Planetary Cinema

The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

Conclusion/Coda

This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book’s key argument: the postscreen as a visual phenomenon which, through contemporary instantiations via Virtual Reality, holographic and light projections, blurs boundaries between virtuality and actuality, and re-formulates conditions of media, reality, death, life, matter and history. The Conclusion also points the post-screen towards two further ideas which drive its concept: difference, in terms of screen boundaries demarcating image against surroundings, and on difference without positive terms; and gluttony of visual media, specifically in relation to play between the real and the unreal. Both ideas not only serve the diminished boundaries of the post-screen in terms of the book’s analyses, but also render the post-screen a framework for today’s politics of post-truth, misinformation and deepfakes as a moment of media history. Finally, the Conclusion extends the post-screen to the (as of writing) current Covid-19 pandemic as a mirror of the internalization that is of both post-screen media and virus – both are in us, and inescapable.

Introduction

This Introduction presents the context for the book’s argument of the post-screen, namely, an argument for a state of critical attention to the delimitations of screen media and the ensuing problematizations of relations between image and object; an intensifying evolution of the virtual and its role in defining media consumers and their realities; and an era of screen media marked by the disappearances of boundaries of differentiation between subject and object; and a point in media history. The central query of the post-screen lies in the growing imperceptibility and instability of screen boundaries. Where these thresholds begin to disappear is also where the need arises to re-question the definitional states of the actual and the virtual, and the renewed contestations for dominance between them.

Lesbian Cinephilia and Digital Affordances

This chapter revisits critical work on the challenges and promises of lesbian cinema spectatorship in light of new media technologies that allow for citation of audiovisual images. Analog videos made by lesbians in the 1990s about the homoerotic pleasures of watching classical Hollywood films are compared with contemporary queer fan videos and community practices on the internet as well as with scholarly video essays. Close readings of these works speculate on the connections between the datedness of cinema as a medium in the digital era and uneasiness with the connotations of the term lesbian on the part of contemporary queer women. Carol, the 2016 film adaptation, by Phyllis Nagy and Todd Haynes, of the 1950s lesbian romance by Patricia Highsmith is an example of a work that appeals to contemporary viewers by engaging both lesbian and media history.

Bailataan ankarasti!

Tarkastelemme uutisparodiaohjelma Frank Pappa Show’ta esimerkkinä 1990-luvun alun asiaviihteen ohjelmistosta, jota määrittävät uudenlainen faktan ja fiktion suhde sekä viihteellisen poliittisen julkisuuden syntyminen. Indieyhtiö Broadcasters Oy:n tuottama televisiosarja kommentoi ajantasaisesti lama-ajan murroksia, kuten piteneviä leipäjonoja ja kasvavaa työttömyyttä. Frank Pappa Show uudisti poliittisen viihteen kenttää nostamalla viimeisen asiallisuuden linnakkeen, uutiset, viihteen käytettäväksi ja totutti katsojat tulkitsemaan ironisia, satiirisia ja parodisia viestejä.Tämän kulttuurihistoriallisen tutkimuksen alkuperäislähteenä käytämme Frank Pappa Show’n jaksoja vuosilta 1991–1994 ja lisäksi ohjelmaan liittyvää lehdistökeskustelua. Näiden aineistojen avulla tarkastelemme kysymystä siitä, miten Frank Pappa Show’n televisuaalinen satiiri osallistui politiikasta käytävään julkiseen keskusteluun 1990-luvulla.Tarkastelemme keskustelun reunaehtoja, jotka kertovat ajan mediasta ja julkisesta keskustelukulttuurista. Frank Pappa Show toimii esimerkkinä uudesta television muotokielestä aikana, jolloin elokuvallinen ilmaisu ja musiikkivideoiden estetiikka levisivät televisioon. Nopeutunut televisiokerronta vaati katsojilta kykyä seurata muuttuvaa kerrontaa. Television arkipäiväistyminen johti spektaakkelimaistumiseen ja ohjelma kommentoi kriittisesti myös omaa mediaympäristöään.Avainsanat: mediahistoria, televisio, asiaviihde, satiiri, Frank PappaPolitical entertainment program Frank Pappa Show as a contemporary commentator on the 1990s recession in FinlandIn this article, we study the news parody program Frank Pappa Show as an example of how television programs of the 1990s that combine topicality and entertainment began to use reality-based audiovisual material as part of their programs. The relationship between fact and fiction changed and a new kind of political publicity emerged when the actions of politicians were mocked in a weekly carnivalistic television broadcast. The Frank Pappa Show commented on the upheavals of Finland's recession in the 1990s, such as rising unemployment. The Frank Pappa Show reshaped the field of political entertainment by raising the last fortress of objectivity, news, for entertainment use, and accustomed viewers to interpreting ironic, satirical, and parodic messages.As the original source for this cultural-historical research, we use episodes of the Frank Pappa Show from 1991 to 1994, as well as press discussions related to the program. Using these materials, we study how the program contributed to the public debate on politics in the 1990s.We study the boundaries of the debate, which tells about the media of the time and the culture of public debate. The Frank Pappa Show serves as an example of a new form of television at a time when cinematic expression and the aesthetics of music videos were spreading to television. Accelerated television narration required of its viewers the ability to follow changing narration. The mundane nature of television led to a taste for the spectacle, and the program also critically commented on its own media environment.Keywords: media history television, entertainment, satire, Frank Pappa

Writing at the Origin of Capitalism

In the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, England simultaneously developed a national market and a national literary culture. In Writing at the Origin of Capitalism, Julianne Werlin describes how economic change in early modern England created new patterns of textual production and circulation with lasting consequences for English literature. Synthesizing research in book and media history, including investigations of manuscript and print, with Marxist historical theory, Werlin demonstrates that England’s transition to capitalism had a decisive impact on techniques of writing, rates of literacy, and modes of reception—and so on the form and style of texts. Individual chapters discuss the impact of market integration on linguistic standardization and the rise of a uniform English prose; the growth of a popular literary market alongside a national market in cheap commodities; and the decline of literary patronage with the monarchy’s loosening grip on trade regulation, among other subjects. Peddlers’ routes and price integration, monopoly licenses and bills of exchange, all prove vital for understanding early modern English writing. Each chapter reveals how books and documents were embedded in wider economic processes and, as a result, how the origin of capitalism constituted a revolutionary event in the history of English literature.