Dear Sir or Madman Louis Bayman (bio) Dear Vice Chancellor, University of London: I think now that the perpetrator has retired it is time for me to explain the curious fug that emanated for years from the basement of your university. That you were ignorant of the facts was proclaimed by none other than their executor, Professor Richard Dyer, surmising, to what can be described only as cackles by the assembled students, that the college management had "probably no idea" what he was teaching that autumn morning. Being only an apprentice to the master of these arts, I did not consider it in my power as teaching assistant to obstruct them. For the deceptively titled "European Crime Film" did not broach our AngloSaxon legal statutes, or provide deductive skills to a vigilant citizenry, and still less an appreciation of crime as one of the few remaining gentlemanly pursuits. Dyer began an earlier treatise on Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) by remarking that there are good films and there are lovely films. But his intention was to emphasize the really, vilely, nasty realms of commoner tastes. I became aware in terror that this peak to his career dissecting popular culture would be devoted to serial killer cinema. Mr. Vice Chancellor! Have you ever wondered what sonic properties are obtained by the squelches during sex with a corpse? Would you care to know how filmmakers achieve realism on a low budget to show two weeks' worth of bodily decomposition, or the material they study to verify the results? I didn't think so. Nor, I suggest, did any of the young charges at your institution. We were taught that if we wanted to know the films with the most deeply affective charge, those least interested in canons of respectability, those most directly visceral in their appeal, then it was to serial killer cinema that we must look. Delirium is not only the product of [End Page 174] disco dancing or the profane divinities of star worship but also the random mayhem of the lust to kill and the charisma of malevolence. We looked to Weimar Germany, whose artists from George Grosz to Otto Dix, whose entertainments from Waxworks (Paul Leni, 1924) to Pandora's Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929) to M (Fritz Lang, 1931), took as a natural fact the compulsion to Lustmord, for killing as a pleasure that animated the Werewolf of Hanover or the Vampire of Düsseldorf, the trenches of the First World War or the Nazisploitation cycle set amid the horrors of the Second World War. For, as De Quincey noted, murder may be treated as a moral issue or as an aesthetic one. In recalling––or eliciting––such murderous urges, the artwork achieves a certain power to summon visions of evil realms. This power is literal in the double-twist ending of Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982), after a crime writer is revealed as a multiple murderer: a shining spike from a metal objet d'art unexpectedly falls and impales him through the stomach while the only person left alive begins to scream—and scream and scream and scream, as the screen fades to black and the final credits appear over the prog rock of Goblin. And she continues to scream. In a film bathed in bright light but whose title means "tenebrous" or gloomy, in a genre whose set-piece killings have the gleeful abandonment of a musical number, it is "as if beneath all the cleverness and wit there is only the inchoate turmoil of terror."1 Navigating past the claims that serial killing defines the nature of humanity, the truth of masculinity, or the condition of modernity, our discovery at the end of it all was that in fact there was no answer. Beyond the big questions of the universe lies the simple inexplicability of the desire to kill and kill and kill again. Feeling overtook reason in art, and rather than discover the meaning of life, we dwelled upon the thrill of death. The violence pushed artistic experience into sublime disorder. The investigation's purpose was to take such wickedness seriously, rigorously, while drawing the focus away from high seriousness toward the pleasures of...

