bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ex-resistants, Conscientious Objectors and the Ethics of Memory
Authors: Sharpe Mani
Published: September 2023

Drawing from the theories aligned with memory studies, this chapter is organised into four sections. In the first section, it questions the political merit of the flashbacks that feature in Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s La Dénonciation/The Denunciation (1962), illustrating how they operate in a ‘multidirectional’ or ‘palimpsestic’ fashion to reveal troubling truths suppressed by the French state, both after the Occupation and during decolonisation. In the second section, I invert the terms of this reading, interpreting the same flashbacks as part of a more general tendency in late-colonial culture to represent French citizens as innocent victims of state abuse, and interrogating the subtext of motivated forgetting, political disengagement and ethical redemption that subtends La Dénonciation more generally. The third section shifts towards a discussion of Claude Autant-Lara’s Tu ne tueras point/L’Objecteur/Thou Shalt Not Kill (1963), arguing that the film displays a strikingly similar instance of ‘multidirectional’ memory, again mediated through the parameters of a flashback, however, this time experienced by a guilt-ridden German soldier-priest. The fourth section then concludes with some final thoughts on Autant-Lara’s representation of redemptive amnesia and conscientious objection, as an act performed by a French citizen blissfully shorn of implication in military atrocities.
‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91
Authors: Williams Paul
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 explores the 1980s, when journalists proclaimed that comics had ‘grown up’ as a result of the graphic novel form. The direct market became the dominant mode of selling comics in the mid-1980s, and independent publishers continued to publish comics that appealed to older fans, giving creators more autonomy and rights; the mainstream publishers Marvel and DC tentatively followed this template. The graphic novels that received press attention in the 1980s were usually revisionist superhero narratives, texts which played with genre expectations and offered pastiches of older comics and other media. These graphic novels chimed with the cultural movement of postmodernism, and this chapter discusses how far Give Me Liberty by writer Frank Miller and artist Dave Gibbons is an example of a postmodernist graphic novel. The 1980s graphic novel boom was not exclusively about superhero comics and the direct market also made it financially viable for small companies publishing alternative genres (autobiography, reportage, satire) to continue the experimentation of the underground. Two prominent graphic novels, Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Harvey Pekar-scripted American Splendor, were produced by creators who either emerged out of, or were closely tied to, underground comix.
Twenty-first-century Graphic Novels
Authors: Williams Paul
Published: September 2023

Chapter 7 surveys the second graphic novel boom of the twenty-first century. Various factors lie behind the increase in sales: the high-profile film adaptations; the decreasing stigma surrounding comics and libraries’ investment in graphic novels as a way of encouraging younger readers, seen in the explosion of children’s and YA graphic novels; the artistic and literary prizes given to comics creators and graphic novels, not least where the genres of history and life-writing are concerned (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is one of this chapter’s case studies); and the popularity of manga, which underscored the profitability of bookstores having distinctive sections dedicated to graphic novels. This chapter also considers the significance of the internet for distributing and selling long-form comics, focusing on Jeremy Love’s Bayou as the final case study. Far from replacing physical graphic novels, webcomics and print editions exist in symbiotic relationship, and new funding models have enabled a more diverse US comics scene than ever before.
Majors
Authors: Laine Kimmo , Laine Kimmo
Published: September 2023

Finnish studio era was dominated by three major production companies, Suomi-Filmi, Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada-Filmi. In terms of feature films, their share was almost 70 per cent of the whole output of films between 1920 and 1963. Two of the majors, Suomi-Filmi and Fennada-Filmi were fully integrated, while Suomen Filmiteollisuus concentrated mainly on production, which made it more vulnerable than its rivals during the production crises of the late 1950s. This chapter outlines the history and the basic modes of operation of the three majors.
Quod Scripsi Scripsi
Authors: McDonough Christopher M.
Published: September 2023

This is not a book about Pontius Pilate. Not really. It is a book, instead, about what Pilate means, and has meant, on film and television. While this means looking to the religious and historical significance of the Roman prefect, there are a host of other issues I hope to unpack in this volume. Among these matters is the political context in which any given film was produced, as well as the “office politics” which often require archival exploration to uncover. In the yellowing memoranda and hand-written notes as well as the email records of newer films, one sees just how much behind-the-scenes collaboration goes into the making of any motion picture production. Casting is considered, but also the “star theory” that media theorist Richard Dyer discusses at length. In addition, I have looked for insight from the directors, writers, and producers of the films here under study, but above all, have tried to find out what the actors themselves had to convey about the subject. The Christian apologist Tertullian once famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This book explores and amplifies that question. “And what has Washington, London, or Hollywood to do with all of them?”
Pilate in CinemaScope, or Notes on Roman Camp
Authors: McDonough Christopher M.
Published: September 2023

