Cinema Journal Research Articles

Slow, Methodical, and Mulled Over: Analog Film Practice in the Age of the Digital

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Cinema Journal following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available through the University of Texas Press.

Film and Media Studies and the State of Academic Publishing: Introduction

Film and Media Studies and the State of Academic PublishingIntroduction Emily Carman (bio) and Ross Melnick (bio) In the winter of 2013, editors from five university presses provided their insights regarding the changing nature of scholarly publishing for Cinema Journal’s In Focus. Topics included intellectual property, fair use, and detailed assessments of how digital technologies and pipelines (namely e-books) were already transforming their work. While acknowledging these and other changes in the publishing business, each editor confirmed that the mission of an academic press had remained fundamental: to publish rich and varied scholarship that generates intellectual debate, critical engagement, increased readership, and, yes, library and retail sales.1 A few months later, Columbia University Press published Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013) and Harvard University Press published Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (2013).2 While Columbia University Press backed Hollywood and Hitler with a strong, traditional marketing campaign, Harvard University Press employed an outside publicity firm for The Collaboration to garner press attention, in part by critiquing Doherty’s competing book. “Perhaps I’m naïve about academic publishing,” David Denby wrote in the New Yorker, “but I’m surprised that Harvard University Press could have published anything as poorly argued as Urwand’s book; and I’m surprised still more that Harvard or Urwand (or both) hired a commercial book publicist, Goldberg McDuffie, which, in its press release for Urwand’s [End Page 130] book, attacked Doherty’s work on the subject. . . . In the past, disputes between scholars were hashed out in academic journals and conferences, not by hired guns.”3 With the ensuing controversy over The Collaboration (and its public relations campaign) in mind, we (along with Anne Helen Petersen, originally a coeditor who now writes for BuzzFeed) were inspired to ponder the many ways in which film and media studies scholars navigate a complex set of questions for writing, publishing, and promoting their work, especially in an increasingly digital landscape where much of the controversy over The Collaboration played out. This led us to a series of questions: What are our roles as authors? What kind of promotion is appropriate for us to commit to for our books? How can we best work with editors to ensure that we are meeting their expectations for both rigorous scholarship and strong promotion at a time when academic presses are increasingly under financial constraints and adapting to new business models? This engagement between academic press and author is indeed a collaboration, and of a very different kind. Thus, we asked fellow scholars and scholars who are also editors to discuss the current state of academic publishing from this side of the fence with particular attention to how marketing academic books has changed in the era of social media and how the pressures of publishing fit into the demands of an ever-changing academic landscape. This In Focus, therefore, is centered on academic books in film and media studies and the changing ways in which scholars work with editors, marketers, social media, journalists, and their colleagues to expand their research and audience in the twenty-first century. The articles in this section also consider how the work of contemporary film and media studies scholars has changed over the past decade as academic presses, search committee expectations, tenure requirements, contingent labor duress, university cultures, and the field itself continue to transform in challenging, exciting, and unexpected ways. Video essays, academic blogs, social media, popular writing, and spatial and data visualizations are just some of the many ways in which new models of scholarship are joining more traditional avenues like academic journals, edited collections, and—of principal interest here—books. Yet many of these digital publishing options are not counted as highly as the staple outputs of academic research: the peer-reviewed article, chapter, or—again—the book. Still, the changes brought about by the digital transition, the influence of digital humanities, and the move to both closed and open-access digital publishing have created a new set of opportunities for and challenges to traditional academic presses and to traditional scholarship. There is also a significant upheaval in academic journals amid...

Write First, Ask Questions Later: Publishing and the Race to Tenure Track

Cinema Journal permits authors to post their accepted post-print manuscript to their personal website and/or institutional repository and/or discipline-specific, not-for-profit server immediately after acceptance.

