all of these issues and more has also captured attention. Accordingly, whilst commentators have long bemoaned that for a quintessentially visual enterprise, geography is remarkably uncritical in regard to their own and others’ deployment of the image, at least one area of human geography has consistently addressed this very issue: cinematic geographies. This “minor” subfield has turned time and again on the question of how, where, and with what effect the image has helped to constitute, and confound, our own and others’ spatiotemporal imaginaries and materialities. It is none too surprising, then, to find that some of the most contentious, as well as productive, conceptual lines of inquiry to emerge in geography have been played out within cinematic geographies. Some of these will be outlined below. It must also be recognised, however, that as with many topics considered to help comprise “popular culture,” there has also been a tendency within the discipline to eschew cinematic geographies as both marginal and ephemeral in comparison with the “real” terrain of (especially) economic and urban processes and practices (Aitken and Zonn 1994). Indeed, film itself has often been referred to as the “reel” counterpart to the “real” (e.g. Lukinbeal 1998; Zonn 1984; 1985). In arguing the case for the dissolution of such a distinction, numerous geographers have taken the opportunity to make a variety of conceptual points in regard to the mediated character of the “real” and the extratextual character of the “reel” (Benton 1995; Dixon and Grimes 2004; Gold 2002; Hanna 1996). Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 08:34 24 Sep 2021; For: 9781315613178, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315613178.ch2 THE ASHGatE RESEARCH COMPANION TO MEDIA GEOGRAPHY In this chapter, I provide an overview of the emergence of the cinematic geography subfield, noting a significant shift from film as a real-world mimetic, and hence useful teaching medium, to film as a complex social construct and material assemblage that “does work” on a variety of levels, from the ideological to the affective. Whilst providing a sense of the relevant literatures available, I also stress at key moments individual essays that speak to a conceptual, as well as methodological, engagement with space especially. I conclude the chapter by turning to current lines of inquiry that, whilst using film as an exemplar and symptom, promise to speak to broadscale debates across the geographic discipline. An Emerging “Cinematic Geography” Whilst film as a complex and important object of analysis became a feature of social theoretical writings early in the twentieth century – indeed, the early reach of the industry, and the societal impacts of film-watching, were taken by some as helping to define a “modern condition” (see Clarke 1997) – there is no doubt that within geography film was to become instrumentalized as a minor element in practitioners’ teaching strategies. The earliest disciplinary writings on film, for example, produced for the Geographical Magazine in the 1950s, were explicitly concerned with their utility as teaching aids, insofar as selected clips could re-present for students the “earth and its people” (Cons 1959; though see Sherman 1967). Indeed, film was superior to photographs in this regard, insofar as their capturing of movement as well as scenery would allow for an even more faithful experience of “being in the field” (Griffith 1953; Koval 1954; Manvell 1953; 1956a; Wright 1956; Knight, 1957). Some subsequent film analyses have echoed this concern over the fidelity of such representations, with a tendency to bemoan the “subjective” input provided by filmmakers, such that images are “distorted” and “misleading” (Liverman and Sherman 1985; Godfrey 1993). Whilst recognizing the pioneering work of Gold (1984; 1985), it is only since the 1990s – and in particular the publication of Aitken and Zonn’s (1994) genre-building, edited collection – that sufficient quantities of critically engaged research articles and books on this popular medium have been produced to allow for a disciplinary subfield to emerge. Such efforts were very much influenced by broadscale debates within and without the discipline on the complex, socially constructed character of “popular culture” per se, and looked to interrogate film in terms of its content, form, and distribution, but also its efficacy as a particular medium of expression. Such efforts can be very loosely grouped into two bodies of literature and methodological practice. First, geographers already interested in ideological apparatuses turned to the work of the Frankfurt School, emerging in 1930s Germany, to understand the particular role of screened people and places, as well as the relationship established between the screen and the audience. The shooting as well as the content of such films, it was argued, more often than not served to divert attention away from the broader effects of the global capitalist system, such as a pervasive neoliberal discourse, toward viscerally exciting scenes of sex and violence, or a more benign concern with the melodramatic plight of the individual (Dixon 2008). What is more, it was argued, as people and place become part of cinematic production and screening, their individuality and uniqueness are subsumed. In response, some geographers were to urge the critical analysis of film as a consciousness-raising exercise (for example, Alderman and Popke 2002; Algeo 2007; Cresswell 2000; Lukinbeal 2002; Mains 2004; Youngs and Martin 1984). And yet, as Scott was to caution, with specific reference to the film industry, any analysis of culture as a matter of identity and power must take into account the potential for a heightened cultural 40 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 08:34 24 Sep 2021; For: 9781315613178, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315613178.ch2 FILM differentiation, as well as a sustained resistance to a homogenized “cultural osmosis.” He writes, Alongside the grim analyses of the Frankfurt School about the leveling and stupefying effects of capitalist culture we must set not only the resilient and creative reception that it encounters in many sorts of traditional cultures, but also the enlightening and progressive cultural forces constantly unleashed by capitalism. (1997: 15) This more avowedly dialectical approach to screen-audience encounters certainly animated Harvey’s (1989) now iconic analysis of Blade Runner (1982), as well as Natter and Jones’s (1993) innovative analysis of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), which takes to task the role of General Motors in building, and then breaking, the town of Flint, Michigan. For Natter and Jones cinematic form as well as content is crucial, insofar as a documentary-style montage presentation does not sum up the tensions inherent in contemporary capitalism: instead, It juxtaposes past and present, class perspectives of the rich and poor, views of capital as both a private and social power, and the seemingly impersonal laws of the economy against their personalized effects. The trope of irony which organizes the film’s stylistic juxtapositions does not permit a reconciliation of these differences, but instead exposes them as unresolved contradictions. It is between the positions thus revealed as unreconcilable that the viewer is forced to choose.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Crazy Narrative in Film. Analysing Alejandro González Iñárritu's Film
    Case study – media image CRAZY NARRATIVE IN FILM. ANALYSING ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU’S FILM NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE Antoaneta MIHOC1 1. M.A., independent researcher, Germany. Corresponding author: [email protected] Abstract Regarding films, many critics have expressed their dissatisfaction with narrative and its Non-linear film narrative breaks the mainstream linearity. While the linear film narrative limits conventions of narrative structure and deceives the audience’s expectations. Alejandro González Iñárritu is the viewer’s participation in the film as the one of the directors that have adopted the fragmentary narrative gives no control to the public, the narration for his films, as a means of experimentation, postmodernist one breaks the mainstream con- creating a narrative puzzle that has to be reassembled by the spectators. His films could be included in the category ventions of narrative structure and destroys the of what has been called ‘hyperlink cinema.’ In hyperlink audience’s expectations in order to create a work cinema the action resides in separate stories, but a in which a less-recognizable internal logic forms connection or influence between those disparate stories is the film’s means of expression. gradually revealed to the audience. This paper will analyse the non-linear narrative technique used by the In the Story of the Lost Reflection, Paul Coates Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu in his states that, trilogy: Amores perros1 , 21 Grams2 and Babel3 . Film emerges from the Trojan horse of Keywords: Non-linear Film Narrative, Hyperlink Cinema, Postmodernism. melodrama and reveals its true identity as the art form of a post-individual society.
    [Show full text]
  • Network Aesthetics
    Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection by Patrick Jagoda Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Timothy W. Lenoir ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 ABSTRACT Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection by Patrick Jagoda Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor __________________________ Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Timothy W. Lenoir ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Patrick Jagoda 2010 Abstract Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly applied the language of interconnection to such diverse collective forms as computer webs, terrorist networks, economic systems, and disease ecologies. The prehistory of network discourse can be
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Hypernarrative in Fiction Film: Alternative Narrative in American Film (1989−2012)
    Copyright by Taehyun Cho 2014 The Thesis Committee for Taehyun Cho Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: A Study of Hypernarrative in Fiction Film: Alternative Narrative in American Film (1989−2012) APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Charles R. Berg Thomas G. Schatz A Study of Hypernarrative in Fiction Film: Alternative Narrative in American Film (1989−2012) by Taehyun Cho, B.A. Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2014 Dedication To my family who teaches me love. Acknowledgements I would like to give special thanks to my advisor, Professor Berg, for his intellectual guidance and warm support throughout my graduate years. I am also grateful to my thesis committee, Professor Schatz, for providing professional insights as a scholar to advance my work. v Abstract A Study of Hypernarrative in Fiction Film: Alternative Narrative in American Film (1989-2012) Taehyun Cho, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Charles R. Berg Although many scholars attempted to define and categorize alternative narratives, a new trend in narrative that has proliferated at the turn of the 21st century, there is no consensus. To understand recent alternative narrative films more comprehensively, another approach using a new perspective may be required. This study used hypertextuality as a new criterion to examine the strategies of alternative narratives, as well as the hypernarrative structure and characteristics in alternative narratives. Using the six types of linkage patterns (linear, hierarchy, hypercube, directed acyclic graph, clumped, and arbitrary links), this study analyzed six recent American fiction films (between 1989 and 2012) that best represent each linkage pattern.
