{"title":"Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan by Diane Wei Lewis (review)","authors":"Jonathan E. Abel","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78418599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Gay in Gauge: Pat Rocco and the Significance of 16mm to Gay Liberation","authors":"Finley Freibert","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0012","url":null,"abstract":"The advent of 16mm technologies has been widely acknowledged as a crucial catalyst for the development of educational film and adult cinema, two seemingly distinct cultural pursuits.1 Yet with the rise of a gay independent cinema movement in the 1960s, educational and pornographic endeavors became fused cultural enterprises, and 16mm functioned as “gay useful media,” a set of cultural projects that forged gay institutions and solidified gay counterpublics.2 Activistentrepreneur Pat Rocco’s 16mm Bizarre Productions Newsfilms, newsreel films made in 1970 to 1976 that covered gay activism, are a compelling example of this complex form of filmmaking. Rocco’s newsreel unit was a division of his Bizarre Productions, a company that primarily specialized in homoerotic softcore shorts. The specific funding source for the Newsfilms is unclear, but they were likely personally financed by Rocco and therefore informally subsidized by his earnings from Bizarre Productions’ softcore mailorder and theatrical distribution. These newsreels were screened both nontheatrically at gay community events and theatrically in adult cinemas","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85242473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deceiving Death: The Myths behind De-aging Effects","authors":"Ori Levin","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article seeks to trace and describe the motivating force behind de-aging effects that rejuvenate actors and resurrect deceased stars. New techniques are often fabricated in order to solve a problem or fulfill a wish. This article uncovers the wish that lies at the root of de-aging effects by exploring the urge to wrestle with death and turn back time, not only in the films that use these effects but also in the history of cinema and in film theory.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83864272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Forests to Film: Chemistry, Industry, and the Rise of Nonflammable Film Stock","authors":"A. Lovejoy","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The first motion picture system to use 16mm film was the CinéKodak, Eastman Kodak’s cameraprojector pair, which, in the words of a 1924 advertisement, “enable[s] you to show in motion on your screen the sort of pictures you turn to first in your album. Train the camera, press the button and the motor cranks the camera.”1 Echoing the catchphrase that sold Kodak’s Brownie camera— “you press the button; we do the rest”— the ensemble was marketed as a motion picture equivalent to this affordable, pushbutton device, which put photography into the hands of nonprofessionals. A cornerstone of the CinéKodak was its customdesigned film stock, which was unique in several ways. Instead of using the established negativepositive process, the stock was “reversal.” Requiring only one strip of film, it was exposed in camera as a negative and then processed to a projectable positive. But for the CinéKodak’s promise of moving film out of studios, cinemas, and everything they entailed, the stock’s most important feature was that its base was made of nonflammable cellulose acetate instead of cellulose nitrate, the highly combustible plastic that caused countless fires in cinema’s first decades.2 Nonflammability was further guaranteed by the","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82805341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer (review)","authors":"N. Sathe","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0018","url":null,"abstract":"In Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, Usha Iyer deconstructs the spectacle of the dancing body in Hindi cinema to reveal the industrial and material realities it conceals. Iyer’s project deviates from previous studies of Hindi cinematic songanddance, which have primarily focused on the ideological dimensions of these sequences. Instead, Iyer is more interested in the industry practices that, in her words, “[alert] us to questions of virtuosity, labor, and pleasure undergirding the production and reception of popular Hindi film dance.”1 Locating her study between the 1930s and 1990s, Iyer deploys the danceractress as an “analytical category” to explore the “construction of gender, stardom and spectacle” in dance sequences.2 Iyer decodes the star texts of various danceractresses, including those of Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, and Madhuri Dixit, to explicate the “social norms for female performance” that informed the reception of their dancing bodies and the ways in which these actresses sought to “challenge or subvert these through their movement vocabulary.”3 Iyer’s comprehensive and meticulous study is","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72635959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postwar Animation and Modernist Criticism: The Case of Annette Michelson","authors":"R. Pierson","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the neglect of animation in film criticism and theory, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to popular belief, it was the rise of modernism that was primarily responsible for that neglect, not scholars’ excessive focus on realism. Unlike the prewar modernists who celebrated animation, the postwar avant-garde sought to distance itself from it. This was due to two historic changes: a new animation culture concerned with visual education and social messages and high modernism’s disenchantment with collectivist politics. In order to unearth this conflict of sensibilities, this article examines the work of avant-garde critic Annette Michelson.