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Crocodile Tears? Authenticity in Televisual Pedagogy

Crocodile Tears? Authenticity in Televisual Pedagogy

Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture

Online Roundtable on Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, with participants Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Melissa Click, Sam Ford, Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Sharon Ross. Section 1 first published as "Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture," by Louisa Stein, Cinema Journal 53 (3): 152–77. Copyright 2014 by The University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: the Two Lincolns, Monuments, and the Preservation of Patriarchy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMerrill SchleierMerrill Schleier is a professor of Art and Architectural History and Film Studies at the University of the Pacific. Her most recent book is Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Her most recent articles include: “Fatal Attractions: Gender, ‘Place and the Korean War in Niagara” in Cinema Journal; “The Griffith Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause: Mystical Temple and Spatiotemporal Structuring Device” in The Journal of Architecture; “The Empire State Building, Working-Class Masculinity and King Kong” in Mosaics; and “The Grid, the Labyrinth, and the Spectacle in The Big Clock (1948): Queered Space and Cold War Discourse,” in Film Studies.

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media:Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture Online Roundtable on Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, with participants Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Melissa Click, Sam Ford, Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Sharon Ross. Moderated by Lousia Stein, Book Review Editor Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York University Press. 2013. $29.95 hardcover; $12.10 e-book. 352pages The following conversation is an edited excerpt from a broader roundtable discussion, organized and moderated by Cinema Journal between June and July 2013. In this section, the conversation focuses on popular culture, fans, and niche cultures. The contributors responded to a series of prompts that asked them to consider the relationship between Spreadable Media and past and current work in fan studies (including Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture).1 Participants also explore Spreadable Media’s relationship to fan studies scholarship and ask whether Spreadable Media represents a shift in the way we think of fans in relationship to popular culture. The full conversation addresses Spreadable Media’s engagement with questions of transmedia, digital culture, and online social activism more broadly, and it will be published online in an upcoming edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. [End Page 152] Kristina Busse: Although Spreadable Media is ultimately not a fan studies book, nor does it try to be, it purposefully engages the concept of the fan and thus gets read in conjunction with fan scholarship, including Jenkins’s previous works, Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture. Given that trajectory and the way the book repeatedly deploys specific examples of fan activities within its larger project, it raises the question as to how Spreadable Media uses the fan and how it engages with fan scholarship. Looking at the way Spreadable Media stretches the concept of being a fan to a point of seeming unrecognizability, I would suggest that the book is ultimately not interested in fans, except what they tell us about larger audiences. There are obviously strategic reasons to expand the term fan from the narrow confines that Henry Jenkins’s earlier Textual Poachers set out. In the intervening years, many aspects of fandom have mainstreamed, a move that Henry has both described extensively and partly helped bring about. There are many benefits to conceptualizing active audiences as fans, but I’d like to look at some of the drawbacks. In particular, I’d like to look at what happens when the definition of fan changes from one based on identity to one based on action. I’d like to look at what gets left out when the definition of fan is as broadly conceived as it is in Spreadable Media, when any “like” click on Facebook, any forwarding of a YouTube link, constitutes a fan activity. I am concerned that such a broadening of the concept facilitates a shift from the fans studied in Textual Poachers to general audiences. Such a shift moves the focus away from the marginal media fan, who was mostly commercially nonviable, often resistant, and uncooperative, and whose dedication to a gift economy was often in spite of capitalist alternatives and not because they didn’t exist. In its stead, the fans who take center stage in Spreadable Media are the commercializable audiences, who happily seem to collaborate in their own exploitation, free laborers creating value of which they cannot even assume ownership. What gets excluded and marginalized in Spreadable Media, then, are the very founders of the concept of fan, the unruly and aggressively anticommercial, the queered and sexually explicit, the anticapitalist and anticopyright. What gets excluded are the audiences whose practices may have been adapted and adopted and celebrated but whose presence is ultimately not desired in this brand-new, commercially viable fan universe. Spreadable Media acknowledges this danger: “We all should be vigilant over what gets sacrificed, compromised, or co-opted by media audiences as part of this process of mainstreaming the activities and interests of cult audiences.”2 But when reading through the chapters, I am distressed by observing that very compromise the authors warn against. I fear the actual driving force of...

Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next

Research Article| December 01 2013 Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next Patricia White Patricia White Patricia White is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999), and co-author with Timothy Corrigan of the textbook The Film Experience (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012). With Meta Mezaj, she and Corrigan are the editors of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011). Her work has appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Out in Culture, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, and Teaching Film. Her book Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting 21st Century Feminisms is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2013) 67 (2): 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.80 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patricia White; Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next. Film Quarterly 1 December 2013; 67 (2): 80–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.80 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Remixing the Remix: Fannish Appropriation and the Limits of Unauthorised Use

Remixing the Remix: Fannish Appropriation and the Limits of Unauthorised Use

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Introduction

Introduction Hollis Griffin, editor (bio) At the 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in New Orleans, I participated in the workshop “Generations of Media Studies.” Here, several established, senior scholars in the field discussed their career trajectories. They talked about the various shifts in their research interests, watershed moments in their teaching experiences, and what it was like to influence cohort after cohort of graduate students. As the most junior person presenting (by far), my own contribution was pointedly more forward looking than retrospective. I stressed how the political economy of higher education has shifted in a way that makes having a long, storied career—with plenty of support for research and ample energy for teaching—a luxury and privilege that fewer media academics will get to enjoy in the years ahead. As the labor market for media scholars increasingly moves toward contract appointments, and even tenure-track jobs now involve a substantial decrease in the perks long associated with them (e.g., research money, sabbatical time), I emphasized that a career in academia looks a lot different for those of us who are just embarking on the path. My presentation was structured by a certain worry about what lies ahead—not just for the field but also for the academy as a whole. When I blogged about that conference for the SCMS website, I wrote about presenting at this workshop. Because I presented last, and was ultimately asked to participate because I was (am) so junior, I called the experience one of “bringing up the rear with the bad news.” When Cinema Journal’s editor invited me to put an “In Focus” section together featuring “new voices” in the field of film and media studies, I thought about my role in that workshop as the young naysayer. I worried about personal essays from early-career academics signifying as a chorus of wailing, whining violins. If employment anxiety and professional malaise have always been realities in academic life, it seems that the current scarcity in, and increasing corporatization of, higher education has made these characteristics far more [End Page 121] palpable in recent years. But I needn’t have worried. While the pages ahead feature a considerable amount of apprehension and concern, what I think comes across louder is the enthusiasm this group shares for intellectual pursuits, as well as the joy they feel in being able to study and teach for a living, and the camaraderie they share with friends and mentors in the field. If the intimate nature of this section is a departure from the writing typically found on these pages, I hope that it is a welcome one. In assembling the list of contributors, my goal was depth and breadth: people from a variety of different subdisciplines, from an array of different institutions. Here you will find essays on film history, new media, television criticism, reception analysis, critical race scholarship, and queer theory. The contributors also embody a diverse cross section of locations: major universities, liberal arts colleges, urban schools, rural institutions, international research institutes, and so on. Another goal I had in putting this section together was to mirror the increasingly global reach of SCMS as an organization. Thus, the essays feature scholars whose teaching, research interests, and current home institutions are located far and wide. As a group, we have also attempted to create some dialogue across the pieces so that the assortment of viewpoints assembled here is united by a tone that is as conversational as it is introspective. Essays of this sort are a risky prospect. Writing them is fraught with all kinds of concerns about authors “saying too much” or “being overly presumptuous.” For this reason, I want to publicly thank the contributors for agreeing to be part of this section. It is to their credit as scholars and writers that the pieces veer away from solipsism and navel-gazing and toward incisiveness and generosity—even as their mode of articulation is personal and affective. Typically, the kinds of insights shared here circulate informally—thoughts and impressions that bubble up in conversations among peers and, maybe, on blogs and Internet message boards. My hope is that the discourse...

