SPECTACLE — footnote episodes

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this consideration of the many relationships that cinema can have with - and to - the city. Building on their recent episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Chris and Alex reflect on those scholars who have placed cinema in dialogue with issues related to space, urban design, and sociology, and who ask questions about how a city is represented onscreen, how its spaces are organised and mapped, and the stakes of re-animating a ‘real’ space to transform an otherwise authentic and accessible locale.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantOctober 14, 2024SPECTACLE, CITY, SPACE, LOCATIONComment

Footnote #50 - Postfeminism (with Eve Benhamou)

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes reach their half-century as Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France to examine the contradictory cultural and political space of postfeminism. A much-debated topic, postfeminism typically pivots on gendered discourses of agency, autonomy, potency, and physical empowerment.

Footnote #49 - Cyborgs

Footnote 49 looks at the fascinating figure of the cyborg as an embodiment of hybridity, resistance, and rebellion, interrogating the role of cyborgs as surrogate figurations that representing disparate forms of identity within both popular media culture and social reality.

Footnote #48 - Visual Effects

Having already tackled the topic of special effects in an earlier Footnote, this latest episode instead focuses on visual effects (VFX) as a way to think through the practical/digital distinction that has come to culturally and industrially define the specificity and spectacle of VFX imagery.

Footnote #47 - Aura

Art’s relationship to the auratic is the focus of Footnote #47, which engages cinema’s historical relation to ‘aura’ via the foundational work of Walter Benjamin who argued for technology’s “withering” of art’s uniqueness of space and time thanks to the potential for the creation of a “plurality of copies” that shift art’s “unique existence.”

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantApril 29, 2024SPECTACLE, AURA, SPECTATORSHIP, TECHNOLOGYComment

Footnote #46 - Multiplanarity

Footnote #46 responds to a listener email by focusing on the speeds and spaces of the “multiplanar” image, a term theorised in Thomas Lamarre’s writing on anime and its techniques which looks at how motion is able to divide animated landscapes into different planes of action.

Footnote #39 - Special Effects

What is so special about special effects? What role does technological innovation play in their convincing construction of illusion? What distinguishes ‘special’ from ‘visual’ effects? In this Footnote episode, Chris and Alex play with ideas of special effects in relation to fantasy and animation.

Footnote #32 - 3D (with Nick Jones)

Fresh from their discussion of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021), Chris, Alex and special guest Dr Nick Jones (Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture, University of York) return for this short Footnote episode on the marvel and magic of 3D technology.

Footnote #26 - The Cinema of Attractions

The tension between spectacle and narrative is investigated through the seminal work of Tom Gunning and his formulation of the “cinema of attractions” in this latest Footnote episode, in which Chris and Alex hold cinema’s propensity for exhibitionist visual display and its later development of story in delicate balance.