Screen Culture

Screen Culture: History and Textuality explores the impact of digital culture on the discipline of film and television studies. Whether the notion of screen culture is used to designate the technological platforms common to present-day digital media, or whether it refers to the support material on which moving images have historically been projected, scanned, or displayed, the 15 previously unpublished essays included here are primarily concerned with the intermedial appraisal of film, television, and digital culture. Contributors are Richard Abel, William Boddy, Ben Brewster, John Fullerton, Douglas Gomery, Alison Griffiths, Vreni Hockenjos, Jan Holmberg, Arne Lunde, Peter Lunenfeld, Charles Musser, Jan Olsson, Barry Salt, Michele L. Torre, William Uricchio, and Malin Wahlberg. Stockholm Studies in Cinema series Distributed for John Libbey Publishing

In this expansive historical synthesis, Richard Butsch integrates social, economic, and political history to offer a comprehensive and cohesive examination of screen media and screen culture globally – from film and television to computers and smart phones – as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on an enormous trove of research on the USA, Britain, France, Egypt, West Africa, India, China, and other nations, Butsch tells the stories of how media have developed in these nations and what global forces linked them. He assesses the global ebb and flow of media hegemony and the cultural differences in audiences' use of media. Comparisons across time and space reveal two linked developments: the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony, and the consistency among audiences from different countries in the way they incorporate screen entertainments into their own cultures. Screen Culture offers a masterful, integrated global history that invites media scholars to see this landscape in a new light. Deeply engaging, the book is also suitable for students and interested general readers.

Screen, Culture, Psyche illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer’s own psyche. Seeking to go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung’s ideas? Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies. This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer.

Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture is the first and only book to position what are called “Soundies” within the broader cultural and technological milieu of the 1940s. From 1940 to 1946, these musical films circulated in everyday venues, including bars, bowling alleys, train stations, hospitals, and even military bases. Viewers would pay a dime to watch them playing on the small screens of the Panoram jukebox. This book expands U.S. film history beyond both Hollywood and institutional film practices. Examining the dynamics between Soundies’ short musical films, the Panoram’s film-jukebox technology, their screening spaces and their popular discourse, Andrea J. Kelley provides an integrative approach to historic media exhibition. She situates the material conditions of Soundies’ screening sites alongside formal considerations of the films and their unique politics of representation to illuminate a formative moment in the history of the small screen.

Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices: Life through the Looking Glass explores the role of mobile technologies in everyday life via the extended case study of Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Via a detailed application (including numerous extended examples) of the experiences associated with Apple’s iOS devices, Charles Soukup examines contemporary screen culture and how individuals navigate it via mobile technologies. Mobile devices provide a lifeline that sifts through, limits, and simplifies the complexities of rapid, vast, circulating information in postmodern culture. Particularly, simple, game-like applications with clear rules and numerical outcomes exceptionally focus, frame, and filter an overwhelming media-saturated culture. Rather than merely outlining the problems associated with a world dominated by digital screens, Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices offers a means for understanding screen culture as well as viable solutions to the challenges facing contemporary social life.

This book explores a range of lesser-known documentaries and short films from the transnational Øresund region released in the period 2000–2009, focusing on how this Scandinavian region’s urban and maritime spaces, iconic architecture, and peripheral communities across Malmö and Copenhagen have been imagined and critiqued through film. This is the first book to widen the critical gaze beyond popular representations to examine a significant body of peripheral films produced in and about the metropolitan Øresund region. Emerging at a time of spatial transformation and geopolitical change, these films weave alternative narratives that confront the official rhetoric of transnational regionalism. Offering the concept of regioscape as a way to investigate the intimate relationship between artistic representation, screen policy, space, and the region-building project, this book presents new readings of films by contemporary Swedish and Danish filmmakers such as Fredrik Gertten, Kolbjörn Guwallius, Daniel Dencik, and Max Kestner.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection exploring the impact of emergent technologies on the production, distribution and reception of media content in the Asia-Pacific region. Exploring case studies from China, Japan, South Korea, India, Thailand and Australia, as well as American co-productions, this collection takes a Cultural Studies approach to the constantly evolving ways of accessing and interacting with visual content. The study of the social and technological impact of online on-demand services is a burgeoning field of investigation, dating back to the early-2010s. This project will be a valuable update to existing conversations, and a cornerstone for future discussions about topics such as online technologies, popular culture, soft power, and social media.

Essays exploring how reformers and charities used the “magic lantern” to raise public awareness of poverty. Public performances using the magic or optical lantern became a prominent part of the social fabric of the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich variety of primary sources, Screen Culture and the Social Question, 1880-1914 investigates how the magic lantern and cinematograph, used at public lectures, church services, and electoral campaigns, became agents of social change. The essays examine how social reformers and charitable organizations used the “art of projection” to raise public awareness of the living conditions of the poor and the destitute, as they argued for reform and encouraged audiences to work to better their lot and that of others.