Anarchy on and off the Air J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (bio) This communiqué aims to open a conversation between media scholarship and decolonial activism and to rethink everyday notions of place and practice. My take here is informed by my past and present work as a radio producer and host for three public affairs programs—one on indigenous politics and the other two focused on anarchist politics—in the context of a hybrid station: WESU, in Middletown, Connecticut.1 From 2007 to 2013, I worked as the sole producer and host of a public affairs show, Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, a program that was widely syndicated and focused on global indigenous struggles while acknowledging the local context in the spirit of ethical engagement with the indigenous peoples of the land where I reside and labor.2 One of the aims of Indigenous Politics radio was to address the colonial politics of erasure. Notably, the conversations the radio show produced were themselves a political act against that ongoing process of indigenous erasure endemic to settler colonialism.3 Then, from September 2010 to May 2013, I also worked in collaboration with a group of students on an anarchist politics show, Horizontal Power Hour.4 Topics included Idle No More, prison abolition, antigentrification, migrant justice, queer liberation, and the Palestinian struggle and global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, among numerous other issues. [End Page 127] Currently, I coproduce and cohost a related anarchist politics show (with a new, and always evolving, group of students) called Anarchy on Air, which launched in February 2014 and includes a diverse range of subjects, including international anarchist activism, Black Lives Matter, direct action to stop deportations, the war in Syria and the refugee crisis, transgender liberation, efforts to decriminalize sex work, radical art, #NoDAPL (opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline), and political solidarity between Palestine and Native America.5 Both the indigenous politics show and the anarchist programs have featured radical politics with a commitment to decolonization. Unhampered by the protocols journalists are expected to abide by, the programs have created a way to discuss radical relationality between people as both mediation and activism at once. Their aim was to move "media activism" from critical and political engagement with specific media and regulatory bodies to an understanding of activism in all its forms as media and mediation. When I was involved with both the indigenous and the anarchist shows during the overlapping years, people often questioned how I could be working on both programs, as though they were so far afield from each other. Although the indigenous politics show and the anarchist radio work were distinct from each other, in terms of the programs themselves and as political projects, I understood them as related in that both challenge the assumed legitimacy and authority of the state. For me, Noam Chomsky's working definition of anarchism gets to the heart of what links these two areas, as they are both about consent politics: Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. … It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. … They have to give a reason for it. … And if they can't justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.6 As someone who identifies as indigenous, in terms of my own anarchist approach taking different forms at different times, I strive for a decolonial modality. Here I offer just one example to get at these linkages. Members of the movement have acknowledged the anarchist roots (and guiding principles) of Occupy Wall Street, even if they themselves do not identity as anarchists.7 As described at Occupy's website: "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."8 Occupy was a powerful movement that centered on the call to "reclaim" the commons...

The Sustainability of Film and Media Studies Kristen J. Warner (bio) Anxious. Anxiety is the emotion most felt when asked to write about the state of film and media studies. I am anxious because in a moment when everything is viral, words can be so easily taken out of context, and digital platforms are the means by which an entire sector of freelance writers earn a living in this era of gig economies. Wedging the place of film and media studies into public discourse is both necessary and a recipe for bad feelings. Part of my uneasiness exists because I am active on digital platforms such as Twitter, attempting to assert my work and my field into these conversations while trying not to step on too many toes or have my words taken out of context—the worst-case scenarios of both possibilities resulting in unimaginable consequences in my real life. Nevertheless, for all my caution, being on Twitter for me is akin to setting up a digital home on a social media platform and making friends with people in my neighborhood. That is to say, my Twitter encompasses a variety of different neighbors—from other film and media studies academics to industry professionals and critics to television fans. These communities can be wonderful spaces for sharing work, thinking through ideas, and, specific to this essay, illustrating how our research is applicable to film and television news in real time. One of the rituals I have noticed emerging on the platform is the Twitter thread, aka "rant storm," in which, rather than completing a whole thought in 140 characters, the user builds the tweets into an argumentative essay. I thought I would try this mode of communication because, if done right, the thread would allow me to talk to multiple communities in multiple registers at one time. So, I wrote threads about my specializations in race and media industry, keying in on specific words and concepts that I imagined the readers on my timeline who were not versed in the literature would be interested in learning. As accessible as this writing mode can be for introducing familiar disciplinary concepts to nonacademic audiences, Twitter threads often prove insufficient because of how little space they afford for the kinds of work, research, and thought processes we pursue as film and media studies scholars, and also because our conclusions are so rarely definite—thus making our ideas harder to circulate as part of the public discourse I mentioned earlier. For example, as much of our work concerns identity, power, structures, and the polysemous nature [End Page 143] of texts, the answers we arrive at are rarely absolute but almost always an ambivalent "both." I envision this ambivalent positionality on the body as a shrugging of the shoulders that can easily be coined the "media studies shrug." The shrug exists not because we do not care but because these questions have complex answers that will inevitably have both positive and negative attributes. For us, that complex center space that refuses the poles of either/or is the sweet spot, but ironically, it is what keeps us out of the very conversations in which we should be participating, because what makes for a successful Twitter thread that could be picked up as part of a debate in an online think piece is resolution and a proper denouement that takes only one position. The media studies shrug thus becomes the antithesis of what defines good online criticism. This makes sense: in an industry of Internet writing where there is never a lack of demand for content, career writers must finesse the art of being nimble workers. They must locate the resources and materials needed to complete their assignments quickly and, simultaneously, need to take pride in the ownership of the ideas they transform into articles so they can circulate the work expeditiously. This ownership includes the very fact that their ideas are singular in nature and original at their core. Because cultural products are made "for everyone," film and television provoke inexhaustible popular writings based in interest but not specialization and curiosity but not context, so that such popular criticism presents its ideas as though without...

Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live By Julie Reid (bio) Countermythologization and Collective Action This essay argues for a revision of both research and teaching practice within the fields of media studies and the communication sciences, and adopts Barthean semiotic myth theory as a means to demonstrate how such revision could be envisaged as countermythologization within the current climate of decolonization. First, a brief discussion broadly contextualizes the decolonization debate. This is followed by two examples of how [End Page 132] this overarching environment can be responded to, first, by rethinking media studies research practice, and second, by critically revising traditional teaching practices within media and communication studies. Roland Barthes constructed the semiotic formula for myth to illustrate how myth acts as a mode of (often political) speech, regularly utilized in visual and mediated cultural artifacts such as film and advertising, for the purposeful naturalization and justification of dominant modes of thought and power.1 Mythologization, which is the activity of mythic speech, differs from the concepts of, for example, discourse and/or narrative in that it declines the provision of detail, empties out its subject of history, and presents only a partial, simplified, and uncomplicated view of the world. Although mythic speech neither tolerates nor accommodates contradiction, it can be remarkably effective in persuading a lot of people that the ways things are, are the way they are meant to be. Since Barthes's original theorization of myth as the "top-down" exertion of communicated power by the dominant sections of society, countermyth theory has examined the conscious mythologization of voices of opposition and dissent.2 The contestation of dominant colonially inscribed power and its resultant myths, and the current oppositional movements fronting decolonization, can be understood within this theoretical frame. A key moment in the decolonization movement arose in 2015, when a collective of students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa called for the removal of a statue of the nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the university's campus. Demands to remove the statue were metonymic of a desire for the transformation of university curricula and culture, as many black students felt alienated within an institutionalized Eurocentric outlook. The #RhodesMustFall initiative provided impetus for the #FeesMustFall student movement, which blossomed on campuses shortly thereafter, sprouting a series of student-led protests in 2015 and 2016. The students' requests varied depending on the particular conditions at each campus, but in general two demands appeared as the main thrust. The first was the provision of access to quality higher education to all willing scholars, free of charge. The second was for a revision and transformation of university curricula, that is, for the decolonization of education.3 Subsequent to #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, collective mobilizations have initiated across the globe, emphasizing similar substantive points of critique and foci, such as the 2015 student protests in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and the 2017 social movements against Confederate monuments in the United States.4 [End Page 133] Responsive South African academics in tertiary communication and media studies schools are currently engaging in a significant process of overdue curriculum revision. The national conversation, which was initiated by the students and followed by the collaborative efforts of media studies and communication academics, partially facilitated by the South African Communications Association (SACOMM), to confront the necessary task of decolonization, provides a rich platform for debate, contestation, and transformation.5 Narratives of racial division have often directed the trajectory of this conversation about curriculum, which in the South African context is to be expected, given the country's recent apartheid history. Fissures of race differences that germinated during colonialism may have evolved in their form (if not their function), but they nonetheless persist in the present. A gruesome beast, this mythology shifts the balance of opportunity and power in favor of some peoples over others, and it crawls about within the socioeconomic structure of things in South Africa much as it does in many other societies. But an overemphasis on issues of race politics risks ignoring the fact that the project of decolonization is about more than balancing the scales of racial inequality. To be sure, the...

