The Cinemising Process: Filmgoing in the Silent Era

This essay examines changing conventions of film spectatorship in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France

The Case of the phantom fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires

This article examines the recurring image of the severed head in Louis Feuillade's serial film Les Vampires (1915-16), linking it to the anxieties and traumas engendered by the First World War. In particular, it argues for a reconsideration of the image's emblematic status as a symbol of castration, and suggests that the castration complex itself may be best understood as a fetish, acting as a decoy for other losses that cannot be acknowledged overtly (those killed and wounded at war). Like a phantom limb, the castration fetish is a substitute that at once disavows an absence and acts as a memorial to that absence

Ezra Becoming Familiar Children's Literature

This essay reads the relationship between witches and their companion animals in Harry Potter (specifically, cats) and His Dark Materials (birds) as allegories of social relations based, respectively, on identification and alterity. The ethical implications of these allegories are considered in the context of these works and beyond

National Cinemas in the Global Era

This essay discusses the evolving concept of national cinema in the era of globalization

Posthuman memory and the re(f)use economy

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2009 filmMicmacs à tire-larigot, a scathing critique of the global arms industry, depicts a ragtag bunch of misfits who live beneath a refuse dump and give a new lease of life to discarded objects, endowing them with what might be called ‘reuse value’. Unlike exchange value, which obscures the past labour that produced the commodity, reuse value enfolds history into an object, reflecting the past use to which it was put, and making of it an exteriorized, prostheticised form of human memory. Reused objects signify two eras at once: that in which they were manufactured (thus the African ethnographer’s antique typewriter evokes the colonial past), and the era in which they are being reused (the not-so-postcolonial present). Coextensive with this animation of disused objects through their endowment with memory is the reification of human beings, who become reduced to an assemblage of inanimate objects as they are alternately blown up in dirty wars or collected by a wealthy arms manufacturer in the form of celebrity body parts. The double-edged nature of the re(f)use economy, which both privileges resistance and underlines the posthuman dissolution of the boundaries between people and objects, points up the pharmacological dimension (at once destructive and potentially positive) of globalisation

Hidden in plain sight: bringing terror home

This analysis of Caché/Hidden(Michael Haneke, 2005) examines how the film's depiction of a world of material privilege corroded by psychic unease opens up broader questions of the political deployment of fear and paranoid fantasy, and the dishonesities and displacements of postcolonialism

L'Auberge espagnole (2002): transnational departure or domestic crash landing?

Cédric Klapisch's vision of encounters within the new Europe in L'Auberge espagnole offers a positive account of the new European project. The film's exclusive focus on young European ERASMUS students already underlines the aims and limitations of what is supposedly a broad cultural and educational exchange. The emphasis on learning about ‘other’ national cultures to achieve a more integrated European union quickly dissolves when the students abandon any interest in local culture, history or politics to focus instead on their own sexual and emotional rites of passage. Challenging the film's construction and ostensible celebration of the new European transnational identity, this article questions the validity and implications of constructing a representation of both Barcelona and Europe riddled with cultural clichés and iconic images of a city as a purely aesthetic experience. It also notes the film's failure to engage with the larger social and historical context that injects meaning into the urban fabric of Barcelona itself

Out of Bounds: The Spatial Politics of Civility in The Square (Ostlund, 2017) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017)

Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Michael Haneke’s Happy End, both released in 2017, skirt around the edges of immigration in Europe. Both address the question of who belongs and who does not belong, not only within the boundaries that determine where one country ends and another begins, but also within those that determine who is a member of civil society and who is not. These films explore how the bounds of what is considered appropriate are breached in certain spatial settings, questioning the meaning of “civility” in both a social and political sense, and prompting us to contemplate the various meanings of hospitality in the context of national and European identity.Will appear in 'Europe at the Crossroads: Cinematic Takes', Winter 202

Why the Treatment of Mental Disorders Is an Important Component of HIV Prevention among People Who Inject Drugs

People who inject drugs are more likely to be HIV positive and to have a mental disorder than the general population. We explore how the detection and treatment of mental illness among people who are injecting drugs are essential to primary and secondary prevention of HIV infection in this population. Aside from opioid addiction, few studies have been conducted on the links between mental disorders and injection-drug use. However, independent of the injection-drug use literature, a growing number of studies demonstrate that untreated mental illness, especially depression and alcohol/substance use disorders, is associated with HIV-related risk behaviors, acquiring HIV infection, failure to access HIV care and treatment, failure to adhere to HIV care and treatment, and increased morbidity and mortality from HIV-related diseases and comorbidities. In our review of both the published literature and gray literature we found a dearth of information on models for providing care for both opioid addiction and other mental illnesses regardless of HIV status, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. We therefore make recommendations on how to address the mental health needs of HIV-positive people who inject drugs, which include the provision of opioid substitution therapy and integrated mental health, substance abuse, and HIV services