In This Issue

Time, the overarching theme for this issue of Mediascape, has long been a dominant focus of cinema and media studies. In this issue, the submissions address a diversity of approaches to this theme, from history to representations and experiences of temporality across media.

Features

Alexander Greenhough’s “Time’s Up: The Clock & Cinephilia” examines Christian Marclay’s 24-hour long digital video installation The Clock as a reflexive space to engage with multiple media histories through the notion of stylized temporality. Continuing this focus on style, Laurie Norris’s “Styled In Time: The Poly-Temporal Post-Apocalyptic Adventures of the Mad Max Film Series” considers the design and impact of compounded temporalities within director George Miller’s work. Both articles emphasize time as a framework to ask questions about history.

Columns

Peter Labuza’s “Networking Agency: Classicism and Post-Classicism in Multiverse Time Travel Films” explores how a number of recent Hollywood films have used multiverse time travel theory (as opposed to single universe time travel) to assert Classical Hollywood conventions coupled with Post-Classical narratology to work through 21st-century network society anxieties. In “The Extension of Poetic Mind: Moving Visual Thinking in Chinese Cinėpoetry”, Ying Xiong applies Stan Brackhage’s concept of “moving visual thinking,” or the recreating of experience through cinema, to Chinese cinėpoetry.

Meta

Sara Collins’s “Immaterial Interruption: Paul Chan’s New New Testament” analyzes Paul Chan’s eponymous work as a “time based, digital born book that interrupts normative modes of reception.” Roberto Lai’s article “Wong Kar-wai: Alchemy of Time among Postmodernism and Modernism” similarly works at the intersection of the conventional and the unfamiliar by considering the work of director Wong Kar-wai as a postmodern investigation of time. Daniel Sander’s “Stretching It Wider” adds to this unique discourse with time through his study of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson’s conceptualizations of duration and memory by way of examples drawn from the avant-garde, the musical, and experimental film.

Reviews

Mediascape’s own James Fleury contributes “Studio Ghibli’s Video Game Play: The Media Convergence of Ni no Kuni”, which looks at famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli’s collaboration with developer Level-5 on the multiplatform video game Ni no Kuni (Bandai Namco, 2010/2013). The piece delves into Studio Ghibli’s gaming history and explores how Ni no Kuni, a game with a nostalgic outlook, may represent one path for the studio’s future in light of its recent hiatus from feature film productions. Finally, Daniel Grinberg’s “Time and Time Again: The Cinematic Temporalities of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” examines the complex representations and use of time in the works of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

-- James Fleury and Matthias Stork, Co-Editors-in-Chief