    [Show full text]
  • Network Aesthetics
    Network Aesthetics Network Aesthetics Patrick Jagoda The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Patrick Jagoda is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34648- 9 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34651- 9 (paper) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34665- 6 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jagoda, Patrick, author. Network aesthetics / Patrick Jagoda. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34648- 9 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34651- 9 (paperback : alkaline paper) ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34665- 6 (e- book) 1. Arts—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Cognitive science. I. Title. BH39.J34 2016 302.23'1—dc23 2015035274 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). This book is dedicated to an assemblage of friends—including the late-night conversational, the lifelong, and the social media varieties— to whom I am grateful for inspiration and discussion, collaboration and argument, shared meals and intellectual support. Whenever I undertake the difficult task of thinking through and beyond network form, I constellate you in my imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Press and Texts
    JACKY CONNOLLY BY FIONA ALISON DUNCAN THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER For years I’ve been trying to come up with They’re so oppressive, it’s banal to complain. a way to describe the metallic ting of human voices on Skype. Not when we go robotic, this oceanic, and while you may learn to forget them, glitch is subtler. It sounds like chewing on alu- I guarantee: we register their threat regardless. minum foil might for the doer, a hearing that Because attention is more diffuse than a sur- tastes irritating. The sound is similar to one viving mind might have it. It’s why we can have that accompanies many effects in 27-year-old repressed memories, summoned by a smell. Or why, after spending two months in a rural videos, particularly the raking of leaves. cabin, then coming back to Manhattan, I felt the pavement shake from underground as if for the Fawn’s Leap (2015), a young woman with pale skin and dark with it for years. We can take our environments hair rakes autumn leaves in the rain. As the day for granted until we experience difference. Like darkens and the leaves come to be piled horse a computer neck crane. We may temporarily high, a young girl—she could be the sister of forget the awkward postures we take, but the the woman, or an adolescently-had daughter, body won’t. If you’re lucky, you’ll ache later. If or the same individual, years prior—plays in not, you won’t even notice that you’re in pain.
    [Show full text]
  • 2010 Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations
    2010 Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations March 31 – April 3, 2010 Rennaisance Grand Hotel St. Louis Delores F. Rauscher, Editor & PCA/ACA Conference Coordinator Jennifer DeFore, Editor & Assistant Coordinator Michigan State University Elna Lim, Wiley-Blackwell Editor Additional information about the PCA/ACA available at www.pcaaca.org 2 Table of Contents The 2009 National Conference Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association Area Chairs ___________________ 5 PCA/ACA Board Members _______________________________ 13 Officers _______________________________________________ 13 Executive Officers ______________________________________ 13 Past & Future Conferences _______________________________ 14 Conference Papers for Sale; Benefits Endowment _____________ 15 Exhibit Hours __________________________________________ 15 Business & Board Meetings _______________________________ 16 Film Screenings ________________________________________ 18 Dinners, Get-Togethers, Receptions, & Tours ________________ 23 Roundtables ___________________________________________ 25 Special Sessions ______________________________________________ 29 Schedule Overview ______________________________________ 33 Saturday ____________________________________________________ 54 Daily Schedule _________________________________________ 77 Wednesday, 12:30 P.M. – 2:00 P.M. ____________________________ 77 Wednesday, 2:30 P.M. – 4:00 P.M. ____________________________ 83 Wednesday, 4:30 P.M. – 6:00 P.M. ____________________________
    [Show full text]
  • [Network Aesthetics] Index.Pdf
