This book is about f ilms and f ilmmakers committed to reality. For them, the world is not a mere construct or discourse, but made of people, animals, plants and objects that physically exist, thrive, suffer and die. They feel part of, and responsible for, this material world and want to change it for the better. ‘Realism’, this book argues, is what def ines these f ilms’ mode of producti…
For some time now, in newspapers and books, a series of words keep ap-pearing that begin with the pref ix “post-.” As for these new words, the key to understanding seems to be a semantics of ambiguity. Post does not indicate something absolutely different but something in-between: postcapital-ism would be a new phase of capitalism; postmodernism, a new f igure of modernism; and post-history…
igitalisation and virtual worlds are increasingly permeating the cultural sector and the creative industries. When it is difficult for cultural offerings to find their audience, they can or must actively reach out to their audience. This also applies to museums, which can find and retain audiences in different ways and with different formats. Even a virtual museum is fundamentally a museum. …
The shortage of affordable housing in cities is one of the most significant global challenges. It affects 1.6 billion people ( one- third of urban population) and is a key priority for policy change identified by the United Nations in the New Urban Agenda ( Tsenkova, 2016). Globally, cities and central governments have championed housing strategies and action plans, with a strong…
The research project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, whose primary output is this monograph, began as an imperative to account for spaces that are awkward, evade attention, or, when they receive it, rarely do so because they produce feelings of desirability, warmth, or contentment. These spaces are sometimes …
On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few wee…
This book came about as a major dissemination output of the BlueHealth Project (https://bluehealth2020.eu), a large, integrated interdisciplinary research project carried out under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research Frame-work Programme between 2016 and 2020. The project took an international and innovative, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to heal…
Thinking sound is an activity. Thinking with sound; thinking about sound; thinking through sound: these are all modalities of living with sound as a physical, vibrating reality. Because sound is matter in motion — resonating and reverberating — it resists conceptualization as an object or as a static concept. It cannot be held in a container but rather …
Struggles over naming our epoch of climate change – Anthropocene? Capitalocene? – are symptomatic of the growing recognition that ecology and economy can no longer be separated: that indeed, they have always been impli-cated in one another. For flm studies, this recognition necessitates adding to early ecocritical concerns with what flm does, a renewed inquiry into how …
In the 1890s, the eccentric American businessman Franklin Webster Smith proposed grand new ‘National Galleries of History and Art’ for Washington, DC. A rendering of his imagined project has the vertigo-inducing scale of the architectural proposal that was destined from its inception to remain unrealized (Figure 1.1). Imagine that you stand at the he…