From Iván Hevesy’s Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (1925), Part 2: The Structure and Image Construction of the Film Play Ágnes Matuska and András Szekfü Translated by Melinda Szalóky The Structure of the Film Play The far-reaching differences and deep-seated similarities that can be observed between the film play and the theater play, as well as between the film play and the novel, are derived purely from the technical character of film. It is the technical necessities and the technical possibilities that determine the conception and inner form of the film play. All of these technical factors follow from the fundamental essence of film. This fundamental essence is reproduction: it gives the film play a story and a reality without being limited by the unity of space and time as happens in the theater play. However, this reproductive nature determines not only the aesthetic form and inner dramatic character of the film play; it determines its entire buildup and the minutest detail of its dramatic direction as well. The task of film direction can be divided into two components, from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The first component is the method of composing the sequence of shots, which is the dramatic structuring of the film play per se, while the other one is the creation of the individual shots, in other words, of the elements of the structure. These two are equally important factors of the film play, and it is difficult to tell which would more obstruct the development of its full dramatic effect: well-composed shots connected in an uncinematic, dragged-out manner or dramatically unfolding but misconceived shots. The conditions for a full dramatic effect in the case of the cinema are completely new, since the whole concept of the scene is given an entirely different meaning in the film play, compared to the theater play. In a theater play, the milieu and the décor change infrequently, most often only at the end of each act, which means that, from the point of view of the direction, it is not the changes of the décor that segment the play. In the theater, the cohesive element is the scene, which is played out with the same characters, since every time a character enters or exits a new scene begins. In film, the milieu, be it natural or a décor, can change countless times. It is because of this, and also because of technical reasons, that the work unit of the director, the scene, is not keyed to the changes of the number of characters but to the changes of milieu. In the film play, a scene, or “shot,” lasts as long as the action evolves in the same milieu or, to put it more precisely, as long as the position of the camera is unchanged. This is because even if the old milieu remains, we get a new shot, a new image, every time the camera changes place, or changes angle, in order to show only a part of the same milieu or to broaden it in some direction, closing up [End Page 61] on a detail or on a face. This segmentation according to shots follows naturally from the technique of the film and from its dramatic expressive possibilities. Film does not give us reality but a reproduction of it, and thus, the point of departure of primary importance for it is not reality but the setup and the point of view that it occupies vis-à-vis reality. Theater drama has a very wide and very broad staging frame in each act. It needs these wide spaces because it has only a few such frames: the entire plot needs to evolve in four or five such wide scenes.24 On the contrary, the film play, making use of its reproductive agility and its unlimited possibilities to change scenes, always tends to narrow down the scene space as opposed to those of the theater. The film play does this simply to guide the attention of the spectators to the most important dramatic moment. At this point, we encounter a phenomenon that again marks the superiority...

Reviewed by: Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film by Michael Boyce Gillespie Courtney R. Baker (bio) Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film by Michael Boyce Gillespie. Duke University Press, 2016. $89.95 hardcover. $23.95 paperback. Also available in e-book. 248 pages. In his book Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, Michael Boyce Gillespie intervenes in the study of racial representation to give media scholars and film viewers a better accounting of how race in general and blackness in particular have been configured and regarded in US narrative films of the past forty years. Film Blackness avails itself of the theoretical gestures from the scholarly work of Kara Keeling, Nathaniel Mackey, and Fred Moten to move us far, far away from determinist arguments about black art that is measured "exclusively by the social category of race or veracity claims about black existential life."1 It is a necessary book that incorporates the vibrancy of black studies in this moment when the field is contributing substantially to our understanding not only of blackness as a constitutive concept for US (if not global) society but also of how art processes and analysis are crucially embedded in racialized systems of sense making. Gillespie's work is to be commended for its serious and sustained consideration of film materiality, something too frequently left out of theoretical considerations of film. He writes with a solid knowledge of filmmaking practices, referencing cinematic elements that might go overlooked by other writers. Film stock and process in particular feature heavily in his assessment of how the films in his study make meaning. Gillespie also wisely attends to the box-office and circulation reports of each film he analyzes to help interpret the aesthetic, cultural, and economic conditions of possibility for film blackness. Film Blackness was published at a time when we are seeing more and more accolades heaped upon black films. From Moonlight to Get Out to [End Page 158] Black Panther to the upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, the range of blackness on-screen seems only to be increasing. Gillespie's work primes us to this present by reminding us, as the book's subtitle states, that American cinema has always incorporated an idea—indeed, a theory—of black film that has attuned cinema to reflect the conditions of black existence. Dissertations on the burden of representation no longer adequately serve