The one connecting factor in the different chapters in this book is obviously Van Hoogstraten himself: there was a single personality – although our knowledge of it may be shifting with each new historiographical focus – that linked art, literature, and scholarship during a foundational era of Dutch cultural history. Even though getting to know the ‘real’ Samuel van Hoogstraten may be b…
Television before TV rethinks the history of interwar television by exploring the medium’s numerous demonstrations organized at national fairs and international exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Building upon extensive archival research in Britain, Germany, and the United States, Anne-Katrin Weber analyses the sites where the new medium met its first audiences. She argues that public d…
Welche Rolle spielt Design in gesellschaftlichen Transformationsprozessen? Können Zukünfte und soziale Wirklichkeiten nachhaltig gestaltet werden - oder handelt es sich bei den Wirkungen gestalterischer Eingriffe um mehr oder weniger zufällige Reaktionen eigensinnig evolvierender sozialer Systeme auf gut gemeinte Interventionen?
Stories are perceived as central to modern life. Not only in narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, theater, but also in social media. Telling/having "a story" is widely deemed essential, in business as well as in social life. Does this mark an intensification of what has always been part of human cultures; or has the realm of "story" expanded to dominate twenty-first centur…
Semio-pragmatics, an approach to the study of film and audiovisual media first proposed by Roger Odin in the early 1980s, shifted the focus from textual analysis to the interaction of text and context and to the institutional modes of framing and reading which shape the viewer’s engagement with the film. A response to an impasse in post-1968 film semiotics and psychoanalytical approaches to f…
Soul of the Documentary offers a groundbreaking new approach to documentary cinema.Ilona Hongisto stirs current thinking by suggesting that the work of documentary films is not reducible to representing what already exists. By closely reading a diverse body of films—fromThe Last BolsheviktoGrey Gardens—Hongisto shows how documentary cinema intervenes in the real by framing it and creatively…
We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certainly without the full theoretical and intellectua…
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has been controversial from its beginning in the life of the French Visitationist nun Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), who established the devotion after a series of mystical visions of Christ. Under the leadership of Sister Sophie Barat, founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1800, the devotion was taken around the world in the course of the nine…
This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of 'world cinema' with the more substantive concept of 'realist cinema'. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: 'non-cin…
This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rap…