If the small-screen television dramas of the 1950s showed Pontius Pilate in a more intimate light, a depiction more overblown and distancing would be found in the overheated genre of Hollywood film. In the big-screen performances of the mid-century, the figure of Pilate would grow more baroque and brash. While Richard Boone in The Robe may act his part in a candid and straightforward manner, there is an ironic quality to the Pilate of Basil Sydney playing a first-rate third wheel to lovers Rita Hayworth and Stewart Granger in Salome. With Frank Thring in Ben-Hur at the decade’s end, however, and Hurd Hatfield in King of King as the 60s begin, we find performances of the Roman prefect that are notable for their exaggerated gesturing and stagey affectation. If they do not “out-Herod Herod,” as Hamlet would have it, they certainly out-Pilate Pilate—Thring’s Pilate is an ironic ham in the overwhelming sincerity of Ben-Hur, while Hatfield is the villain of Nicholas Ray’s film, desiring to persecute Jesus because, as he intones, “He is different and refuses to behave like the others.”
What Is Truth? Pilate as 1970s Moral Relativist
Authors: McDonough Christopher M.
Published: September 2023

As a decade, the 1970s were characterised by a moral relativism and mistrust of authority, and unsurprisingly, the dramatic productions of the Passion. In Jesus Christ Superstar, we find in Barry Dennen’s performance a brittle Pontius Pilate who, haunted by a dream, knows that there is no way out of the consequent blame future generations will cast upon him. It is a more unscrupulous prefect we see in The Passover Plot played by Donald Pleasance, for whom holding on to power is paramount, though that power is glaringly illegitimate. Just a few years later, Rod Steiger’s Pilate in Jesus of Nazareth, the made-for-TV production directed by Franco Zeffirelli, he will be beleaguered, a mid-level military functionary trying to dispatch one last difficult matter before the weekend. Whether tormented, underhanded, or exhausted, the Pilates of the 70s reflect the difficult politics of their period in both the fragmented America of Vietnam and Watergate as well as the Britain suffering through the pre-Thatcherite Winter of Discontent. Each of these prefects openly wonders whether truth is a thing they have very much regard for.
Remaking, Cultural Exchange and Personal Legacy: The Limey
Authors: Rasmus Agnieszka
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses Steven Soderbergh’s unacknowledged remake/sequel to Get Garter, which offers a reminiscent look back at 1960s iconic films, stars and music. Whereas Get Carter was deeply rooted in the post-swinging pessimism of Northern England, The Limey ironically takes place in a bright and sunny modern California, where the two antagonists played by Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda crash and burn. The chapter shows the importance of casting and soundtrack in remakes to create cross-cultural exchange and continuity. Soderbergh’s film oscillates between being a remake and a sequel of the British classic, with which it engages in a creative dialogue. Being a profoundly self-reflexive work, The Limey not only confirms Soderbergh’s continued interest in remaking as a form of artistic creativity but also shows its role as a meeting place between the past and the present. The film is thus not just a crime thriller but also a metacommentary on cross-cultural encounters between two countries, cinemas and cultures that appear close yet distant, similar yet different.
Watson Macedo’s Aviso aos navegantes (1950): Reflections on the Musical Numbers of a Brazilian Chanchada 1
Authors: Costa Flávia Cesarino
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the Brazilian musical comedy (or chanchada) Aviso aos navegantes (Calling All Sailors), directed by Watson Macedo in 1950 at the Atlântida studios in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that the film stands as an emblematic production in the heyday of musical comedies and provides a telling example of the intermedial connections that shaped Brazilian cinema between the 1930s and the 1950s. The analysis stresses the need to move away from the usual considerations of the relationship between musical numbers and plot so as to focus on the intermedial features of these numbers in terms of their ties with other cultural traditions, industries and practices, including theatre, carnival, the music industry and radio performances.
Chanchada , Samba and Beyond: From the Cinema of Radio to the Cinema of Television (1930s–1960s)
Authors: Vieira João Luiz
Published: September 2023

This chapter addresses the role of Brazilian popular music, specifically of certain generic samba forms, focusing on how their screen adaptations were inflected by a double process of cross-mediation. It demonstrates how cinema reconfigured Brazilian music via its intermedial connections with staged modes of production, representation and consumption, including radio auditoriums, casinos, nightclubs and other entertainment spaces, thereby incorporating audiences as part of the film’s diegesis. Brazilian cinema, radio and television are investigated in their many forms of interaction, from the moment synchronised sound was first introduced into Brazilian cinema until the late 1950s, when television gradually became the most popular form of audiovisual contact with audiences around the world. In focus is the period between the mid-1930s, with the arrival of sound, and the late 1950s, when the traditional chanchada genre started to face the competition of other Brazilian film genres.
The World Turned Upside Down
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines the methodology used in the book. While the standard view is that displaced people pose a problem for the international order, the basic method of the book is to turn that problem on its head, and see the international order as a problem for displaced people.
The chapter examines the structure of exclusion at the level of Political Theory itself, in the way that certain groups are categorised and placed on the inside or the outside or on the edges of political thought.
This creates a challenge of complicity for the political theorist, in that they may be using a theory structured around the exclusion of the other, however benign their intentions.
The chapter draws on a range of approaches such as postcolonial theory to propose a Radical Realist approach to the theory of displacement.
That approach would place the experiences and voices of the displaced at the centre of theory, as subjects with agency, including the agency of making theory.
The Borders of Refugeehood
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines both the definition of the refugee in international law, and the dominant conceptions of refugeehood in political theory, namely the political and the humanitarian conceptions.
The first part of the chapter looks at definitions of the refugee found in the 1951 Refugee Convention and elsewhere, and at the rights of refugees contained in the Convention, such as the protection against refoulement. It examines non-refoulement in detail, looking at various ways in which that protection has been interpreted by states.
The second half of the chapter looks at political theory, beginning with the political conception with its emphasis on the necessity of persecution. In doing so it examines the idea of membership that informs the political conception, with its argument that only persecution removes a person’s membership of their political community.
The humanitarian conception takes a wider view of the kinds of displacement that should fall under the concept of the refugee, not only persecution, but extreme poverty, for example.
Both these approaches, however, insist on alienage, that the refugee has to be outside of their home country. The chapter critically examines this principle of alienage, and suggests arguments why it should be set aside.
Internal Displacements
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines theory, policy and practice around internal displacement, and the category of the Internally Displaced Person. It examines the development of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and their impact, and the debate about whether there should be a distinct category of the IDP.
The distinction between the refugee and the IDP is examined in relation to international protection, asking why IDPs are not afforded the same protections as refugees, when the only difference is their location in relation to the border of their home state.
The rest of the chapter examines the impacts of internal displacement, especially upon their membership of their political community, drawing on the theory of membership developed in Chapter 4.
Solidarity
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the most important strategy that should be pursued to support those facing the injustice of displacement is solidarity, and it explores the meanings of solidarity in this context.
It contrasts ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of solidarity, to understand what is needed for solidarity to exist between different groups with different experiences.
It draws on the approaches taken by Hannah Arendt in particular, who described the activity of solidarity as world-building, and applies that approaches to the case study of activists in Greece who worked to support refugees and asylum seekers. What this activities created, the chapter argues, is a common political space of resistance.
The key here, it is argued, is a partnership of equally respected political agency between all who participate in that space of resistance.
Democracy, Sovereignty and the Constitution: Scotland, 1945–1979
Authors: Petrie Malcolm R.
Published: September 2023

The introduction situates the study within the context of developments in the historiography of modern Scottish and British politics. It provides an overview of the evolution of Scottish politics between the Second World War and the 1979 general election, concentrating on the decline of the two-party politics that had defined the 1940s and 1950s, and the subsequent emergence of a distinctive four-party Scottish electoral contest. It summarises existing explanations of this transformation and for the growing importance of debates over Scotland’s constitutional status. The introduction concludes by outlining the argument to be proposed, and the structure, methodology and sources employed in the book.
Hong Kong and Athens: Contested Spaces of the Global and the Local in the Neo-Noir of John Woo and Alexis Alexiou
Authors: Chen Yun-hua
Published: September 2023

In her chapter, Yun-hua Chen reads Alexis Alexiou’s Wednesday 04:45 (2015) alongside John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), drawing parallels between their different contexts: financial crisis Athens and post-handover Hong Kong. Alexiou has admitted that Woo was a major influence on him, and Chen uses this case study to delineate the transnational connections of neo-noir. She focuses on the dialectics between global and local, the universal or the generic and the specific, through the representation of bleak transitory spaces and ‘nonplaces’ reflecting metropolises in socio-economic and cultural turmoil, as well as through the notion of ‘elsewhere’. As Chen notes, ‘in their globalised spaces, A Better Tomorrow and Wednesday 04:45 address specific local themes, and use noir elements to reflect upon societies in turmoil and upheaval.’
Diana Dors
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This is a book in two halves. Part One charts the rise and fall and rise again of Diana Dors’ film stardom across four separate chapters. Part Two analyzes her performances in a selection of films from the 1950s to the 1980s. The first four chapters explore the evolution of Dors’ image through publicity and film roles, including her links with particular studios, publications and collaborators, as well as professional rivalries. Here, the emphasis remains largely on Dors as a public personality or celebrity. The remaining five chapters concentrate on her work as a film actor, with close textual analysis of her acting in various cinematic genres, including British romantic comedy and Hollywood melodrama, children’s fantasy and adult exploitation thrillers. This part of the book both highlights Dors’ skills as a screen performer and raises the profile of some films that have so far received relatively little critical attention.
Bold (July to November 1956)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter is largely concerned with the ambivalent and increasingly hostile press reaction to Dors in the USA during her short but career-defining spell at RKO. Dors’ Hollywood debacle is charted here by examining the coverage she generated in leading American newspapers from the moment she arrived in New York at the end of June 1956 to her flight from LA in November, long before the release of her two Hollywood films, the crime melodrama The Unholy Wife (Farrow 1957) and the romantic comedy I Married a Woman (Kanter 1958). This chapter ends with a consideration of how Dors’ image became tarnished after losing the much-hyped ‘Battle of the Blondes’ to Marilyn Monroe.
A marriage of method and style in The Unholy Wife (1957)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses Dors’ performance as an archetypal femme fatale in the American crime melodrama The Unholy Wife (1957). Here, she combines composure and control when playing one of her most unsympathetic characters. Consolidating her signature style, she redeployed her trademark postures when adapting her acting style to the techniques of the Method actors performing with her. Analysis of several scenes of this critically underrated movie reveals just how versatile the British star was when working in Hollywood in 1956.
Talk Therapy: Poetry as Spiritual Medicine
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 focuses on the metaphorical understanding of speech as spiritual medicine. This notion was widespread in premodern Islamicate discourses, and ʿAttar invokes the metaphor throughout his oeuvre and makes it a central feature of his persona through his pen name (the druggist). In this chapter, O’Malley uses the metaphor to uncover an implied poetics that privileges speech’s pragmatic, curative effects in a human context without sacrificing the importance of meaning. The medicinal metaphor also raises questions of authority, as physicians demonstrated the efficacy of their cures through their own good health. ʿAttar, the druggist of souls, must thus perform his spiritual authority by repeatedly ‘taking his own medicine’ and thereby demonstrating his freedom from hypocrisy, a rhetorical strategy that he shares with the popular preachers of his day.
The Hoopoe on the Pulpit
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

The vast majority of ʿAttar’s Conference of the Birds is devoted not to the birds’ journey, but to the homiletic sessions delivered by the hoopoe to prepare them for the quest. This frame-tale structure creates an imagined performance setting, complete with an embodied speaker and reactive audience. The hoopoe mounts a pulpit and exhorts his avian audience in line with the conventions of contemporary preaching; the birds respond, question and resist the hoopoe’s entreaties before they are ultimately persuaded to set out. Through the frame narrative, the poem thus concretises the didactic mode’s implicit homiletic relationship between speaker and addressee, thematising the dialogical character of spiritual instruction and demonstrating how exhortations and stories successfully guide audiences along the spiritual path. In this way, the poem celebrates the perlocutionary power of speech – including ʿAttar’s own – to instigate spiritual reform.
Seminar from November 17, 1982
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter raises the question of the kind of relationship we may have with the past other than a merely passive one. Castoriadis argues that not every historical reconstruction is arbitrary and that there can be serious discussion about the meanings of a past society. He compares and contrasts his method with Gadamer and hermeneutics and argues that researchers must ultimately posit imaginary schemas if they are to grasp the specificity of the object of any history. Emphasizing the significant example of the ancient democratic practice of graphē paranomōn, Castoriadis proposes to investigate the origins of democratic practices and philosophy as mutually connected, i.e., as phenomena with an indissociable character and with an originality vis-à-vis other historical experiences. In question-and-answer, Castoriadis emphasizes the limited historical scope of his current inquiry, defends the prospect of understanding other societies, and comments on Popperian falsifiability.
Seminar from December 1, 1982
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter continues with the discussion of Homer. Opening with a critique of two equally naïve approaches to the study of Homer (Analysts and Unitarians), Castoriadis examines the poems’ specific role in Greek culture; their mode of composition; the era they refer back to; and the elements of meaning in the poems that come to play a central role later in history. Comparing and contrasting the Greek attitude to poetry with the notion in other cultures of a sacred text, Castoriadis links the poems to the functions of creative imagination and memory. He argues that they point to something essential in the Greek imaginary, namely the tragic grasp of the world. This grasp involves a strong sense of fate and transgression, which are related to the Iliad’s emphasis on death as the core, inescapable given for humans. Emphasizing the importance of distinguishing death suffered from death chosen, Castoriadis highlights a core tension in the Greek tragic grasp: nothing is worth one’s life; but if nothing is worth more than life, then life is worth nothing. In question-and-answer, Castoriadis argues that the classical text lends itself indefinitely to rediscovery and comments on the ruse of Reason in Hegel and tragedy.
Seminar from December 15, 1982
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter continues the discussion of Homer, arguing that the poems contain a deep sense of the tragic. Admitting that the study of Homer inevitably requires taking account of what would emerge later in history, Castoriadis focuses on the significance of the Homeric conception of moira, which he links closely to the idea of limits and death. Castoriadis discusses the importance of a chosen death, emphasizing Odysseus’s choice against the prospect of immortality offered by Calypso. Here, Castoriadis highlights the coexistence of an impersonal law with the free decision of the human and discusses more broadly the concepts of individuality, decision, and will in the Greek world. He closes by arguing that there is, in Homer, a distinct sense of impartiality in the way the poems treat opposing forces. In question-and-answer, Castoriadis returns to the theme of will and choice and puzzles over the enigmatic place of Sparta relative to the seminars’ themes.
Seminar from January 12, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter furthers the discussion of Greek religion. Castoriadis emphasizes its lack of a notion of decisive revelation, which gives the Greeks the chance to recreate and modify their myths in, for example, Greek tragedies. Likewise, in Greek religion there is neither a privileging of anthropogony nor an infinite distance between the human and the non-human. After a digression on idolatry and divine presence, he argues that Greek religion importantly lacks otherworldly promise or hope, and he argues that the Greek gods are grasped as “universal” and not merely as the gods of their own group. Examining the episode of the Cyclopes, in particular, Castoriadis argues that they serve to mirror for the Greeks their own sense of objective impiety and, indeed, inhumanity, insofar as they lack institutions that the Greeks see as most human (e.g., deliberative assemblies). Castoriadis then closes by discussing the retention and disappearance of Homeric values over time, the gods’ relationship to justice, and the tension between themes of agonism and solidarity in Greek history. In question-and-answer, Castoriadis contrasts the concepts of “monster” and “barbarian” and discusses the emergence of a current of rational theology in the Greek world.
Seminar from January 26, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the nature of myth broadly, defined as the figuration by means of a narrative of the meaning with which a given society invests the world. As distinct from a mere tale, Castoriadis sees myth as the carrier of an essential cultural meaning. He likewise argues that what is essential and universal in Greek myths remains so for us; and their universal significance is not limited to their own tradition. They unveil a signification of the world that constantly presents meaning over a background of un-meaning, i.e., a signification in which there is no room to hope for a correspondence between our desires or our decisions and the nature of being. As Castoriadis argues, this vision conditions the birth of both philosophy and democracy. It can be witnessed in the notion of Chaos in Hesiod, which means void and abyss, and later comes to mean indefinite mixture. Castoriadis then links the notions of order and chaos to the concepts of peras and apeiron and their importance in Anaximander, Plato, and Aristotle. In question-and-answer, Castoriadis addresses the philosophical dimension of mythology, the meaning of the sacred in Homeric religion, and the sense in which Greek mythology must be seen as true.
The DreamWorks Formula and the Post-feminist Disney Couple: Tangled ’s Romantic Parodies
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

First, this chapter analyses Disney’s reappropriation of what can be described as the ‘DreamWorks formula’ in Tangled, combining ‘contra-diegetic intertextuality’ and critical parody. This reappropriation stands out throughout the paratextual and textual portrayal of Flynn Rider, and is particularly notable in the first half of the film. In parallel with Flynn’s double act, this chapter examines how Tangled gradually reveals its formulaic identity, mediating its DreamWorks-style performance through tropes typical of the studio’s sentimental fairy tales and idealised romance. Such a delicate balance between parody and idealisation also characterises the construction of gender and coupledom. The second part of this chapter investigates the typically post-feminist sensibilities characterising Rapunzel’s and Flynn’s portrayal both in Tangled and in the subsequent short Tangled Ever After. From a wider perspective, this chapter uses Tangled as a case study to reflect upon the influence of an animation studio beyond Disney’s cinematic universe (DreamWorks) on the former’s contemporary output and its formula.
‘The Helen Rose originals are fabulous’: the fashion featurette and fashion show as sites of industrial reflexivity
Authors: Nakama Julie
Published: September 2023

In the 1950s, the MGM costume designer Helen Rose defined a certain American, middle-class, feminine style with her dress designs. During her career in Hollywood, she also designed and sold ready-to-wear clothing through exclusive department stores and specialty shops. After Rose left MGM in 1966, she continued to market fashion through her retail label and one of her most effective marketing devices was the fashion featurette.
This chapter argues that Rose deployed the fashion featurette as a site of what John Caldwell might call “industrial reflexivity,” or a space through which the industry represents itself to itself. By extending Caldwell’s framework into the field of costume design, Nakama argues that Rose used the fashion featurette to represent the craft of costume design to both the film industry itself and the wider fashion retail industry.
A maverick on the streets: Bill Cunningham and the documentary process
Authors: Ritzenhoff Karen A.
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the New York fashion photographer Bill Cunningham and his photography work on the streets of the Big Apple. By comparing the two feature documentaries dedicated to the photographer: Richard Press’ Bill Cunningham New York (2010) and Mark Bozek’s documentary The Times of Bill Cunningham (2018), Ritzenhoff examines Cunningham’s self-proclaimed definition of ‘fashion historian’, rather than fashion photographer. By studying the films’ documentary process, including Cunningham’s use of analogue technologies for documentation, Ritzenhoff connects Cunningham with Dziga Vertov’s cinema verité and argues that one of Cunningham’s most enduring legacies is the popularisation of street glamour. This, she argues, foregrounds the democratisation of street fashion blogging and social media posts, so common in the present day.
Documenting fashion history: television and the temporalities of cultural remembrance
Authors: Dyer Jihane
Published: September 2023

Rather than mere exercises in nostalgia and historical escapism, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s forays into fashion history have invariably forged connections between modern-day viewers and Britain’s past. Multi-part documentary series have selected, reanimated and repackaged fashion history into mass-mediated acts of cultural remembrance that resonate with the contemporary cultural landscape, transplanting memories across generations and geographies, projecting the past onto the present and vice versa. This chapter analyses three fashion history series broadcast by the BBC between 1999 and 2014 and reveals the genre’s ability to mediate a uniquely affective engagement with cultural memory due to fashion’s unparalleled relationship to the body. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’, Jihane Dyer proposes that the distinct temporalities emerging from the history documentary format and the presentation of clothing enable modern viewers to take on cultural memories that are not their own. By theorising the fashion history documentary as a specific technology of cultural remembrance, Dyer explores how the study of fashion and material culture may introduce new perspectives for documentary makers, scholars and other cultural memory projects.
Fashioning self-care: Queer Eye , affect and makeover culture
Authors: Affuso Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Tan France and Jonathan Van Ness, the fashion and grooming experts on the 2018 Netflix’s reboot show Queer Eye (2018). Elizabeth Affuso frames the logic of the new makeover show within the culture of self-care and making grooming and fashion transformations a tool of caring for themselves and of projecting that care outward. In this chapter, Affuso also reassesses the role of fashion and beauty experts in reality TV media and discusses how this positionality differs from the role of the expert within documentary media more broadly. Ultimately this chapter evaluates the historic function of gay men as arbiters of taste within fashion cultures and the larger implications of this for gender, sexuality, and care work.
Zoya Akhtar as a Screenwriter: Making Niche the New Mainstream
Authors: Jha Vyoma
Published: September 2023

A central theme across Zoya Akhtar’s movie scripts is the high quality of its ensemble performances. This chapter will take an in-depth look at Akhtar’s scripts, including those co-written with Reema Kagti, and argue that she has mastered the art of ensembles in Hindi cinema. Through a deconstruction of the storylines, characters, and dialogue of her films, I will make a case for how Akhtar is unique in creating a strong, individual style of writing while being an active collaborator. To do so, the chapter will proceed in four parts, each tying back to the principal idea that Akhtar’s prowess as a screenwriter lies in her treatment of the ensemble cast.
Queer Love: He is Also Made in Heaven
Authors: Cheema Iqra Shagufta
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Karan Mehra’s portrayal in Made in Heaven (2019) to argue that it departs from the dominant representation of homosexuality in popular Hindi cinema. Homosexuality is not an entirely unfamiliar territory for Hindi cinema, however, barring a few exceptions, these films prototypically either downplay homosexual desire or portray homosexual love subtly, humorously, and connotatively. This results in homosexuality being represented binaristically either in competition or in opposition to heterosexuality. Borrowing from Eve Sedgwick’s terminology, I argue that Karan’s character is neither minoritized, nor universalized – rather he is parallelized with heterosexual portrayals of love. Using Eve Sedgwick and Michel Foucault, I will explore interconnections of desire, sexuality, and security in socioeconomic contexts and discuss homosexuality, sociality, and eroticism in the show. Considering that the 2018 decriminalization of homosexual relationships in India does not end its socio-cultural challenges, I will also discuss how documentation of gay rights’ activists in a popular visual medium like Made in Heaven is an act of narrative (re)formation in itself. Collectively, the series’ depiction of a homosexual man in India forebodes a shift in cinematic discourses of homosexual subjectivities – which sets the precedent for more accepting and tolerant social and historical existence.
A Proposition
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