Two-Way Mirrors: Looking at the Future of Academic-Industry Engagement

Two-Way Mirrors:Looking at the Future of Academic-Industry Engagement Jennifer Holt (bio) As the study of screen industries evolves, so do our modes of engagement, potential points of access, and collaborative experiences with this dynamic object of study. Interactions between the industry (in its various forms) and the academy are a source of new opportunities and information, often serving as inspiration for future dimensions of the knowledge circulated by the field. They also have a flip side in the methodological, discursive, and even ethical challenges that they present for Film and Media Studies scholars. It is the opportunities embedded in these complications, and the new terrain they present for industry researchers, that I am interested in, for what they might teach us as we look toward the future of this discipline. Going forward, our job will be to strike the right balance between being critical and being engaged with our object of study as we cultivate more terrain for collaboration. I believe we can, and should, create more research projects that involve the industry in some form. Further, we can embrace these projects as potential funding models, sources of rich information and untapped archives, and occasions for disciplinary self-reflection. Interviews have always provided academics with a certain measure of industry interaction. There is an extensive literature in the field that has utilized ethnographic approaches and journalistic tactics to glean information from primary sources; John Caldwell’s Production Culture, Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time, and Vicki Mayer’s Below the Line stand as just a few excellent examples.1 Academics have also long been aware of the hazards associated with the industry interview: the need to sift through “spin” and promotion, to filter interpersonal and institutional agendas, to balance the desire for rapport and an ongoing relationship with the desire to ask tough questions, to translate scholarly concerns for a business-oriented subject, and to navigate the myriad other dimensions and dynamics that can mitigate the value of [End Page 183] these encounters. Indeed, an excellent Cinema Journal In Focus section has already been devoted to the practitioner interview and its attendant challenges.2 In addition to the one-on-one interview, there is an expanding list of options offering varying degrees of industry engagement. Some of these formalized interactions are hosted for academics by industry constituents. For example, in the United States, there are a small number of established “faculty fellowships,” such as the weeklong Faculty Seminar put on by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation, the Faculty Fellowship to the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference, and the Visiting Professor Program at the Advertising Education Foundation. These events provide valuable immersive experiences for faculty, and they create space for dialogue with industry professionals, offer exposure to different discursive constructions of industry trends, and often lead participants to recalibrate their understanding of certain industry dynamics (and how they are skillfully spun by public relations machines). There is also a wide variety of less cultivated but equally productive arenas for screen studies scholars to interact with industry professionals. Dr. Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard was recently named chairman of the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Advisory Committee.3 While it is the rarest of academics who is appointed to lead federal policy commissions, many have testified at congressional hearings, in legal cases involving industry matters, and in front of regulatory bodies. Others have attended events such as the “upfronts” and the Television Critics Association Press Tour, as well as annual conventions held by MIPCOM, MIP-TV, NATPE, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Examples of scholarly work that has grown out of such interactions include Amanda Lotz’s exploration of the upfronts and Tim Havens’s analysis of the global television trade.4 Still more academics have participated in industry-focused forums such as those at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film and music festival and conference, the Produced By conference, the Media That Matters conference organized by the Center for Social Media, the annual congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the Game Developers Conference (GDC), and the Adult Video News (AVN) Adult Entertainment Expo, among many others. Increasingly...

‘A Temporarily Vanished Civilisation’: Ice Cream, Confectionery and Wartime Cinema-Going

The editorial page of The Times on 22 November 1944 contained the following breathless passage: Many a heart must have leapt up at the news, as at a rainbow in the sky, must have felt this one litt...

Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and The American Way of Life in The Second World War

The years 1942 and 1943 saw great concern, on both sides of the Atlantic, about Anglo-American understanding. Almost one million American servicemen were to arrive on British shores by the end of 1...