    Index accidents: Aristotle’s theory of, 79, The Wire, structures of feeling, and 259n21; cinematic reflection affective complicity, 134– 38 on, 258n15; conspiracy films vs. affect theory, 33, 243n92, 264n66 network films and, 100; in network Agamben, Giorgio, 223 film, 77– 80; inSyriana , 78– 80, 89– agency: digital games and, 147, 148; in 90, 92, 262n48, 263n58 The Wire, 117 action: Arendt’s theory of, 160– 61, agnotology, 58, 251n37 162– 63; Between and, 160– 63; Alexander, Christopher, 208 reflection, active, 165;Uplink and, alone- togetherness, 2, 7 153 al Qaeda, 260n32 actor- network theory (ANT), 108– 10, alternate reality games (ARGs), 181– 128, 243n90, 268n19, 268n22, 219; alternate reality, production of, 275n72 193; collective dimension of, 195– Adorno, Theodor, 26, 230n13 96, 295n58; connectivity and, 183– aesthetic politics, 101, 265n75 84; defined, 183; designer- player aesthetics: concept of, 16– 19; of distinction, breakdown of, 193– 95; dejection, 99– 100; intersubjectivity ephemera and, 218– 19; exhaustion and, 141; post- identity collectivity and, 216– 19; and experience of and, 141; tensions in, 26. See also networks, vs. representation or network aesthetics; and specific imagination of networks, 183; works human- environment coupling affect: human and nonhuman in, 200; integration of play with dimensions of networks and, everyday life, 191– 93; names for, 31– 33; intensity in Syriana, 90– 91; 182; as networking, 186; practice- Journey and, 171– 75, 286n86, based research and, 185– 87; 287n68; network films and affective
    [Show full text]
  • The Magical Neoliberalism of Network Films
    International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), 2680–2704 1932–8036/20140005 The Magical Neoliberalism of Network Films AMANDA CIAFONE1 The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. While they emphasize realism in their aesthetics, these films rely on risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations, resulting in the magical meeting of multiple and divergent characters and storylines, spectacularizing the reality of social relations, and giving a negative valence to human connection. Over the last 20 years, the network narrative has become a prominent means of representing and containing social relations under neoliberalism. Keywords: globalization, neoliberalism, network theory, network narrative films, political economy, international film markets After seeing Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000) and Rodrigo García’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet confirmed his excitement about being part of the new Latin American cultural boom he called “McOndo.” McOndo, he wrote, had achieved the global recognition of Latin America’s earlier boom time, “magical realism,” as represented in Macondo, the fictional town of Gabriel García Marquez’s Cien Años de Soledad. But now the “flying abuelitas and the obsessively constructed genealogies” (Fuguet, 2001, p. 71) (and the politics) had been replaced with the globalized, popular commercial world of McDonalds: Macondo was now McOndo.
    [Show full text]
  • PIRATING HUMAN RIGHTS by Sarah Mcauley Passino Dissertation
    PIRATING HUMAN RIGHTS By Sarah McAuley Passino Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Dana Nelson Colin Dayan Cecelia Tichi Jaya Kasibhatla Preguntando, caminamos. —Zapatistas ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the two years of writing this dissertation, I have often only half‐ jokingly thought that I would like to teach a class on the genre of the acknowledgements page. Not because I know anything about writing these—this is my first attempt—but because these pages are the institutional space where both the collaborative process of scholarship and the apprenticeship model of academic training take their most powerful textual form. It is in this radical space that gratitude and thanksgiving are powerfully ritualized by the academy. This collective spirit was not only central to the arguments I have tried to work through in this project, but it is also what got me through the days when it looked impossible to get to where I was trying to go. My advisors—Dana Nelson, Jaya Kasibhalta, Colin Dayan, Cecelia Tichi, and Joseph Slaughter—modeled a generous scholarship for which I can only hope they know how deep my gratitude is. Each has also, with such strength and force and clarity, shown me what it looks like to engage with the world through writing and teaching about literature. For this, I am honored and thankful to have had the opportunity to learn from them and I am humbled by their fierce engagement with my work.