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87720013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organic Creativity: Alden B. Dow’s Small-Gauge Architecture","authors":"Justus Nieland","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1926, a young Michigander made the front page of the Midland Republican, his hometown paper: “Alden Dow Takes MovingPictures of ‘The Sights’ of Europe.” Dow, an avid photographer, had been filming with a 17.5mm Movette since 1917, and he eagerly adopted 16mm with the birth of the gauge. The “cleverly designed mechanism” of Dow’s new Kodak also gets some ink, as the paper extols the vicarious “thrills” the films gave Dow’s friends and family back in rural Midland, population 8,500.1 On its face, this is a smalltown, smallgauge episode in 16mm as a local novelty, an amateur’s delight. But Dow was no typical young man. The youngest son of Herbert H. Dow, founder of Dow Chemical, the Midlandbased industrial giant, Alden Dow was unusually well heeled and well traveled. By the summer of 1926, Dow had decided to abandon his expected course of study in chemical and mechanical engineering. Instead, he pursued his passion for architecture at Columbia University, followed by a fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1933. The 16mm blackandwhite and stunning Kodachrome films that Dow made during his time with Wright constitute but a tiny fraction of the approximately three hundred films produced by Dow over five decades, from 1923 through the 1960s. These productions include not only travel films and home movies but also philosophically oriented experimental films and a host","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74124704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Are Ant-Man: The Digital Body in a Superhero Comedy","authors":"Scott Bukatman","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Phenomenologist Don Ihde posits a technological knowledge rooted in embodied experience via technologically enhanced perceptions. Super-heroes might be understood as embodied technologies and enhanced perceptions. Digital technologies are normally less visually accessible than those of the Industrial Age, but the cinematic superheroes of the twenty-first century are highly visible digital effects that might tell us something about the status of the body in digital culture. A digital superhero comedy, Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018) models one kind of human-digital relation: the hapless Ant-Man knows nothing about how his advanced technologies actually work, but his cluelessness has no bearing upon his ability to use them and effect positive change.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81651699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reconsidering the Network Era: 16mm Film on Television","authors":"Kit Hughes","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Kinescope recording— using a 16mm film camera to record live signals from a cathoderay tube— is typically remembered as the strategy the major US commercial broadcast networks used to send programs to affiliates not yet linked by microwave or coaxial cable in the late 1940s and 1950s. However, early enthusiasm surrounding kinescoping’s potential as a new media practice suggests far broader institutional investments in film on television. Promoted users and uses spanned ad agencies (for recording commercials), independent stations (for air checks and pilots), medicine (for microphotography and surgery), the military (for weapons tests), and industry (particularly mill and manufacturing operations).1 Use of 16mm film by television stations also went beyond kinescopes and included firstand secondrun syndication (of both independent productions and reruns), feature films, news, interstitials, sponsored films, and other programming. Tracing film and television’s convergences, scholars have complicated our understanding of struggles between Hollywood and television, liveness, and televisual logics of repetition, among other things.2 While this scholarship attends to questions","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86577513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documenting Anti-colonial Social Movements in Early 1970s Hong Kong with 16mm","authors":"T. Cunliffe","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0013","url":null,"abstract":"In early 1970s Hong Kong, independently made documentaries were rare. Conventional film distribution channels, which opened doors to public screenings, were closed off to independent filmmakers, and financing was difficult for any filmmaker not backed by a big studio.1 Furthermore, the colonial film censors would ban or censor material they deemed critical of the state; anticolonial sentiments were especially unwelcome. Into this treacherous terrain stepped the social activists Ng Chun-Yin and Mok Chiuyu, coeditors of the radical internationalist leftwing The 70’s Biweekly (70年代雙週刊), a bilingual periodical published in Hong Kong that focused on political issues, social movements, and art.2 The 70’s Biweekly’s writers connected various sociopolitical struggles and problems in their magazine, including global issues of civil rights, feminism, poverty, and the severe, local injustices of the colonial regime.3 In 1971, Ng and Mok decided to extend their publishing project to include filmmaking.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75104263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}