Ethical Code

Queen’s University Belfast

Stefano Baschiera is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. His work on European cinema and film industries has been published in a variety of edited collections and journals including Film International and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Stefano is the co-editor with Russ Hunter of the book Italian Horror Cinema (EUP) and he was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC research network project ‘World Cinema On Demand: Distribution and Education in the Streaming Era’.

Università degli Studi eCampus

This special issue of Cinéma & Cie analyses the logic and processes of reintermediation emerging in the contemporary European media industry landscape, providing an opportunity to bring questions of availability, text circulation and gatekeeping to the centre of scholarly debates and investigations. Through contributions showcasing a wide array of methodological and theoretical approaches, the volume illustrates and analyses the presence of new gatekeepers, their impact in shaping texts and their consumption in different European contexts. Its case studies include file sharing, Curzon Home Cinema, VOD services and the problematic implementation of the Digital Single Market policy. The introduction is structured in three parts. In the first, we define the logic of reintermediation as the change in traditional intermediaries and the development of new, different gatekeepers; we then emphasize its importance for a full understanding of the cultural and economic struggles in the contemporary European audiovisual market. The second part provides an example of the ongoing re-intermediation processes by focusing on the lesser known case of ‘aggregators’ for VOD platforms, in reference to the activities of the international company Under the Milky Way. Finally, the third part provides a detailed overview of the articles included in the special issue.

Università di Bologna

Luca Barra is Senior Assistant Professor at Università di Bologna, where he teaches Radio and Television History and Digital Media, and a former postdoctoral research fellow at Università Cattolica, Milan. He is the author of the books Palinsesto (Laterza, Roma-Bari 2015) and Risate in scatola (Vita e Pensiero, Milan 2012), co-editor of Taboo Comedy (with C. Bucaria, Palgrave, Basingstoke 2015), Backstage (with T. Bonini and S. Splendore, Unicopli, Milan 2015) and Tutta un’altra fiction (with M. Scaglioni, Carocci, Roma 2013), and has written essays in various edited volumes and journals. He is an editorial consultant for Italian TV studies journal Link. Idee per la televisione.

In the months surrounding Netflix’s arrival on the Italian market, different mediaoutlets presented the platform not only as revolutionary, a game-changer, but also as a threat for established broadcasters. After a long wait, with hype fanned by the news coming from the US, the launch in many other European markets, and the strengths of the first branded productions, Italian TV audiences have also been able to access Netflix’s library and original series, since 22 October 2015. On the one hand, Netflix has reaped the results of its effort to establish a long-term promotional discourse in Italy. On the other, however, Netflix’s late appearance was also couched in the context of a complex media scenario and an already established national on-demand market. A rhetoric of disintermediation has been carefully constructed at the exact moment when a powerful global intermediary was entering the Italian market, masking its (future, intended) gatekeeping role. Adopting a media-industry and production-studies approach, this essay reconstructs Netflix’s arrival in the Italian landscape, focusing on the promotional discourse and its rhetoric, and on the reactions from the press, to give a deeper, more nuanced view of the phenomenon in the national media arena.

Charles University

Petr Szczepanik (Charles University, Prague) has written several books on the history of the Czech film industry. He co-edited Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures (with Patrick Vonderau, Palgrave, 2013). He was the leader of an EU-funded FIND project (www.projectfind.cz, 2012-2014), which utilized student internships for a collective ethnography of production cultures. In 2015, he was the main author of an industry report on the practices of screenplay development for the Czech Cinematography Fund. He is currently working on a study of producer practices in the contemporary Czech audiovisual industry and an analysis of the impact of the Digital Single Market strategy.