a thoroughgoing analysis of the enduring presence—to paraphrase Toni Morrison—of blackness in one of America's most robust narrative media. Blackness is more than surface and stigma. Film blackness—an artistic play with the already-complex notion of blackness—is, therefore, always more than the term "representation" suggests: "What if black film is art or creative interpretation and not merely the visual transcription of the black lifeworld?"2 Gillespie responds to this rhetorical question with ample evidence that interpretation is indeed a more accurate assessment of black filmmaking, and he goes on to model the kind of critical inquiry that such a recognition warrants. The films Gillespie has selected to analyze are delightfully unexpected and wide ranging. Sleepers and independent films such as Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1975), Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989), and Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008) are three of the films explored. The selection underscores Gillespie's point regarding the irreducibility of racial blackness. Each of the works touches on and brushes against the representation of blackness in film and the tendency for films to be regarded as making a statement (rather than posing questions) about the unalterability of blackness. Gillespie's reading of Chameleon Street, which grounds the book's second chapter, is a case in point. In parsing Harris's film, a fictionalized account of the con artist Douglas Street Jr., Gillespie shows how the film's form (its use of voice-over, lighting, and narrative structure) conspires with Harris's performance and Street's biography to enact blackness as personae. The contemplation leads him not only to regard a fugitive blackness in action (the main character quite literally eludes capture by authorities by assuming multiple identities) but also to consider the psychology of...

What Was Asian American Cinema? Sylvia Shin Huey Chong (bio) The year 2016 has had a bumper crop of media controversies involving Asian American representation. Just before their Super Bowl appearance, Coldplay and Beyoncé were criticized for appropriating Indian culture in their video "Hymn for the Weekend" (Ben Mor, 2016). Then, despite (or perhaps because of) the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, comedians Chris Rock and Ali G cracked anti-Asian jokes at the Academy Awards, sparking condemnation from prominent Asian American directors and actors such as Ang Lee and Sandra Oh. Of course, there was the endless stream of poor casting choices, from Tilda Swinton as a Tibetan monk in the comic-book film Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016) to Scarlett Johansson as Major Kusanagi in a live-action remake of a famous Japanese anime, Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), and, most recently, Matt Damon as an unnamed white savior in the transnational production The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2017)—all of these echoing earlier controversies over Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), and 21 (Robert Luketic, 2008). In addition to the vociferous criticism of these announcements on Twitter and blogs, Asian American performers also spoke out against such practices in public forums, including Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–present) star Constance Wu, at a panel sponsored by the Chinese American group Committee of 100 in Los Angeles, and veteran actor B. D. Wong at an event titled "Beyond Orientalism" in New York directed at theater professionals. The terms "yellowface" and "whitewashing" even began showing up outside of academia and the blogosphere, entering the mainstream media. With such growing consciousness of the need for Asian American representation, might we conclude that the time is ripe for something called "Asian American cinema"? If the problem with racist misrepresentation is racial invisibility, then the solution seems to call [End Page 130] for some kind of forced integration of American popular culture in order to claim visibility. And what might that cinema look like? Perhaps one clue might be found in the recent Internet meme sparked by these controversies: #Starring JohnCho, photoshopping the Korean American actor into a variety of films ranging from The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015), and the latest James Bond flick, to the rom-com Me before You (Thea Sharrock, 2016), the buddy film The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016), and so on. (A similar meme places Constance Wu in The Hunger Games [Gary Ross, 2012] and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past [Mark Waters, 2009].) In essence, the campaign is a new-media sit-in of the mostly white world of Hollywood films and television shows, replacing white bodies with Asian ones so as to highlight their erasure from popular representation, but also to assert their utter normalcy in these contexts. We are asked to accept the possibility of Asian American heroes and love interests—the latter in particular confronting the ghosts of antimiscegenation that kept Asian and Asian American actors out of older films such as The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin, 1932). These calls for Asian American representation and inclusion in the media are certainly important, and they highlight not only the symbolic importance of the cultural industry but also its economic dimensions; the paucity of jobs for Asian American actors, directors, writers, and producers points to a form of employment discrimination that would be actionable in other fields that cannot claim the invisible hand of "the box office" as an excuse. Yet the call for economic parity is overdetermined by the symbolic economy in which these roles, especially on-screen ones, participate. It is not enough to simply have more Asian American deliverymen, dry cleaners, prostitutes, martial artists, or dictators in films and television. But on the flip side, the clamor for "better" roles potentially buys into fantasies of power that Hollywood peddles not only to audiences of color but to all consumers. What, for example, does an Asian American James Bond or Captain America accomplish, other than recruit Asian Americans into a toxic heterosexual masculinity in order to make up for their historical emasculation? This discourse of visibility...

