International Journal of Film and Media Arts

Table of Content and Editorial

José Bragança de Miranda — 2022-12-13

FEAR and "The great reset": Analysis of the World Economic Forum's post-COVID agenda videos and the adverse reactions to them

Nemanja Milošević — 2022-12-13

This article compares the ideological positions found in the visions of the future proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in “The Great Reset” campaign and in the internet users’ reaction to it. In this YouTube campaign, the WEF presents what it understands the “new normal” should be –understood as the new social, economic, and political relations after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The YouTube users’ comments reject the agenda and express different grounds for such an attitude. This study identifies the main ideas and ideologies within the comments and in the presentation of the WEF’s campaign using the psychoanalytical political theory. The results reveal that the agenda and reactions to it are motivated by the exacerbated state of inequality and suffering caused by the current pandemic. While “The Great Reset” attempts to save capitalism by integrating human values, the comments contain populist and conspiratorial ideas. Although they rely on different epistemological grounds, the analysis reveals that both share a common understanding of a society that separates the populace against the ruling elites, who have become wealthier during the pandemic.

Digital Spectacles of Violence: Film, TV and Social Media Entanglements in 2010’s Brazil

Eduardo Prado Cardoso — 2022-12-13

The study of cultural industries, in particular the complex manifestations of spectacle, has produced valuable contributions that articulate capitalism, globalization and culture. The revisitation of this legacy, especially in dealing with Latin American phenomena, is this paper’s effort. Two case studies that took place in the 2010’s, in Brazil, underpin a reflection on mediated crimes in a digitalized, but still inequal society. The first tells of a prisoner’s self-recorded video, made in response to TV Globo’s news piece about a 2017 massacre; the second examines a reenactment of a 2000 crime that happened on the bridge Rio-Niterói in 2019, and referenced not only a real hijacking, but its film representations (Bus 174 and Last Stop 174). Invoking examples of exceptionality, the article aims at delineating how certain digital spectacles of violence can be understood as direct responses to cultural texts: even though practices of socialization via the internet pose questions of accelerated efficiency (in reaching wider audiences, and updating the meaning of live events), the social and aesthetic performances involving violence retrieve long-standing traditions created by modern institutions.

Transmedia Narratives and Social Networks: Peaky Blinders' Television Fiction

Rut Martínez-Borda — 2022-12-13

Digital media expanded the scenarios in which people watch television and the communication contexts where fans comment on their content. This work focuses on the conversations between Spanish speakers that take place on the Internet about the Peaky Blinders TV series.

We focus on analysis of the discourse generated from the series’ content in social networks, where spectators converse with one another and on analysis of other, creative practices, which help to develop the transmedia narrative but are generated by the spectators themselves. This is known as fan fiction, cosplay or crossover.

We combine big data (Kitchin, 2014), to extract digital texts, and small data to analyze the construction of meanings from the perspective of discourse analysis (Gee, 2014). Big data were collected during the recent premiere of the fifth season in Spain, from 14 March to 15 June 2020 (3 months of which coincided with Covid-19 lockdown).The texts appeared on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as in forums, comments, and other digital information. We dynamically defined 268 categories during the data collection stage. This study includes only those that the research team considered were more relevant, facilitating in-depth analysis of the conversations through discourse analysis.

The results discuss how participants construct narratives that we interpret from a triple model. First, digital and situated storytelling (Ryan, 2019) through reconstruction of the contents and formats of the series by fans (Lacasa, 2020). Second, digital media and the presence of multi-platforms, which have generated transmedia strategies (Kavoori et al., 2017 (Kavoori, 2017)).

The study establishes the relationships between these multiple platforms and how audiences are present there. Third, digital contexts that generate conversations, creating dialogue between cultural industries and TV series followers.

Importance of Storytelling and Speculative Fiction in the Transition into A Posthuman Ecosystem

Marco Fraga da Silva — 2022-12-13

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools the Homo sapiens species have at their disposal. Considered one of the oldest forms of art and an evolutionary adaptation for survival, storytelling will surely have an important role in the challenging transition into a posthuman ecosystem. This article argues that Homo sapiens will eventually evolve and fragment into other species much due to our natural proclivity towards enhancing technologies; we propose that empathic storytelling might be paramount to reduce otherness and othering in-between human, transhuman, and posthuman sentient beings. The importance of storytelling as a deterrent for othering future complex artificial intelligence, augmented humans, and posthuman species has not been properly explored and studied in-depth, therefore, we collected data and points of view on vital concepts pertinent to the discussion. This paper’s main goals are to contribute to the debate of storytelling and posthumanism and to understand how the action of telling empathic, appealing, and engaging stories, be it through books, moving images, or videogames could be used for the betterment of future societies and their relations. We concluded that by creating and disseminating big quantities of beautiful, touching, empathic, direct from the heart, speculative, truthful, and thought-provoking stories, in all available media, it is possible to combat the nefarious act of othering and prepare contemporary societies for the emergence of transhuman and posthuman species; we further argue that speculative fiction and audiovisual content production systematically explores concepts such as androids, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, robots, and what it means to be human, making them an efficient genre and media to achieve the above-mentioned inspiring goal of connecting people empathically and reducing future othering.

Narratives of Enfoldment: Multi-linear and Parafictional Storytelling in Media Art

Fuad Halwani — 2022-12-13

Narratives have been witnessing a state of enfoldment within the virtual world(s) since the proliferation of transmedia story worlds and new media art works. The aesthetics of enfoldment are discussed by Laura U. Marks within different trends in media art. She follows a genealogy of media art that has its roots in premodern Islamic concepts. Enfoldment is therefore situated as the broad framework of this paper’s discussion. Since the prevalence of the concept of transmedia storytelling, coined by Henry Jenkins in 2007, different franchises (be it in entertainment and others) have adopted certain narrative tropes to create a transmedia presence or universe. One of these tropes is the usage of multi-linear storytelling. Multi-linearity is one of the forms narrative storytelling that liberates a story from its temporal structure, making the consumption of narrative open to the end user. Parafiction, on the other hand, denotes instances when the lines between fact and fiction become blurry creating contemporary artworks where story worlds are essential for the dissemination of the works themselves. According to Lambert-beaty (2009) “the slew of recent writings trying to describe or explain this condition ranges from philosophical explorations of ‘the ethics of the lie’, to moralist warnings about our entry into ‘the post-truth era’” (Lambert-beatty, 2009). The following article aims at disseminating past scholarship on multi-linear and parafictional storytelling in trans and new media art in an attempt at shaping the theoretical framework of my doctoral thesis project; a podcast series intended for online dissemination that features conversations between a fictional character and non-fictional historical figures.