Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Ghosts Of Times Square: A Zine Exploring Representations Of Times Square Through Film, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

My zines are often an extension of my research—either a jumping off point or a way to create a more visual project (or both). They are in their own way a form of excess - they are often too scandalous, too smutty, too much — everything that is spilling out of the margins.

My zines and research focus on lesser known queer histories, trying to highlight them and bring them to a new audience and new generations.

Using zines as a creative form of research, I am able to reach a broader audience both inside and outside of academia. I …

Haptic Processing: How The Shutter Button Shapes Photography, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

The goal of this essay is to explore the haptics of taking photographs in the digital age. More specifically, I examine the evolving relationship between the body and imaging technologies. The body must, somehow, interact with the camera shutter, whether the shutter is a simple mechanical door or an electrical timing network switch. Human intention has to activate the switch via a button, even if this intention is complicated: since 2012, mobile phones can take photos using voice commands, relieving the need to physically touch the shutter button. One does not necessarily need to use the fundamental levers often associated …

The Towering Inferno: Art, Policy, And Legacy, Charles R. Jennings

Publications and Research

The Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies, leveraging the expertise of its faculty, staff, Advisory Board and colleagues, has consistently programmed activities focused on high-rise fire safety. The upcoming 50^th anniversary of the film The Towering Inferno was an inspiration.

We decided this would be more lighthearted and less purely technical than many of our events. We wanted to consider both the film, and use it to reflect on the state of fire safety in tall buildings in New York City.

Of course it does not escape us that the topic of fire safety is a serious one, …

Holiday Chaos To Corporate Crisis: A Lesson From Christmas Vacation In Executive Protection, Rachael A. Zerr

Publications and Research

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) may be best known for its holiday humor, but it also inadvertently highlights critical issues in corporate security and executive protection. Through the kidnapping of Clark Griswold's boss, Frank Shirley, the film illustrates the vulnerabilities faced by high-net-worth individuals and executives. This paper draws parallels between the fictional events of the film and real-world cases of executive kidnapping and violence, emphasizing the need for robust security measures. It discusses modern executive protection strategies, including risk assessments, real-time monitoring, and cybersecurity, and highlights the role of technology in mitigating threats. Ultimately, this paper argues that as …

Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism And The (Post)Human, Stephen C. Tumino

Publications and Research

Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour …

Past * An Introduction To The Problem, Zelimir Zilnik, Boris Buden, New Media Center Kuda.Org, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past • An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility. And what are we supposed to find in that past? Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers …

The Golden Age Of Mexican Cinema, Daniel Galindo

Publications and Research

This presentation is about the film called María Candelaria (1943), a film of the cinema of the golden age of Mexico that shows the lifestyle of the people of that time, more than anything it shows how women were reviled in the macho society. The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is a period of brilliance in the history of Mexican cinema, which began in 1936-1956.

Histories, Legacies, And Futures Of Image-Processing, Helena Shaskevich, Adam Hart

Publications and Research

Conversations for this special section of Leonardo first began in July 2023. Over the course of the following year and half, as the framework was conceptualized, papers were solicited, reviewed, edited and re-edited, and editorial deadlines came and went, two pioneering figures in the field of video image-processing passed away: Louise (Etra) Ledeen and Ralph Hocking. While the trajectories of their engagement with the now-widely dispersed community of image-processing artists differed—Ledeen left the art world to focus on corporate projects in the late 1980s while Hocking continued to teach at Binghamton University and remained at the helm of the Experimental …

Maniobres De Resistència Personal, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Quan jo tenia nous anys, els meus pares em van enviar a estudiar a la capital. Havia de quedar en règim d'internat de dilluns a divendres, dia que mon pare venia del poble a recollir-me, normalment cap a les cinc del capvespre, si fa no fa.

Jogakpo Window (7 Feet X 4 Feet), Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Materials: glass, sunlight, post-it notes. Image description: Photographs show a large window covered with a 조각보 patchwork of colorful post-it notes. Sunlight illuminates the paper.