    [Show full text]
  • Movies That Push Our Cognitive Limits 23 September 2013
    Movies that push our cognitive limits 23 September 2013 Hyperlink films mirror contemporary globalized lists also featured much the same number of communities, using exciting cinematic elements speaking characters as a Shakespeare play (27.8 and multiple story lines to create the idea of a characters), which reflects a broader, less intimate world that is interconnected on many social levels. sphere of action. Female interest films had 20 However, films in this genre like Crash, Babel, and relevant characters on average, which corresponds Love Actually are not as new and innovative as with the sympathy group size and mimics female presumed and still conform to conventional social social networks in real life. patterns. These findings, by Jaimie Krems of Arizona State University in the US and Robin "Because of our evolved psychology, humans Dunbar of the University of Oxford in the UK, are cannot break through the cognitive glass ceiling published in Springer's journal Human Nature. that naturally limits our ability to handle social relationships, or to understand complex Hyperlink cinema uses cinematic devices such as interpersonal dramas," explains Krems, who flashbacks, interspersing scenes out of believes that a person's mental abilities determine chronological order, split screens and voiceovers how he or she is able to handle or be enthusiastic to create an interacting social network of storylines about genres, such as hyperlink films, that push the and characters across space and time. This gives limits. the impression that people's lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without "Despite the promise it holds, digital and other new modern technologies of travel and communication.
    [Show full text]
  • Network Films: a Global Genre?
    Network Films: a Global Genre? Vivien Claire Silvey December 2012 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. ii This thesis is solely my original work, except where due reference is given. iii Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful for all the time and effort my dear supervisor Cathie Summerhayes has invested throughout this project. Her constant support, encouragement, advice and wisdom have been absolutely indispensable. To that master of words, puns and keeping his hat on during the toughest times of semester, Roger Hillman, I extend profound gratitude. Roger‟s generosity with opportunities for co-publishing, lecturing and tutoring, and enthusiasm for all things Turkish German, musical and filmic has been invaluable. For all our conversations and film-loans, I warmly say to Gino Moliterno grazie mille! I am indebted to Gaik Cheng Khoo, Russell Smith and Fiona Jenkins, who have provided valuable information, lecturing and tutoring roles. I am also grateful for the APA scholarship and for all the helpful administration staff in the School of Cultural Inquiry. At the heart of this thesis lies the influence of my mother Elizabeth, who has taken me to see scores of “foreign” and “art” films over the years, and my father Jerry, with whom I have watched countless Hollywood movies. Thank you for instilling in me a fascination for all things “world cinema”, for your help, and for providing a caring home. To my gorgeous Dave, thank you for all your love, motivation, cooking and advice. I am enormously honoured to have you by my side.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts Issue 08 | Spring 2009
    University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts Issue 08 | Spring 2009 Title Not Just Ensemble Films: Six Degrees, Webs, Multiplexity and the Rise of Network Narratives Author Vivien Silvey Publication FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts Issue Number 08 Issue Date Spring 2009 Publication Date 05/06/2009 Editors Jana Funke & Lena Wånggren FORUM claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in any such media current or later developed. The author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. Any latter publication shall recognise FORUM as the original publisher. Not Just Ensemble Films: Six Degrees, Webs, Multiplexity and the Rise of Network Narratives Vivien Silvey, The Australian National University In a scene from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel, one afternoon a deaf- mute Japanese girl, Chieko, gossips in sign language with a school friend via her mobile phone’s web cam. The scene’s linguistically estranged nature encapsulates how language in itself is a technology, a system which reaches across borders of silence to allow understanding. We are only able to interpret language through shared knowledge of its systems and, in many cases, through the aid of devices which collapse the barriers of proximity in time, space, and in this case, vision. It is indicative of the contemporary paradigm of network society that this scene occurs within a film which explores worldwide repercussions of (mis)communication, and that Babel belongs within a genre which in recent years has frequently thematised systems of interconnection, exploiting digital narrative technologies and in effect practicing Fredric Jameson’s concept “cognitive mapping” (Jameson 54).
    [Show full text]