Book Review: From Méliès to New Media: Spectral Projections

Reviewed by Amy Ione, August 2020
Leonardo Reviews, https://www.leonardo.info/review/2020/08/from-melies-to-new-media-spectral-projections

From Méliès to New Media: Spectral Projections is an exploration of the presence and importance of film history in contemporary digital culture. Using a media archaeology approach, the author, Wendy Haslem, aims to demonstrate that innovative new media forms are not only indebted to, but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Throughout the book Haslem presents an array of projects that deftly move through topics, like indexicality, semiotics, memory, and digital restoration to light, materiality/immateriality, creative experimentation, time and obsolescence. While the overall goal is to introduce a new language of cinema and an alternative approach to historiography, the net result is a good start but falls short. The study is strongest and most original when presenting contemporary projects and examples of spectacle. Haslem tells us:

“Many of the films that I explore in this book favour spectacle over realism, some prioritize non-linear, experimental narration over linear, classical narrative form. Many of the older (and some of the newer) films exhibit surfaces etched with markers of time, and as such, they provide a rich surface aesthetic to encounter and explore. My approach to writing on film has always been to try to explore the surface of the film itself. That means prioritizing the aesthetic, looking for moments where details of the spectacle reveal history. My tendency is to zoom into surface details, focusing on the traces of celluloid that remain present within a digital ecology. Material detail, surface, aesthetic and mise-en-scéne drive my film analysis. This is also an approach that prioritizes the senses. (p. 28)

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Speaking of Amy Johnson, A Pioneering English Pilot

Today I learned about Amy Johnson (1903-1941), a pioneering English pilot, who was the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. Flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, she set many long-distance records during the 1930s. She flew in the Second World War as a part of the Air Transport Auxiliary and died during a ferry flight.
Here’s a wonderful song about her and some newsreel footage.

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New Health Humanities Initiative: CoVid-19: Critical/Creative Studies in Music, Image, and Text

As the outlook surrounding the crisis continues to worsen in the US and around the world, the project carries with it a critical commitment to supporting artists and theorists developing new work and thought responding to the pandemic in real time.

Registration in advance is required, here

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EVENT: Einstein’s Wife by David C. Cassidy

Einstein’s Wife by David C. Cassidy
Wednesday, May 29th 7:30PM
Playroom Theater, 151 West 46th Street, 8th Floor

Mileva Marić confronts the challenges of disability and discrimination, love and fate, and her marriage to Albert Einstein. Based on actual events.
Time: Fall 1893.
Place: Zagreb, Croatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire

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CFP: American Art and Visual Culture Seminar

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
Submission Deadline: Monday, June 3, 2019

The Newberry Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture is open to those working in the art history and visual culture of the United States, from the colonial era to the present. They are inviting papers that cross and challenge borders both within and outside the discipline that engage questions of methodology and ideology, examine exhibition and provenance history, probe the categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and reflect critically on the state and outlook of the field.

They also welcome topics focusing on Chicago art and design within the larger national and international contexts, such as: thematic studies on world’s fairs, Chicago’s Gilded Age, institutional/private/corporate display practices, urban landscapes, African-American art past and present, and self-taught artists.

Flyer about the seminar
More information: scholarlyseminars@newberry.org
Submit a proposal at https://www.newberry.org/seminar-proposal-form

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How the U. of Tulsa Landed Bob Dylan’s ‘Secret Archive’

How did the University of Tulsa land the coveted Bob Dylan archive? The coup was the result of a lengthy courtship that began more than a year ago, see article here