Introduction to Newsreel 55:Which Side Are You On? Maja Krajnc In the cinema of independent Slovenia (considered in the field of film history to be a segment of post-Yugoslav cinema), documentary film has lately been gaining ground. While Filmografija slovenskih celovečernih filmov: 1931–2010 (Film-ography of Slovenian feature films: 1931–2010) contains only one documentary title made between the end of World War II and 1991, in recent years the situation has changed to the point that the main awards at the Festival of Slovenian Film, or Festival Slovenskega Filma, have gone to feature-length documentaries. The first title to receive such an award was Miran Zupanič's Otroci s Petrička (Children from Petriček Hill, 2007), a documentary about attempts at ideological indoctrination after World War II that had not spared even the youngest inhabitants of Slovenia. In 2014, the main award went to Siniša Gačić's Boj za (A fight for), which deals with the expansion and subsequent disintegration of the Slovenian version of the Occupy movement. Among the documentaries of more recent date, we come across works of highly diverse content, vision, and approaches, focused both on important social questions and on various aspects of individuality in the forms of subjective or first-person documentary. But the common denominator of these films is still in the endeavor to, on the one hand, right the wrongs of the (recent) past and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the current problems in the social and political sphere. In the broadest sense, such documentaries belong to the framework of political film, with the most radical ones expressing their commitment both at the level of content and in the questioning of the formal determinations with which they probe social reality. An example of such a documentary is Newsreel 55 (Nika Autor, 2013), which Andrej Šprah considers one of the most important recent developments in Slovenian filmmaking, specifically in the sphere of committed political documentary film. In the text that follows, Šprah examines this film project, created collectively by the Newsreel Front under the leadership of Nika Autor. Autor is a cineaste and visual artist who entered the film world in 2010 by exploring the refugee question and the restrictive asylum policies in Slovenia with her short Postcards and the feature-length Report on the State of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Slovenia, January 2008–August 2009. She continued her documentary engagement with In the Land of Bears (2012), a feature-length work presenting the struggle of the exploited and humiliated seasonal workers from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Slovenia. The film shows the difficult position of workers with virtually no rights who, having been left without pay or any social rights, organized themselves in an activist initiative of invisible [End Page 95] workers of the world and strove to right the wrongs committed by the exploitative Slovenian employers and state. In Newsreel 55, which deals with current political events through a revitalization of the newsreel genre, Nika Autor expanded her individual commitment and joined forces with Marko Bratina, Jurij Meden, and Ciril Oberstar, who all work in the fields of theory and art, to establish the Newsreel Front collective. In his discussion of the film Newsreel 55, Šprah analyzes in detail various forms of newsreels as types of oppositional film practices through the perspective of political documentary. He shows how the revitalization of certain initiatives and formal elements of the past can establish the possibility for a cinema of active resistance along with a reflective approach that addresses social reality and at the same time reflects on the status of current political documentaries in Slovenia—and the world. On the one hand, the theoretical framework of Šprah's study coincides with the references we come across in the film itself. This is the case, for example, with Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image as an examination of the "real image of the past"; with Georges Didi-Huberman's questioning of the (im)possibility of representing the most chilling traumatic facts of the past in his "Four Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell"; and with Bertolt Brecht, whose critique of capitalism...

Sherpa Romeo green journal. Permission to post final published version after 12 month embargo.