The Iconography Of An All-American Icon: Sailors, Homoeroticism, And Mid-Century Queer Cultural Politics, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

Through a new critical reading of the relevant images found in The Young Physique and Physique Pictorial, I explore how the sailor has become a homoerotic icon and how the sailor has become an object of gay fetishization and fantasy. Through media (in this instance: magazines), I focus on the time period between World War II through Gay Liberation in the 1970s, showing how the culture of the port cities of New York City and Los Angeles helped to create this homoerotic image of the sailor. Through a reading of three images that demonstrate the homoeroticism of sailor imagery from …

Trans* Bambalinas: Del Freak Show Al Videoarte En El Documental Disidente Chileno, Ignacio A. Pastén López

Publications and Research

Este ensayo reseña los siguientes documentales:

El viaje de Monalisa. Dir. Nicole Costa. Prod. Gregory Costa y Daniela Camino. Nueva York, 2019, 93 min. https://ondamedia.cl/show/el-viaje-de-monalisa-1626213821621.

Casa Roshell. Dir. Camila José Donoso. Prod. Garbiñe Ortega, Juan Pablo Bastarrachea, Maximiliano Cruz y Sandra Gómez. Chile, 2017, 71 min. https://ondamedia.cl/show/casa-roshell.

Naomi Campbel. Dir. Camila José Donoso y Nicolás Videla. Prod. Catalina Donoso y Rocío Romero. Chile, 2013, 83 minutos. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=236699154110418.

En tránsito. Dir. Constanza Gallardo. Prod. Constanza Gallardo y Felipe Garrido González. Chile, 2017, 65 min. https://www.cclm.cl/cineteca-online/en-transito/.

El gran circo pobre de Timoteo. Dir. Lorena Giachino Torréns. Prod. Paola …

On The Avenue Of The Mystery: The Postwar Counterculture In Novels And Film, Gary Hentzi

Publications and Research

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945–65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985–2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novelsthemselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965–75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after …

Re-Presenting The Un-Presentable: Annie Ernaux’S "L’Évènement" And Cristian Mungiu’S "4 Months, 3 Weeks, And Two Days", Victoria Tomasulo

Publications and Research

Situating Annie Ernaux’s L’évènement and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in a reproductive justice framework, I argue that both the memoir and the film contribute to working-class historiographies by documenting backstreet abortion in times and places where it was heavily criminalized: 1960s France and Communist Romania. Committed to a working-class aesthetic with roots in neorealism, Ernaux and Mungiu focus singularly on an event once deemed unrepresentable in literature and cinema. Drawing upon the distinction made between empathy and “rational compassion” made by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy (2016), as well as from Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond …

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

El Laboratorio Cinegráfico De Pedro Pietri, Rojo Robles Mejias

Publications and Research

En su relato “Lost in the Museum of Natural History” Pedro Pietri se inserta en la narración como personaje y como fuente de historias inspiradas en la violencia de los géneros del western, los biker films y los melodramas. Esta aproximación a la experimentación literaria, la alteración sensorial y fílmica escenifica una crisis en la enunciación y la representación que hecha luces sobre las relaciones entre las desigualdades sociales, la violencia y la subjetividad.

We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times Of Aids Cultural Production (Introduction And Timeline 1), Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

This is a book about the history, present, and future of the cultural production of AIDS. It takes the form of thirteen short conversations between two AIDS activists, Alex and Ted, whom you will get to know more as you go along. The book focuses on what we call the Times of AIDS. All this talk is inspired by our longtime AIDS activism and is initiated by looking at related cultural production: objects like AIDS activist videos; events like protests; spaces like AIDS memorials; ideas we have learned from within and outside our community; and through our own memories and …

We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times Of Aids Cultural Production (Introduction And Toc & 3 Timelines), Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the …

Aiming For The Trees: Random Access Information And Paik’S Video Study, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Public lecture and paper presented for the 13th international symposium, The Gift of Nam June Paik, attending to his dreams of random access information and the inauguration of his Video Study.

The Gifts Of Respect (Shoes) And Home: Alanis Obomsawin In Conversation With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Alex: You must send me a picture of your blue ones. We just met in Berlin on the occasion of your retrospective, a comprehensive survey of your work as a filmmaker and also as a visual artist: The Children Have to Hear Another Story. Have you ever had a survey of this magnitude?

