Wordlessness (to be Continued)

This is the first part of some thoughts toward how to open up again the question of the theoretical issues around the expressivity of the body, especially given the example of silent cinema. It is an old semiotic problem of what meanings words convey and what the body without words can be said to “express.” After deciding that “silence” is not the operative concept we want I return briefly to the no-word advocates like Béla Balász, and “pure cinema” theorists Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Louis Delluc, as well as to Christian Metz who was highly dismissive of what he called the “gibberish” of the silent screen. Peter Brooks comes in for some scrutiny for coming so close in his “Text of Muteness” chapter in The Melodramatic Imagination, but I find that he still sits on the fence, wanting to give the day to silent expression, but then signaling a preference for words. So I keep asking what is meant by the phrase “words cannot express,” wanting to know if this means that they fall short or that other signs must take up the slack, or that words will never substitute for gestures. Concluding with Lillian Gish’s essay on “Speech Without Words” and Asta Nielsen’s position that the American cinema had too many words, I call this an exercise in defining a problem although I do not consider this project anything more than “to be continued.

Activism, affect, identification: trans documentary in France and Spain and its reception

This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. The first part addresses questions surrounding the place of affect and narrative in documentary film, particularly in relation to trans issues. The second part o f the article analyses an audience case study from a screening at the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Barcelona of Valérie Mitteaux's Girl or Boy, My Sex is not my Gender (2011), considering how different viewers respond to the representatio n of trans identities. The article builds on qualitative research whilst extending the exploration of sexuality and gender in previous audience studies to a consideration of documentary film, seeking to provide a more nuanced understanding of what audience claims for identification in politicised contexts mean

The Science of Marine Protected Areas (3rd edition, Mediterranean)

The main purpose of the booklet is to present the latest scientific information about the effects of MPAs in the Mediterranean in order to inform current management dialogues. This is particularly relevant given the increasing legislative frameworks and political initiatives to implement networks of MPAs in countries across the Mediterranean Sea. Importantly, this Edition does much more than simply tailor the earlier content for the Mediterranean region. The edition update the basic content of the booklet, drawing on the wealth of new published scientific literature, highlighting case studies from the Mediterranean Sea

Community change within a Caribbean coral reef Marine Protected Area following two decades of local management

© The Author(s), 2013. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in PLoS ONE 8 (2013): e54069, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054069.Structural change in both the habitat and reef-associated fish assemblages within spatially managed coral reefs can provide key insights into the benefits and limitations of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). While MPA zoning effects on particular target species are well reported, we are yet to fully resolve the various affects of spatial management on the structure of coral reef communities over decadal time scales. Here, we document mixed affects of MPA zoning on fish density, biomass and species richness over the 21 years since establishment of the Saba Marine Park (SMP). Although we found significantly greater biomass and species richness of reef-associated fishes within shallow habitats (5 meters depth) closed to fishing, this did not hold for deeper (15 m) habitats, and there was a widespread decline (38% decrease) in live hard coral cover and a 68% loss of carnivorous reef fishes across all zones of the SMP from the 1990s to 2008. Given the importance of live coral for the maintenance and replenishment of reef fishes, and the likely role of chronic disturbance in driving coral decline across the region, we explore how local spatial management can help protect coral reef ecosystems within the context of large-scale environmental pressures and disturbances outside the purview of local MPA management.Funding was provided by the Saba Conservation Foundation ((SCF), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, The Australian National University and Australian Research Council

Habitat and Scale Shape the Demographic Fate of the Keystone Sea Urchin Paracentrotus lividus in Mediterranean Macrophyte Communities

Demographic processes exert different degrees of control as individuals grow, and in species that span several habitats and spatial scales, this can influence our ability to predict their population at a particular life-history stage given the previous life stage. In particular, when keystone species are involved, this relative coupling between demographic stages can have significant implications for the functioning of ecosystems. We examined benthic and pelagic abundances of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus in order to: 1) understand the main life-history bottlenecks by observing the degree of coupling between demographic stages; and 2) explore the processes driving these linkages. P. lividus is the dominant invertebrate herbivore in the Mediterranean Sea, and has been repeatedly observed to overgraze shallow beds of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica and rocky macroalgal communities. We used a hierarchical sampling design at different spatial scales (100 s, 10 s and <1 km) and habitats (seagrass and rocky macroalgae) to describe the spatial patterns in the abundance of different demographic stages (larvae, settlers, recruits and adults). Our results indicate that large-scale factors (potentially currents, nutrients, temperature, etc.) determine larval availability and settlement in the pelagic stages of urchin life history. In rocky macroalgal habitats, benthic processes (like predation) acting at large or medium scales drive adult abundances. In contrast, adult numbers in seagrass meadows are most likely influenced by factors like local migration (from adjoining rocky habitats) functioning at much smaller scales. The complexity of spatial and habitat-dependent processes shaping urchin populations demands a multiplicity of approaches when addressing habitat conservation actions, yet such actions are currently mostly aimed at managing predation processes and fish numbers. We argue that a more holistic ecosystem management also needs to incorporate the landscape and habitat-quality level processes (eutrophication, fragmentation, etc.) that together regulate the populations of this keystone herbivore

The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

Part of the War, Documentary and Iraq Dossier

The Inevitability of Teleology: From le Dispositif to Apparatus Theory to Dispositifs Plural

The article asks how problems of historical method are implied in the question “What Is Left of Apparatus Theory [...] ?”, the topic of the round table for which this paper was first delivered at the IMPACT conference. It goes on to recap the problems with traditional historical approaches : the “from…to” overview, the linear narrative, and the teleological expectation, to name a few. Then, it suggests, following Reinhard Koselleck, that teleologies (like the teleology to end all teleologies – the death of cinema) are unavoidable if one is functioning as a historian-positioned-in-time. Finally, it asks how we are to lay out Baudry and Foucault and trace the “adventures” of the apparatus and apparatus theory when the discourse theory that underwrote their projects critiques the project of “discovering” past events since in the end we are constituting the technology we discover, the same technology that we have said constitutes us.L’auteure, ayant participé à une table ronde intitulée “Que reste-t-il de la théorie du dispositif?”, lors du colloque Impact, s’interroge sur les problèmes historiographiques que soulève cette question. Elle y résume les problèmes liés aux approches traditionnelles de l’histoire : la vue d’ensemble “de/depuis ... à/jusqu’à”; le récit linéaire; la perspective téléologique; etc. Ensuite, s’inspirant de Reinhard Kosselleck, elle suggère que les téléologies (comme celle de mettre fin à toutes les téléoglogies – la mort du cinéma) sont inévitables pour quiconque occupe la position d’un historien-situé-dans-le-temps. Elle s’interroge enfin sur la façon d’exposer les travaux de Baudry et de Foucault, et sur comment retracer les “aventures” du dispositif et de sa théorisation alors que la théorie du discours ayant souscrit à leurs projets critique toute “découverte” d’événements passés, puisqu’en définitive elle avance que nous en sommes toujours à constituer la technologie que nous découvrons alors même que nous croyons qu’elle nous constitue