Digital Humanities and Videographic Criticism SIG

Suryansu Guha, Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, and Allison Cooper

In Translation: Matsumoto Toshio and the Antifascist Avant-Garde Documentary

Julia Alekseyeva

The Four Forms of Non-fiction Cinema: Modality and Expressivity in Documentary Classification

Lawrence Garcia

Abstract: This article argues that documentary classifications can serve a distinctive expressive function that has thus far been overlooked in non-fiction scholarship. Following the lead of Robert Brandom, I contend that classifications should aim to render explicit modal relations that are implicit in the terms used in practical discourse. To substantiate this claim, the article builds on two distinctions from Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to advance a novel, modally explicit taxonomy of four non-fiction forms: chronicle, portrait, diary, and anatomy. I argue that this taxonomy's greater expressivity, in comparison to that of prior classifications, highlights the significance of modality in classificatory approaches more generally.

Memories of Development: Global Media After State Socialism

Zachary Hicks

Abstract: Amid ongoing debates about globalization, the postsocialist former Second World has largely receded from view, its significance confined to its disappearance or to its status as prehistory. I argue that introducing postsocialism and the former Second World as a framework disrupts and complicates discourses of the global that inform much thinking about contemporary film and media. Seeking a materialist methodology that can account for the postsocialist world, I offer the Chto Delat? group's intermedial art installation titled Otritsanie otritsaniya (The Negation of Negation, 2003) as a case study for understanding postsocialist transformation and the uneven development that underwrites it.

Readers Engagement and Imaginary Stardom: Exploring Turkish Movie Magazines and Oriental Star Selma in the 1930s

Özge Özyılmaz

Abstract: This article examines Turkish movie magazines in the 1930s, analyzing their reader engagement strategies and impact on cinema culture. Employing puzzles, surveys, and competitions, magazines aimed to foster an active readership. My focus is on Holivut magazine's portrayal of the fictional story of Selma, a Turkish girl who escapes to Hollywood, winning the Oriental Star contest, and the magazine's publication of actress Marian Marsh's photographs as the fictional Selma. The Selma story leads to temporary tension between Holivut and another magazine, as readers perceive an insult and demand a response. Even if only a fiction, the Selma case underlines the presence of fan audiences closely following Hollywood, affirming the magazines' success in cultivating an active readership.

“A Special, Special Agent”: Defamiliarized Disability in World of Giants

Olivia Johnston Riley

Abstract: This article analyzes the 1959 TV show World of Giants, which narrates its six-inch-tall protagonist Mel Hunter's struggle to live and work as a miniaturized spy in a normative environment. This defamiliarized experience of speculative impairment can be read productively in a disability register, rendering legible the show's critique of structural inaccessibility and complicating past scholarship's queer readings with a crip interpretation of Mel's non-normative gender and relationships with his "normal" companions. This argument combats disability's erasure in broadcast history scholarship and intervenes in conventional narratives regarding mid-century disability representation.

Macau on Location: Cinematic and Sociospatial Analysis of a Postcolonial City

Christopher K. Tong

Abstract: The former Portuguese colony of Macau observed the twenty-fifth anniversary of its Handover to the People's Republic of China in 2024. Since the Handover, the gambling enclave has seen an acceleration in urban and infrastructural development, including the reclamation of a landmass known as the Cotai Strip and its integration into the Greater Bay Area. This article presents Macau as a unique case in the postcolonial study of film and space. Blending film interpretation, postcolonial history, and fieldwork spanning over a decade, this article introduces what the author calls the ethnographic drift as a method of cinematic and sociospatial analysis.

Introduction

Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa and Leo Goldsmith

Preenactment, Now and Then

Alisa Lebow

The Truth Is Out There: UFO Conspiracy and Science Fiction

Gerry Canavan

The Delay Between Thinking and Feeling: Documenting Affect in Citizen Sleeper

Cameron Kunzelman

The Time of the Assassins

Laliv Melamed

Fabulations of Light: Speculative Operations in Sunstone and All Light, Everywhere

Jihoon Kim

Close Encounters: Nosferasta: First Bite and Tierra en trance

Almudena Escobar López

Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981–2022
by Jihoon Kim

Reviewed by Hye Jean Chung

Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace
by Timothy P.A. Cooper

Reviewed by Zehra Husain

Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders
by Isabel Huacuja Alonso

Reviewed by Mejgan Massoumi

Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema
by Maggie Hennefeld

Reviewed by Judith Mayne

The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion
by Iván Chaar López

Reviewed by Lisa Messeri

Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror
by Kartik Nair

Reviewed by Julie Turnock