As an anthropologist and contemporary artist working in analogue film for both cinematic exhibition and installation and writing and publishing within anthropology and cinema studies, one of my ongoing frustrations has been the lack of true understanding between these disciplines of the other’s languages, practices, history and training of practitioners. On each side there is a major failure to see and comprehend as valuable the other’s epistemological strategies. Artists and those who write about them tend to deploy the term ethnographic as an adjective to mean practically anything to do with culture or whatever they may mean by that (e.g. Catherine Russell). On the other hand, anthropologists tend to uncritically exoticise the artists they purport to admire, research or work with, treating their material practices, working methods and ways of knowing as exotic and individual rather than the product of years of disciplinary training and study, enmeshed in and participating within deep cultural, community-based traditions as well as in dialogue with broader aesthetic and technological histories.

German crime films usually only find wide international circulation when they deal with either the two World Wars or the country’s unique position during the Cold War. Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015) is an exception. The film, shot in one continuous take, tells the story of a young woman from Madrid who meets four local Berliners outside a nightclub in the middle of the night and ends up robbing a private bank with them. Without an established auteur or any sizeable star power attached to it, the film managed to travel widely within Europe, made possible by Creative Europe’s funding schemes for distribution. The first section of the article examines the struggles of German crime films to cross the borders, despite the abundant national production of crime films, television series, and literature. The second section focuses on the importance of the distribution scheme that helped Victoria travel and explores how the policies of the MEDIA programme have shaped the European cinema landscape. In the third section, the paper examines how Victoria evokes images and discourses of European society such as disenfranchisement, solidarity, and precarity set in a cosmopolitan Berlin. By analysing the promotional texts, this final section explores how Victoria’s ideal combination of genre, auteurial ambitions and “added European value” granted the film access to support mechanisms which are usually out of reach for a film.

Issue 22 - Considering the transnational prominence of European cinema, European crime films present an interesting case. As a genre, crime “is clearly the most popular genre across Europe for novels, television series and films”, and crime fiction productions are abundant on a national level in most European countries (Bondebjerg et al. 223). Crime fiction, therefore, appears as the genre most able to facilitate transborder cultural exchange and communicate “Europeanness” at local, national, regional, and transnational levels. This is surely the case of television productions where “crime drama seems to be a powerful, cross-cultural phenomenon with the noteworthy possibility of travelling internationally” (Hansen et al. 3). However, while crime novels and television series have been receiving much critical attention—especially within the context of Nordic Noir—crime films are absent from most of the scholarly discussions and struggle to gain cross-border popularity. It can be argued that crime drama on television has profited from a changed transnational production and distribution culture which has not benefited European crime films in the same way.

Over a span of forty years, James Cameron has become synonymous with the box-office blockbuster. Bigger stars, budgets, and technological innovations have led the director to transcend spectacle-centric contemporaries like Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, reframing him in the words of Thomas Elsaesser, as “the embodiment of the post-auteur author” (248). For Elsaesser, the post-auteur author is distinguished in part by their ability to synergise art and business into a single entity. As is the case with Cameron, this often culminates in the formation of a production studio or visual effects company, but Cameron’s desire to create universally appealing films while exercising total control over their production seems to transcend even this tradition.

True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the other’s shoes, but an encounter with empathy’s own limits, the impossibility of access to the other’s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspective on world history and the lost pasts of the Global South. By analysing films where “cinematic depictions of the past are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with others” (2), Martin-Jones diagnoses and exposes a trend in world cinema (what he calls a “world of cinemas”) to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity. This is framed by Martin-Jones through the Orwellian notion of doublethink as the spinning of a political narrative of the past at odds with the facts.

Rather early on in The Imaginary Signifier (1982), Christian Metz takes a full paragraph to detail the type of love for cinema that a “theoretician of the cinema” should have (15). It is a complicated affair; the thinker negotiates a safe distance between herself and her cinephilia, which she must forget about, rediscover, and ultimately keep in check—as if the work of theory were not already quite the handful in and of itself. Now, I cannot say whether Turvey is a theoretician/born-again cinephile in the Metzian sense, but, while reading his latest book, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism, I certainly felt his love for cinema, and in particular for that of French filmmaker extraordinaire Jacques Tati; a clear, sincere, and undoubtedly personal, love. This makes Turvey’s already famously limpid, precise, and accessible thinking and writing even more enjoyable than usual. I would in fact argue that his patent investment in the book’s subject is clearly a crucial cog in the functioning of the whole study, ensuring that every reader feels involved and present at all times, as she goes through the work’s vast and deep analytical and conceptual apparatus.

Patrick ffrench’s Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics is dizzying in scope; at just under 300 pages, this newest addition to Bloomsbury’s “Film Thinks” series is dense and sinewy, with over 1,000 footnotes. While the book may not befor the casual Barthes fan, this is not a reflection on ffrench’s writing but rather an indication that Barthes’ philosophical attitude, including his foray into cinema, is persistently revisionary and complex. To borrow from ffrench, who borrows in turn from Gilles Deleuze, Barthes’ trajectory can be understood as one of “becoming-Barthes” (53). But who is it exactly that Barthes becomes?

I very much enjoyed reading this book, but I should make a couple of “declarations of interest” at the outset. Daniels uses an aspect of my own work (A Whited Sepulchre, 2009) in her discussion of the “multiplicity of voices” in autobiographical documentary (69-73), and, as implied by this, we share a background as independent filmmakers with an interest in both autobiographical documentary and in Practice Research in the Academy. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I found it a completely fascinating and thought-provoking read. Taken as a whole, the book gives both an intimate portrait of a particular filmmaker’s struggle to make work, and a very clear picture of the contexts (personal, industrial and intellectual) in which that work was produced.

Carrie Sutton is a freelance directors’ representative working with independent creatives as well as music video directors signed to Biscuit Filmworks, Blindeye Films, Good Co., Kode Media, Rankin and The Graft. In her role as Music Video Commissioner, she has commissioned videos for Blur, Tina Turner, Pet Shop Boys, Snow Patrol and Robbie Williams amongst many others, with artists picking up 3 Brit Awards for Best Video, an MTV Award and a D&AD Yellow Pencil Nomination. In 2018, she was awarded the ‘Outstanding Achievement’ award at the UK Music Video Awards in recognition of her career as a Creative Commissioner, Directors’ Rep., Executive Producer and Producer

Alphaville Issue 19 is characterised by a distinct focus on intermediality, interartiality and intertextuality. Both of the issue’s main sections aim to shed light on some of the ways in which music and the moving image have intersected historically, giving rise to particular formats, genres and instances of medium hybridity. While covering diverse generic and geographical areas, “Performing the Intermedial across Brazilian Cinema”, a selection of articles and interviews curated by Tamara Courage and Albert Elduque, and “Music Videos in the British Screen Industries and Screen Heritage: From Innovation to Curation”, a dossier edited by Emily Caston, place the accent on a set of specific encounters between cinema, video and music, thus shedding new light on corpora that have often been underrepresented in international scholarship in film and screen media, while simultaneously investigating broad- ranging methodological concerns.