Subversive agency

Reivew of Jill Godmilow, Kill The Documentary
Jill Godmilow, Kill The Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 224pp., £94.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 0 23120 276 3 hb., 978 0 23120 277 0 pb. Jill Godmilow’s Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars is a curious object. Although published by Columbia […]

Cleaning artefacts

Reivew of Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury eds., Nightcleaners & ’36 to ’77
Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury, eds., Nightcleaners and ’36 to ’77 (London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books, 2018). Box-set containing two books (214pp.) and two DVDs/Blu-Rays. £24.00, 978 3 96098 381 1 From campaign film to experiment in documentary representation, and from exemplary instance of anti-realist and self-reflexive ‘Brechtian’ counter cinema (according to some […]

Border crossings

Reivew of Brigitta Kuster, Grenze filmen
Brigitta Kuster, Grenze filmen. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Analyse audiovisueller Produktionen an der Grenze Europas (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018). 344pp., € 29,99, 978 3 83763 981 0 ‘We did not cross the border, the border crossed us’. So say the migrant activists at the Mexican-US-American border. The categorisation of migration and the individual migrant does not exist […]

Interview: Forgetting Vietnam

Trinh T. Minh-ha teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s departments of Rhetoric, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Born in Hanoi in 1952, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied musical composition, ethnomusicology and French literature, completing her PhD dissertation in 1977 under the title: Un Art sans Oeuvre: l’Anonymat dans […]

Harun Farocki, 1944–2014: The image scout

OBITUARY The image scout Harun Farocki, 1944–2014often accompanied by texts. [1] From his first militant films, his first creations for television, and his first critical writings onwards, a theoretical and materialist concern sustained his intentions, had always addressed themselves to the medium that received them. And so he studied the way people saw the Vietnam […]

Ideology and the Media: A Response

COMMENT Ideology and the Media: A Response Martin Barker’s examination of problems and evasions discernible in the use made of the concept of ideology by major strands of media research (Radical Philosophy 46) is timely. Media analysis in Britain seems now to be well-launched into a phase in which empirically-based studies, including studies of audience […]

Philosophy on Film

support to this non-Cartesian posItIon which one can find, for instance, in both Hegel and Wi ttgenstein – authors whom Laing has read. In Hegel’ s Phenomenology of Spirit, in the section on the dialectic of Master and Slave, the non-Cartesianism is perfectly clear: ating morally would render their children morally dependent. When Laing and […]

The aesthetics of appearing

If for a moment we were to imagine aesthetics as an expansive building that has been worked upon continuously for centuries, that has undergone many redecorations and acquired numerous extensions – letʼs say, as a museum that has become somewhat labyrinthine in the course of time – then we could consider which of its many […]

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Whole film festivals could be programmed on the decade of German political unrest from the riotous demonstrations of the late 1960s to the emergency measures of the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977. From the beginning, film was inseparable from the movement. None more than Harun Farocki’s agitprop film from 1968, On Some Problems of the Anti-authoritarian […]

People exposed, people as extras

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

People exposed, people as extras Georges Didi-Huberman The title of the first film shown in history is La Sortie des usines Lumière – in English, ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. On 22 March 1895, in the rue de Rennes in Paris, in front of about two hundred spectators, Auguste and Louis Lumière showed for the […]