This article offers an analysis of one small-nation market’s perspective on the current and expected changes of digital distribution and its intermediaries. It demonstrates how key stakeholders in the Czech audiovisual distribution sector are reacting to regulatory processes at the EU level and how they are reconsidering their existing business practices, strategic plans, and structural positions vis-à-vis new global trends and competition in the evolving sphere of digital distribution. The article is not a full-fledged analysis of the Digital Single Market’s (DSM) potential impacts: instead, it considers DSM as just one factor in the strategic thinking of stakeholders, a factor that functions as a catalyst and a focal point in both business operations and policy-making.
 

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy

There is a widespread myth and rhetoric, even in academic discourse, about data and VOD recommender systems, especially with regard to the notion of automation and the innocence of this presumed automation. Behind this rhetoric lies the de-humanization of machine computation, i.e. the removal of all the processual, decisional, ‘oriented’ aspects informing every online recommender system. This essay focuses on content-to-content video recommendations, which are based on patterns of similarity between different contents, and it intends to show that there is nothing neutral — even in the most seemingly ‘objective’ form of video recommendation. The aim is to rediscover those very processual elements of the ‘data supply chain’ — regarding how metadata are created and collected, and how algorithms are configured — so as to make them critically observable again: the funnels, decision points, the multiple layers of human mediation and filtering, in both their relevance and sensitivity.

King’s College London

Virginia Crisp is Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is the author of Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Palgrave, 2015), and co-editor of Besides the Screen: Moving Images through Distribution, Promotion and Curation (Palgrave, 2015). She is the co-founder, with Gabriel Menotti Gonring (UFES, Brazil), of the Besides the Screen Network (www.besidesthescreen.com).

While recent years has witnessed the proliferation of new modes and methods of informal distribution, a certain sector of unauthorized media distribution, namely ‘The Scene’, has been subject to surprisingly little academic consideration. ‘The Scene’ is a collective title for several self-identified ‘release groups’ who collaborate to remove copyright protection from media artefacts (e.g. games, software, films) and repackage them into ‘releases’ for distribution online. Despite assertions that the Scene is the source of ‘most’ pirate copies circulating online, the role these online gatekeepers play in selecting what is ‘released’ into unauthorized online distribution networks has yet to be thoroughly explored. As such, this paper will examine how the practices of The Scene intersect with the wider unauthorized distribution ecology and how they might act as both tastemakers and gatekeepers in an online context that is frequently perceived to be ‘free’, ‘open’ and untroubled by traditional intermediaries. In doing so, the paper will consider how the practices of the Scene are emblematic of the wider processes of re-intermediation that are being felt across the audio-visual industries.

Queen’s University

Ian Robinson teaches in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. His current research is focused on digital film culture, film and intermediality, film festivals and new modes of distribution. He is also working on a project on film cultures and industries in Canada. His research has been published in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Public: Art, Ideas and Culture as well as anthologies on film and media culture.
 

This article considers two recent attempts at developing networked film cultures in online exhibition spaces. Focusing on two video-on-demand platforms, Festival Scope and Curzon Home Cinema, the article examines how VOD is being positioned and utilized as a tool to develop film-literate audiences while also serving the interests of the film industry by promoting and exposing films to different geographic markets. While Festival Scope originated as a platform for industry insiders to view and gather information about films, Curzon Home Cinema has emerged in the last five years as a leader in day-and-date online releases of art films for audiences in the UK and Ireland. The emergence and growth of both platforms is examined with special attention to the rhetoric of on-demand spectatorship as a special event. In both cases, the platforms’ presentation of films on-demand, concurrent with their theatrical (Curzon) or festival (Festival Scope) screenings, is offered to audiences as a privileged moment of participation in film culture. The article then argues that these platforms should be understood in close relation to the prevalent discourses of European film policy, funding and industrial support. Both Festival Scope and Curzon are funded in part by Creative Europe’s Media programme. The article situates the growth of these on-demand platforms in relation to Creative Europe’s competing cultural and economic discourses of public access and competitiveness. An analysis of Creative Europe’s funding schemes reveals how VOD figures into the goals of European cultural and economic integration. The re-intermediation of film culture that is fostered by VOD platforms such as Festival Scope and Curzon is considered with regards to how it aligns with Creative Europe’s cultural and economic objectives and its emphasis on digitalization and transnationalism.