Alanis: Oh, no. I’ve had exhibitions sometimes of just of my etchings. Over the years, I’ve had a few retrospectives and it was very nice. But this, I’ve never had this kind of attention. And from so far away!

Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

This piece looks at queer characters in the Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016). The film takes place during the heyday of the Hollywood film studio set in 1951 and draws on many films during that time period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

"Writing Unspeakable Things: Speechlessness, Abjection, And The Ethics/Aesthetics Of (Not) Representing Sexual Violence In Three Korean American "Comfort Women' Novels", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes “comfort women” novels by the Korean American authors Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language. I specifically look at these authors’ stylistic strategies to describe rape in writing and how they (more or less successfully) avoid voyeuristic portrayals of the “comfort women” by controlling the narrative point of view and relying on traumatic “speechlessness” and abjection. Building on relevant notions from the fields of photography, cinematography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this analysis suggests that in-progress representations of rape in language become a futile project …

Analog Video In The Age Of Digital Data: A Case Study Of Shigeko Kubota's "Social Practice", Helena Shaskevich, Lia Robinson

Publications and Research

If Nam June Paik truly is the “father of video art,” as so many scholars claim, then Shigeko Kubota is in many ways its mother, performing the unacknowledged and undervalued labor of managing the “house” of video and taking care of its inhabitants. My digital art history project for Panorama, which performs a data-driven deep dive into Kubota’s networks, argues that Kubota’s legacy must be understood as a lived, “social practice” of care for video art and its communities.

Mother Monsters And Monster Mothers From Dracula To Stranger Things, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is an homage to 1970s and 1980s sci-fi and horror, including Alien and Aliens, Carrie, the Star Wars trilogy, and Poltergeist, as well as buddy adventure films like Goonies and Stand by Me. But it is also, in its obsessive presentation of monsters as mothers and mothers as monsters, a show that takes its 1980s mothering cues straight out of Bram Stoker’s 1890s. Despite its 2016 production date, the Duffer Brother’s Stranger Things presents viewers with very old fashioned ideas of mothering, with Joyce Byers (Wynona Ryder) as the single, but exceedingly pro-active mom from …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

Great Directors: Sidney Lumet, William Blick

Publications and Research

Given the breadth of Lumet’s oeuvre, it’s debatable whether or not he has a distinctive, recognizable style. The canon encompasses such a large canvas, it is impossible to say whether or not his films are instantly recognizable. There are, however, trademark characteristics: gritty New York urban realism, dynamic and snappy dialogue coupled with frequent collaborations with the best actors and writers in the business. These collaborations captivated film critics and the public alike, as both bore witness to Lumet’s talent for translating text to screen. Lumet’s politics are unabashedly liberal and often elicit distrust of the establishment as characters challenge …

Natalie Bookchin In Conversation With Alexandra Juhasz: Performance Of Race And White Hegemony On Youtube, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In November 2019, in her house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I joined friend and fellow artist Natalie Bookchin for a conversation about her installation and film Now he’s out in public and everyone can see. The installation, which premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a venerable Los Angeles art space, in 2012, was remade into a film and released as a DVD double feature along with her film Long Story Short by Icaras Films in 2016. Our loose and lively conversation was recorded and transcribed and forms the basis for what follows. We have been in conversation about digital culture, …

The Self-Reflexive Praxis At The Heart Of Dh, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The author revisits a cancelled prison education class about YouTube and media literacy.

The World Would Be Better If They Hadn't Died: Alexandra Juhasz With Don’T Rhine, Alexandra Juhasz, Dont Rhine

Publications and Research

In Final Transmission: Performance Art and AIDS in LA, eds. Brian Getnick and Tanya Rubbak. When we chatted for an hour before to prepare, the first thing I asked you was how old you are. I’m 52, and you’re 54. But we realized that we didn’t know a lot about our shared history because we met in an activist part of the AIDS scene in Los Angeles. I picked up pieces about your history, and we’ve even collaborated, but I actually don’t know that much about you personally. Checking in before this public conversation, one of the things we realized …