The first chapter proposes the book’s unifying arguments, that only by de-mystifying the entire tripartite division of history (into ancient, medieval and modern) are we able to contrive present ethno-national identities not as “forming” in some stable, if debatable abstract periodisation, but as being created by the process of various ruling dynasties’ conversions to various monotheisms, whenever and wherever it occurred. Namely, a nation didn’t convert to a monotheism en masse, only a dynasty did, and then imposed its form of monotheism down on its subjects, which later became what today we imagine to be a “nation.” Outside self-described “European” space, the same processes of monotheistic impositions which occurred in “late-antiquity” (defined to ~800 CE), also continued further into Western Eurasia, whether as Christian, Jewish or Islamic proselytizations, using several case studies (“petri dishes”), to study these processes. The first case study is Khazaria, then Volga Bulgaria, Hungary, the Pečenegs, Rus’ and Cuman-Qıpčaqs. After frontloading historiographical and methodological discussions about various schools of thought and different methodologies in previously distinct fields, the argument turns toward combining these different fields, traditions and methodologies into a mosaic of interdisciplinary research.
A Commonwealth Inchoate: Byzantium and Pontic-Caspian Eurasia in the Tenth Century
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

This chapter finalises the story of Khazaria regarding Byzantine Pontic policy before 989 CE and gives a prelude to the so-called “Byzantine Commonwealth.” It discusses two competing theories for the downfall of the Khazar khağanate in the 10th century – one based on competition with the Rus’ for tribute from local subject populations (and culminating in the pagan Rus’ prince Svjatoslav’s assault against Khazaria). The other theory is based on Khazarian loss of revenue due to the Islamisation of Volga Bulgaria – and argues that both theories are compatible. Then, it reinterprets Byzantium’s relationship with the Black Sea and her northern neighbours before and after their respective monotheisations in the 10th century. It argues that ethnicity was never considered as based exclusively on biological descent (primordial) in Byzantium, but rather as a component of monotheism and therefore that the “Byzantine Commonwealth” truly accelerated due to top-down Christianisation processes of peripheral dynasties by the turn of the 11th century.
‘Democrats dominate’: The Democratic Party in Congress and the Midterms of 1974 and 1978
Authors: Andelic Patrick
Published: September 2023

In most histories of the 1970s, the 1978 midterm elections are a harbinger of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ two years later. With President Jimmy Carter increasingly ensnared by the crises of the 1970s, the Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives and Senate for the first time since Watergate, and welcomed into their ranks a number of conservatives (like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney) who would play a central role in national politics in subsequent decades. This chapter instead puts the focus on the party that technically won those congressional elections: the governing Democratic Party. These were the last midterm elections (to date) in which the Democrats succeeded in maintaining congressional majorities under a Democratic president. Although the Democrats sustained losses, they still emerged with control of both House and Senate. Viewed from another angle, these midterms represented the Democrats consolidating the bumper majorities they had won in the 1974 post-Watergate landslide, and defended in 1976, despite an increasingly hostile political climate. This chapter aims to re-capture this moment, not as the twilight of the long Democratic hegemony, but as a moment of contingency when the Democrats sought to rejuvenate their position as the nation’s majority party.
Found footage horror, 9/11 and a culture of fear
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter opens the second part of Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror Cinema and develops the argument that the subgenre can be read as a site of traumatic representation through a focus on the new visual language of fear that emerged in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. After addressing criticisms of the allegorical model, this chapter outlines the palpable culture of fear and anxiety present in the United States following 9/11 and investigates how this was distilled both visually and narratively into cinema more broadly during this time, before moving to detail how the horror genre specifically responded to 9/11 trauma. With reference to different kinds of camerawork and visual motifs that become popular in the years following 9/11, this chapter discusses the specific aesthetic of ‘bystander footage’ and its centrality in both real-life coverage of world events and found footage horror cinema. This chapter then moves to address the unbelievability of continuing to record footage in the midst of destruction and death.
The ‘Islamic’ Arabian Nights in World Imaginaries
Authors: al-Musawi Muhsin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that a conflation between Islam and the Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) was initiated in a number of introductions and articles by eminent Arabists and Orientalists. The latter’s philological inquiry often led them to confuse storytelling with Islam and the Arabs. Lack of sufficient material in translation, the conflict with the Ottomans, and the rising colonial interests in the region, on one hand, and the popularity of the Arabian Nights, on the other, enhanced this conflation. These factors stood behind a tendency to treat the Arabian Nights as document, a representation of manners and customs. The amount of material written as commentaries on the Arabian Nights, and the massive use of illustrations to represent a presumed real “Orient,” sheds very strongly into contemporaneous representations of Islam and the Arabs. Conversely, a counter discourse and alternative venues are building up.
Praising The Prophet MuḤammad in Chinese: A New Translation and Analysis of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang’s Ode to the Prophet
Authors: Ma Haiyun , Newlon Brendan
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on praising the Prophet Muhammad by a Chinese emperor, or Ode to the Prophet, allegedly composed by the founding father of the Ming dynasty and frequently quoted in the Confucian-Islamic (Han Kitab) literature. It provides a new and nuanced translation, textual examination, and contextual analysis of the Ode to Muhammad. It reveals intricate interactions and relations between Islam and Chinese politics that contributes to the development of the Chinese Islamic literature since the late Ming dynasty.
Screen Acting
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This book analyses western realist screen acting practices from 1950 onwards as the solicitation of distinct, complimentary, and overlapping empathetic relationships: the actor’s relationship with her character; the actor’s relationship with other actors-as-characters; and the actor’s solicitation of the audience’s attention through the camera. The ensuing cognitive and phenomenological framework for analysing screen acting shifts the focus away from analysing specific actorly performances to instead think about the actor’s creative process amidst the industrial logistics of film and television production. The book charts the empathetic solicitations at the core of well-established acting styles, such as Strasberg and Meisner’s versions of method acting, as well as across common stages in the screen actor’s workflow, such as auditions, pre-shooting preparations, on-set tactics, and more. These descriptions of an actor’s process draw heavily on published interviews with A-list Hollywood actors, the author’s personal interviews with modern professional screen actors, and the author’s own decades of experiences as a professional actor.
The Moving Parts
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines the major critical discourses which will be incorporated into the overarching book’s theoretical model of screen acting as a practice of soliciting empathy. The usefulness of neurophenomenology, a hybrid discourse of cognitive studies and phenomenological philosophy, to the analysis of creative acting practices has considerable precedent in modern cognitive Theatre Studies. On one hand, the artistic, technical, and industrial logistics of theatre acting are quite different from those of film and television acting. On the other hand, the common creative core of embodiment, imagination, memory, movement, and storytelling tactics have a great deal in common across theatrical and screen-based acting, and are productively framed by modern ideas about empathy, cognitive blending, and distributed cognition. The reliance on interviews with actors, and the increased interest in acting practices independent of specific actorly performances, in modern Television Studies helps to ground the book’s theoretical project within the lived experiences of professional screen actors.
The Actor’s Three Empathetic Connections
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes in detail the three simultaneous, overlapping, and complimentary empathetic relationships that screen actors solicit while acting. Some of these empathetic relationships are particularly important to well-established acting traditions, particularly within the American Method Acting movements; where appropriate, these traditions are used as examples of common – but not exclusive – tactics for soliciting these connections. The Intrasubjective empathetic connection between the actor and her character is particularly important to Lee Strasberg’s version of the Method. The Intersubjective connections between the actor and her scene partners is the core of Method rival Sanford Meisner’s Method foundational actor training exercises. Whereas the Intrasubjective and Intersubjective relationships position the actor as the observer of their empathetic targets, the Performative empathetic connection positions the actor as the aspiring target of the eventual audience’s empathy, as mediated by the actor’s relationship with the camera.
Acting Culture and Audition Preparation
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter connects the industrial pressures within acting culture, such as the scarcity of professional work and economic precarity between acting jobs, with the fickle cruelty of the casting process. Auditions are positioned as a highly specialized screen performance style, rather than as an example of full-fledged screen acting, because most screen auditions only gage the overlap between the actor’s Intrasubjective and Performative connections. Compounding the matter, auditioning actors rarely have access to the entire screenplay for the production at hand. A considerable percentage of the audition’s Intrasubjective appresentations are based on guesswork from the limited version of the screenplay that they are given. This scarcity of resources emphasizes the actor’s ability to communicate the situational character’s cognitive scaffolding to the camera based on intuition, creative insight, and blind hope that the casting director and producer similarly envision the character. In a sense, screen auditions allow the actor to demonstrate a worst-case scenario to the producer and casting director of what her performance would look like if she has no meaningful Intersubjective connection with her fellow actors.
Conclusion “Ready for my Close-up”
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

The concluding chapter presents suggestions for three potential directions for research into empathy in screen acting. First, the three empathetic solicitations as supported by Coplan’s criteria could be used as a useful comparative framework for analyzing realist screen acting practices across time periods, localities, and performance traditions. Jared Leto’s on-set antics while shooting Suicide Squad and Diane Keaton’s performance in Annie Hall are presented as preliminary case studies. Second, this research could be foundational to a theoretical model of collective cognition and collaborative authorship in screen media production. Third, this research suggests that a critical framework for analyzing screen acting practices could lead to new and compelling insights into how actors contribute to film form, especially in light of the growing importance of motion-capture (“mocap”) performances and the ensuing collaborations with CGI animators.