University of Potsdam

Jan Distelmeyer is Professor for History and Theory of Media in the European Media Studies program, a co-operative project between the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the University of Potsdam, and a founding member of the ZeM – Brandenburg Center for Media Studies. His most recent books include Game Over?! Perspektiven des Computerspiels (Game Over?! Perspectives on Computer Games, 2008), Raumdeutung. Zur Wiederkehr des 3D-Films (Interpretation of Space. On the Comeback of the 3D-Movie, 2012,) Das flexible Kino. Ästhetik und Dispositiv der DVD & Blu-ray (The flexible Cinema. Aesthetics and Dispositif of DVD & Blu-ray, 2012), Katastrophe und Kapitalismus. Phantasien des Untergangs (Catastrophe and Capitalism. Phantasies of the Downfall, 2013), Machtzeichen. Anordnungen des Computers (Signs of Power. Orders by Computers, 2017)

Any interest in the relationship between today’s popular culture and images or visibility cannot escape the sustained significance of images delivered by various forms of graphical user interfaces. Since these interfaces are not only tools or even mere preparations of presentations but meaningful presentations themselves, this essay proposes to analyze them as operative images. By delivering a sort of signs, that combine iconic as well as symbolic and indexical qualities, operative images sketch out and perform interrelated concepts of both: the user and the computer/the digital. From this follows the importance of analyzing popular interfaces as a special kind of staging – as a mise-en-scène ‘depresenting’ the power and work of the computer and interrelating with the promises/fears shaping the myth of ‘the digital’ since the late 1980s. Struggling for a critical position against the mythical term ‘digital’, I have proposed the neologism ‘digitalicity’ [Digitalizität]. I will argue that establishing the analysis of ‘interface-mise-en-scène’ as something like a vital part of today’s media studies is largely and indeed long overdue. The graphical user interface of YouTube will be taken here as a case study. It will be discussed as a particular performance of the ‘aesthetics of regulation’ [Ästhetik der Verfügung], that informs the aesthetical appearance of computers, allowing and framing our handling with them. Characterized by a dialectic motion, the aesthetics of regulation raises questions of power: interfaces empower users to regulate and condemn them to be regulated at the same time.

University, Rome

University of Lincoln

Alberto Micali insegna Comunicazione presso il Dipartimento di Communications della John Cabot University a Roma. In passato ha insegnato presso University of Lincoln (GB), dove ha ottenuto il dottorato di ricerca con una tesi sulle relazioni tra cultura hacker e attivismo nelle culture digitali. La sua ricerca si focalizza sulle culture e i media e reti digitali, spaziando anche verso l’ecosofia Guattariana e la filosofia politica e la critica postumanista. Dal 2018 è membro del gruppo di ricerca di Studi Postumanisti (John Cabot University) e dal 2016 del Centre for Entangled Media Studies (University of Lincoln). Le sue pubblicazioni più recenti sono apparse su riviste come Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society, Media and Communication, e Critical Studies.

Following the presentation of a paper at the XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School 2017, this article focuses on some of the theoretical premises that the legacy of postmodern thought offers for the understanding of contemporary forms of media resistance. In particular, it centres the attention on so-called ‘digital swarms’ that, also known as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), are one of the leading ‘weapons’ in the politics of digital media and network dissent. However, in the literature on hacktivism, these ‘swarming machines’ are predominantly defined via an analogy with direct action, implying assumptions based on humanist epistemologies, which limits their politics as a matter of representation. With the objective of offering a possibility to move beyond the limits of such a metaphorical impasse, genealogy is suggested as a critical approach to link, through ideas of nonlinearity and difference, postmodern thinking and media archaeological investigations.

University of Michigan

University of Copenhagen]

King’s College, London

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore