ABSTRACT: In Jia Zhangke’s Ershisi chengji ( 24 City , 2008), the director narrates the transformation and gradual disappearance of a typical socialist space in China, the factory complex, in the post-Mao era. This article approaches this issue from the perspective of critical social theory of space and historical reappraisal of the socialist space in actual socialist countries before undergoing an analysis of what I call the spatial performance of socialist memories in Jia Zhangke’s film aesthetics. The film reconstructs a narrative of socialist space that not only salvages real socialist living experiences from the erasing power of developmentalism but also creates a spatial commemoration for alternative futures of the working class in China.
ABSTRACT: Greenswork involves the provision of living and artificial plants for a film’s production design. This article documents the establishment of Greens Departments and plant nurseries at the major Hollywood studios, which were tasked with storing and growing trees, shrubs, and flowers as needed. It then considers how classical-era greenswork approached standards of verisimilitude, as it learned to navigate audiences’ expectations about realism for onscreen greenery. Greenswork also had to contend with the fragility of vegetation, which routinely wilted under the hot studio lights. Finally, I address how greenswork managed unruly vegetal matter either by using artificial substitutes or through physiochemical modification.
ABSTRACT: Pema Tseden’s film Xuebao ( Snow Leopard , 2023) is a part of and a reflection on animal-themed visual culture. Set in the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve in China’s Qinghai Province, it follows a dispute over the treatment of a snow leopard confined in a sheep corral after harming a Tibetan herding family’s livestock. The film explores how animals are framed through diegetic cameras operated by journalists, residents, and forestry police. In establishing an equality of gazes between a human character and the CGI-rendered snow leopard, it offers an ecological perspective on the Buddhist concept of dāna , the gift of freeing living beings from fear.
ABSTRACT: This article offers a feminist production history of the workplace comedy 9 to 5 (Colin Higgins, 1980). Drawing on archival documents, interviews, and historical research on feminist organizing in the 1970s, it shows how struggles over commercial palatability, directorial sensibility, and workplace expectations all collided, resulting in a clash between the visions of actor Jane Fonda, screenwriter Patricia Resnick, and director Colin Higgins. Higgins’s camp style simultaneously rolled back the feminism of Resnick’s script and made room for ambivalent forms of queer pleasure. As a result, the film embodies the contradictory desire to both articulate feminist, pro-labor ideals and contain their radical disruptions.
ABSTRACT: The nationalized production of animated film in Czechoslovakia and Poland during the period from 1945 to 1960 was underfinanced because of postwar shortages. The comparative research presented in this article reveals the strategies applied by these two state-socialist film industries in confronting postwar contingencies: Animation’s spatial organization was typically adapted to preexisting spaces rather than being accommodated in purpose-built facilities tailored to its specific production needs. This reaction to the challenge, which we term “urbanized functionality,” outweighed the more costly alternative of integration into non-animation production complexes. This article analyzes the process of urbanization for animation studios and identifies its implications for animation studios’ arrangements.
ABSTRACT: This article uses a cultural-studies framework to revisit Soviet film songs. Songs in Stalin-era cinema presented in two types: those containing explicit propaganda were bracketed by film plots, lacked record releases, and are completely forgotten today; other, more popular songs enhanced storytelling, were mass consumed, and continue to circulate to this day. These functional divergences suggest that rather than negotiating appeals or serving as sites of indoctrination and resistance, each type of song satisfied different audience needs, making it easier to split the personal from the political.
ABSTRACT: With media scholars rethinking environments as media, I turn to media ecologies to examine how mud, historically and in the present, functions as an elemental medium enabling the Darién rainforest’s resistance to external interventions. I propose the term mudware to describe the collaborations between mud and the beings that inhabit the rainforest, as an infrastructure of bios sustaining life in the region. Through a perspective grounded in mud—its ephemerality, impenetrability, discontinuities, and intervals—I analyze how Spanish colonial enterprises in the Darién, as well as the Pan-American Highway project and other contemporary incursions, have repeatedly failed within the Darién territory.
ABSTRACT: This article studies the preoccupation with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Rod Serling’s work, specifically episodes of The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) and his 1964 telefilm Carol for Another Christmas (ABC), made in partnership with the United Nations. While much has been written about Serling’s commitment to the civil rights movement, I show that his vision was equally internationalist, creating what I call atomic antiracisms oriented toward the Asias. By grieving Japanese death, Serling produced a distinctive and different type of liberal antiracism and challenged the contemporaneity and realism that marked other modes of televisual racial liberalism.