Jean-Luc Godard—musicien: die Musik in den Filmen von Jean-Luc Godard , and: Jean-Luc Godard (review)

Jean-Luc Godard-musicien: die Musik in den Filmen von Jean-Luc Godard. By Jurg Stenzl. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2010. [464 p. ISBN 9783869160979. i48.] Music examples, facsimiles, interview, bibliography, filmography, discography, index. Jean-Luc Godard. Edited by Bernd Kiefer. (Film-Konzepte, edited by Thomas Koebner and Fabienne Liptay, Heft 20.) Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2010. [116 p. ISBN 9783869160719. i22.] Music examples, screen stills, filmography, list of contributors. Given his fame and widely acknowledged influence, Jean-Luc Godard reached his eightieth birthday in December 2010 after a year predictably filled with festivals, retrospectives, and similar public events. Just as predictably, the director himself was actively involved in the celebration and stirred up controversy along the way. He had already set the terms with a retrospective exhibition in 2006, and when the time came, he offered the premiere of a dense and politically pointed film (Film socialisme, Cannes Film Festival, May 2010). Later in the year, media attention spiked as he dithered about whether he would attend the ceremony to receive an honorary award from the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Science (he decided not to go). Rumors started in 2009 also continued throughout 2010 that Godard's next proj - ect would be a film version of Daniel Mendelsohn's book about the Holocaust, The Lost: Six of Six Million. The year offered surprisingly little from publishing quarters, however. The specialty film seller, Criterion Collection, did take advantage of the event to release a number of early films on DVD and to upgrade several of the most familiar to Blu-ray format. Of three substantial trade-level publications, one is a topical dictionary ( Jean-Luc Douin, Jean-Luc Godard, dictionnaire des passions [Paris: Stock, 2010]) and the second an exhaustive documentation of more than 900 pages by a film historian (Antoine de Baecque, Godard: biographie [Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010]). The third actually appeared in 2009 and was a paperback reprint of a critical biography skewed by overly aggressive claims that Godard is anti-Semitic (Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard [New York: Picador (Macmillan), 2009]). Academic journals, on the other hand, barely seemed to notice. Cinema Journal, the official organ of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, did run a print symposium, but it covered the New Wave generally, not only Godard (in vol. 49, no. 3 [June 2010]). Critical Quarterly also ran a five-article symposium on Godard's late films (in vol. 51, no. 3 [October 2009]), but film periodicals with a leftist political tradition, such as Screen, Cineaste, and Cineaction, published only the scattered article through 2009 and 2010. Ironic, then, that two of the most sustained efforts came not from France or North America but from Germany: a special issue in the periodical Film-Konzepte and a monograph survey of Godard's career in terms of his treatment of the sound track. Jurg Stenzl is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Salzburg. He is known as a medievalist and a specialist on Italian modernists, in particular Luigi Nono. Jean-Luc Godard is his first book about film. The author's segmentation of Godard's career comes through very clearly in the book's organization. Six chapters begin with Godard and his composers, covering early films (from 1959-67) that follow the traditional path in which an experienced musician provides original material for the underscore and sometimes also for source music. For Ever Beethoven gathers seven films from the 1970s and 1980s (with one outlier from 2002) in which that composer's music provides the source material from which Godard fashions the musical component of his film's sound design. Political and Musical Passions, as the title suggests, divides into two sections: the first on the films that respond to world events in the 1970s and in which music's role is either reduced or eliminated, and films from the 1980s in which Godard returns to aesthetic concerns but refashions his approach to the sound track. …

Reinvigorating Film Studies: An Immodest Proposal

CINEJ Cinema Journal is a newcomer to the field of film studies. It is committed to publishing fresh and original research in the fields of film and media studies. The need for such a journal is result of emergence of fresh perspectives in film studies and the absence of an outlet to incorporate such ideals.

Cinema Journal Annotated Index to Volume 50

Cinema Journal Annotated Index to Volume 50

“Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as ‘Surrogate Body’ for the Cinema,” by Christiane Voss

“Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as ‘Surrogate Body’ for the Cinema,” by Christiane Voss Christiane Voss and Vinzenz Hediger (bio) Translated by Inga Pollmann (bio) Introduction At a critical juncture in the history of film theory, about twenty years ago, the two main concerns of film theory were positioning and processing. Feminist film theory and semio-psychoanalytic approaches were interested in how the film positioned the spectator and defined her subjectivity. Meanwhile, arguing against the idea of a passively constructed spectator, cognitivist film theory conceived of the spectator in terms of information processing: the film offered a matrix of information, a series of cues, which the spectator processed in an exercise of mostly pleasurable problem solving. For all the turbulent sexual desire reflected on in feminist and psychoanalytic film theory, and for all the joy and peace of mind that emanates from duly processed chunks of information, both approaches were, in a way, intensely cerebral, wary or sometimes even distrustful of the corporeal aspects of the film experience in the case of feminist film theory, and mostly oblivious to any possibility of an embodied version of information processing in the case of cognitive film theory. Since then, however, and mostly because of the impact of philosophy on film theory, the body has re-entered the frame and become a key focus of film theory. To cite two particularly influential examples, the work of Vivian Sobchack and Raymond Bellour may illustrate this point. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and arguing explicitly against the body-skepticism of feminist and psychoanalytic film theory, Sobchack argued in her 1992 book The Address of the Eye, and again in Carnal Thoughts from 2004, not only that we should think of the spectator as an embodied being but that the film itself has a body—that is, that there is a corporeal dimension to the aesthetics of the film that transcends, even though it interacts with, the individual body of the spectator.1 [End Page 136] Meanwhile, starting from within the scope of psychoanalytic film theory and inspired by Gilles Deleuze and his thinking of the film in terms of image and affect, and more particularly in terms of how affect traverses and transforms the subject, Bellour has developed seminal elements of a theory of the cinematic body, or rather of the film-as-body, over the past twenty years. “Le film est un corps de mémoire” (the film is a body of memory) is the opening line of one of Bellour’s most recent books, a brief study of “Menschen am Sonntag.” In just a few words this line sums up an argument about body, memory, and spectatorship which Bellour develops more fully in the more than six hundred pages of his 2009 book Le corps du cinema, focusing in particular on the film experience as a state of quasi-hypnosis and on aesthetic emotions on a presemantic, somatic level. As different as their approaches and philosophical references may be—Sobchack, for instance, argues from within a phenomenological framework and develops her theoretical argument at a level of media theory, whereas Bellour, much like André Bazin before him, comes to theory from the engagement with specific works—both Sobchack and Bellour converge on the idea of the film’s body, or the film-as-body, which goes beyond any psychologically grounded attention to the tactile and other somatic aspects of film viewing as an individual and individually attributable experience. We chose to present the following essay by Christiane Voss to the readership of Cinema Journal not least because her work marks a notable contribution to the field of thinking about the corporeal dimensions of film delineated by the work of such authors as Sobchack and Bellour. Writing in German and coming from a philosophical background—her previous work was on the philosophy of emotions, with a particular focus on contributions from analytic philosophy—Voss picks up a thread from Sobchack’s argument about the corporeal dimensions of the film experience and combines it with a philosophical argument about illusion as a key element of aesthetic experience. Reviving a Kantian approach to illusion which posits it as a...

Introduction: The "Bad Romance" of Media Industry Studies

Gaga neatly sums up my relationship with industry studies. I guess that I've always had a bad romance with media industry studies, betraying my original discipline of Economics to pursue Media Studies and, in turn, cheating on academia by leaving to work in the industry. Still, I've always felt that industry studies existed in a bold liminal space of Media Studies, never fully embraced by those engaged in narrative /textual work, and more or less openly dismissed by those in traditional economics (I once overheard two microeconomists at UCLA shriek with gales of laughter over the possibility of film theory intersecting with economic theory). As a result, when teaching or writing in the area of media economics, I always felt that a certain freedom was possible: the parameters of the field were still being set, and the open terrain was vast. Since leaving academia ten years ago, I've kept track of industry studies through editing a book series (Commerce and Mass Culture, University of Minnesota Press), reviewing manuscripts and articles, and occasionally writing articles and giving guest lectures. On the occasion of Cinema Journal reviewing five industry studies texts, the editors have asked me to consider the state of industry studies today. Using my lost decade as a starting and ending point, I want to suggest some tendencies for industry studies during the decade.