Need for narrative

What do consumers need from a narrative? How can videographers satisfy those needs? Through semi-structured interviews with 55 Eurostar passengers from 14 countries, this film documents how people define narratives, why they need them, and how they experience the effects of need for narrative. The adjoining commentary contributes to the development of videography as an attractive method by introducing the videographer’s perspective and elucidating key story elements that can help satisfy viewers’ needs for narrative. The suggested approach maintains the vivid quality of videography and respects its methodological rigour, while increasing its effectiveness in close alignment with a consumer society that visual communication increasingly permeates. As such, the commentary and the film jointly unveil videographers’ etic and viewers’ emic use and evaluation of the videographic method

Television and serial fictions

Written in 1974, Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form was to become for many academics, and particularly for academics who approached popular culture from the perspective of the humanities, one of the foundational texts of the study of television, the first and even the only book on reading lists, the book which introduced the concept of ‘flow’ as a way of identifying ‘the defining characteristic of broadcasting’. While, almost forty years later, many of its formulations have worn thin with over-use, Williams's observation on the centrality of televisual dramatic fiction to modern experience still has the force of defamiliarisation: it is still surprising to consider, as if for the first time, how much of our time is spent with, how many of our references are drawn from, or how much the structure of contemporary feeling is shaped by television dramatic fiction in its various forms. ‘It seems probable’, says Williams, that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or a weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is not uncommon for the majority of viewers to see, regularly, as much as two or three hours of drama, of various kinds, every day. The implications of this have scarcely begun to be considered. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to see a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food

The Urban-rural Dichotomy in the Indonesian Documentaries Nona Nyonya? and Untuk Apa?

The media play a pivotal role in the democratization process in Indonesia and this is among others apparent in the surge of films, both fiction and documentaries that have been produced after the end Suharto\u27s decades of control over the media. It is important to note, however, that compared with fiction films, the documentary genre remains rather unpopular in Indonesia. Indonesian documentary films struggle to depict stories of the subaltern and those living in the “periphery” in order for them to be seen and heard by the greater masses and by those in power – the ones in the “centre” or Jakarta. This paper discusses the connection between urban and rural voices and its impact in the documentary films Nona nyonya? (Miss mrs?, 2008) and Untuk apa? (What\u27s the point?, 2008) produced by Kalyana Shira Films, an organization well-known for its work on gender issues using film as medium. Departing from the notion that the film industry itself is still largely Jakarta-centred, this article focuses on the way urban settings and voices are used to create rhetoric, and the impact of the domination of these urban voices over the rural ones

Dying to be Seen: Snuff-Fiction's Problematic Fantasies of "Reality"

The mythic Snuff film has remained a persistent cinematic rumour since the mid-1970s. The discourses that surround Snuff are preoccupied by two factors: (a) the formal aesthetic, and (b) their alleged role as a kind of titillating pornography. Although critical narratives have been established to account for the subgenre, little has been done to unpick a recent wave of hardcore horror pseudo-Snuff texts, and the cultural climate they enter into. Exploring the August Underground trilogy (2001-2007) in particular, I investigate how contemporary faux-Snuff fits into and challenges Snuff’s established rhetorical paradigms. This discussion is informed by the legacy of 1970s anti-porn feminism as well as the age of reality culture, torture porn, and extreme pornography that immediately situates 21st century hardcore horror

The global event? The media, football and the FIFA World Cup

An examination of the FIFA World Cup as media mega event and the role played by television in this process

Humanity Rearranged: The Polish and Czechoslovak Pavilions at Expo 58

This article explores the ways in which ʻcinematicʼ exhibition techniques exploited by Czechoslovak and Polish designers in schemes for the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 can be understood as part of a new political project to produce active citizens after the trauma of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Its originality lies in extending a discussion on the work of celebrated figures like Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames by scholars like Marc Treib in Space Calculated in Seconds (1996) and Beatrix Colomina in Domesticity at War (2007) to the context of Eastern Europe. It examines, for the first time, the historic coincidence of multimedia architectural and exhibition design practices on both sides of the East-West divide. Based on research in the archives of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and on press reports from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, this 8,000 word article brings hitherto unresearched architecture and design practices to an international readership. Crowley takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing contemporaneous theories of space developed by architects and theories of the image developed by film makers in Poland and Hungary to bear on exhibition design. Crowley was invited to present this research at a symposium at the Central European University in Budapest in 2010. Developed from this paper, this article appears in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. In recent years, this refereed journal has become a central forum for the discussion of modernist design

Old New Media: Closed-circuit Television and the Classroom

This article explores closed-circuit television (CCTV) and its ‘bright promise stage’, as it was contemplated, marketed, and implemented as a low-cost classroom tool. After the Federal Communications Commission issued the 1952 Sixth Report and Order, many schools and communities sought to bring educational television to the classroom. However, this model was financially out of reach for most. CCTV was a more affordable version of educational television that could cater to specific classroom needs and allow schools to create their own in-house network. CCTV represents just one of many new technologies that have been promoted as ideal for classroom instruction over the last century. Using articles and advertisements from popular press magazines, educational journals, books, and archival materials, this article seeks to illuminate the ‘social practices and conflicts’ that contributed to the conversations around CCTV’s classroom utility. It concludes by connecting CCTV’s promotion in the 1950s to more recent new media technologies

Everyday racism and "my tram experience": emotion, civic performance and learning on YouTube

Does the public expression and performance of shock, distress, anger, frustration and ideological disapproval of particular sorts of politics constitute a form of collective political expression from which individuals can learn about being citizens When it comes to the expression of feelings of racial and other types of prejudice, has political correctness led to a deepening of entrenched racist beliefs with no channel for discussion This article engages with such questions through a case study of YouTube responses to «My Tram Experience» a commuter-uploaded mobile-phone video of a racist diatribe on a tram in the UK. Using qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis, it describes how these performed, networked and distributed moments of citizen angst demonstrate a limited but interesting range of civic engagements with and positionings towards racism, immigration, class and nationalism. For one reason or another these are not allowed to occur in other public for a such as the mainstream media or schools. The article argues that these vlogs are both a wide-ranging potentially therapeutic resource for those needing validation for their racist or anti-racist views, or for those who wish to express and garner solidarity for discomfort and pain caused by racism; they are also a significant though currently uncurated resource for citizenship education both formal and informal because of their engagements with technology, social context, emotional context and political rhetoric

"Too close to call" : CNN's politics of captions in the coverage of the Florida Recount

Proceeding chronologically in terms of the events covered, Raimund Schieß in his paper „Too close to call: CNN’s politics of captions in the coverage of the Florida Recount“ focusses on Nov. 11, 2000, when the Bush campaign applied to Miami Federal Court to stop the manual recount of ballots which had been started in some counties. The paper studies the discursive practices employed by the CNN journalists to construct a particular version of the events, focussing on captions, i.e. the lines of text inserted at the bottom of the tv screen, and on the way in which they interact with the other verbal and visual components of the television text. Raimund Schieß concludes that captions, far beyond providing mere details of a speech event (who is talking to whom about what, where and when), are used to select, to highlight and hide, and thus to invite a preferred interpretation of the event. He is also able to show that captions are often employed to exploit a story’s potential for drama and sensation. His detailed micro-analysis of the verbal and visual dimensions of the television text is supported by careful documentation of the data, either through screen shots or via transcriptions of the stretches of broadcast discussed