Between scenes: Glasgow’s alternative film spaces in the 1990s

This article focuses on previously undocumented film initiatives that emerged within counter-cultural scenes in Glasgow, presenting the case study of New Visions, a film and video festival established in 1992. Drawing on primary sources including institutional archives, festival brochures, and interviews, this article argues that Glasgow’s alternative film culture had a symbiotic relationship with the arts and the music scenes, a relationship made concrete through the use of shared spaces and the transit of people between different practices. In the context of shifting agendas of cultural policy and funding, with a growing emphasis on festivals, New Visions’ struggles illuminate the clash between grassroots initiatives and mainstream cultural policy

Culture beyond extractivism: What might a post-growth cinema look like?

First paragraph: IN THIS ARTICLE, I argue against the growth-based model of the cultural industries, focusing on cinema and thinking towards alternative pathways for a postgrowth creative sector in Scotland. In the months since I started writing it, many of the things I argued about have ground to a halt due the Covid-19 pandemic. Production projects have stalled, venues have closed, awards have been postponed and festivals moved online. As people’s livelihoods hang in the balance, it needs to be said that this crisis is not a solution to the problems with the status quo. Indeed, its tendency is to reinforce the concentration of power, as the sector reacts defensively and closes down spaces for experimentation. Returning to this analysis while the situation remains very uncertain is a risky exercise, but I do it in the hope that, amongst the grief and the fear, there is also a critical desire for a different life in and out of this impasse.https://enough.scot/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/LESS1-C3.pd

Ephemeral Cinema Spaces

With changing technologies and social habits, the communal cinema experience would seem to be a legacy from another era. However, the last decade has seen a surge in interest for screening films in other, temporary public settings. This desire to turn pubs, galleries, parks, and even boats, into temporary cinema spaces is moved not only by a love for movies, but also a search for ways of being and working together. This book documents current practices of pop-up and site-specific cinema exhibition in the UK (with a focus on Scotland), tracing their links with historical forms of non-theatrical exhibition such as public hall cinema and fairground bioscopes. Through archival research, observation and interviews, the project asks how exhibitors create ephemeral social spaces, and how the combination of film and venue reinvents cinema as device and as social practice

Culture beyond extractivism: What might a post-growth cinema look like?

First paragraph: IN THIS ARTICLE, I argue against the growth-based model of the cultural industries, focusing on cinema and thinking towards alternative pathways for a postgrowth creative sector in Scotland. In the months since I started writing it, many of the things I argued about have ground to a halt due the Covid-19 pandemic. Production projects have stalled, venues have closed, awards have been postponed and festivals moved online. As people’s livelihoods hang in the balance, it needs to be said that this crisis is not a solution to the problems with the status quo. Indeed, its tendency is to reinforce the concentration of power, as the sector reacts defensively and closes down spaces for experimentation. Returning to this analysis while the situation remains very uncertain is a risky exercise, but I do it in the hope that, amongst the grief and the fear, there is also a critical desire for a different life in and out of this impasse

Ports: On the material and symbolic mediation of global capitalism

Introducing and contextualising the contributions to the thematic section on ports, we discuss the conceptual and empirical productivity of the port for media research. As material infrastructures, ports mediate between land and sea, nature and culture, centres of power and colonised/extracted peripheries. As logistic nodes, ports connect transport and communication, technological innovation and revolutionary agency. Their ambivalent and managed visibility makes ports an intriguing motif of media representations that is harnessed for dramatic narratives, cognitive mapping of capitalism, or for city branding. As such ports help to rethink ideas about the relationship between material and symbolic aspects of mediation, between technological innovation and cultural heritage, between metaphorical and literal media ecologies

Ports and the politics of visibility: An interview with Laleh Khalili

In this interview with Laleh Khalili, her book Sinews of War and Trade (Verso, 2020) is the starting point to discuss how ports – through their material procedures and their media representations – contribute to the uneven visibility of the global economy and labor conditions. The book weaves a richly-detailed history of places along the Arabian peninsula that have been transformed by oil and finance, imperialism and nationalism, from the traditional dhow traders to the modern container ports and oil terminals. In the interview Khalili details how some ports have become a spectacle that enacts the technological sublime and caters to tourism, while also obscuring less attractive operations such as bulk cargo and scrap. Their managed visibility offers insights into the infrastructural power relationships they emerge from and reproduce. This was particularly salient in the context of supply chain crises during COVID, which also exacerbated problems of labour exploitation and the restriction of human movement. Ports can also be key nodes of protest through tactical interruption of capitalist logistics. Next to critical analysis, Khalili suggests literary imagination as a procedure that allows for a more complex understanding of the layered realities of ports