To Örebro University

This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse - Varldens Starkaste Bjorn [Bamse - The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.

This article explores viewers’ experiences of the Swedish Public Service (SVT) ‘slow TV’ broadcast Den stora älgvandringen (The Great Moose Migration), aired as a three-week long, live, multi-platform programme since 2019. Through semi-structured interviews with key informants, the aim is to qualitatively under- stand the audience attraction to the 24/7 programme, especially when it comes to authenticity, affordances and its apparent slowness of pace. The study showcases a spectrum of audiences’ experiences, ranging from appreciating the programme’s serenity and stillness to its potential for unexpected drama. It is suggested thatThe Great Moose Migration offers a ‘direct’ link to Swedish nature as it enables awallowing in Swedish landscapes and fauna, and allows for an unashamed adora- tion of the majestic Swedish moose, but without it being experienced as something particularly ‘Swedish’. It is found that authenticity is central to the programme’s success with both production team and audiences. However, both personal and sociable experiences of the programme as authentic rest on the collective accept- ance of authenticity as something intrinsically produced by people and technolo- gies yet not experienced as constructed. Rather, it is something that hovers in between experienced mediated and unmediated reality.

In the montage of archival and original material that makes up John Akomfrah's three-channel video work Vertigo Sea (2015), the frequent use of footage shot by BBCs Natural History Unit (producers of series like Planet Earth) stands out as an unusual choice. This article explores aesthetic-political implications of how this material is subtly repurposed, with focus on one of the interconnected issues dealt with in the work: nature and the Capitaloscene. What does Vertigo Sea do to and through these BBC nature images? Which artistic strategies are involved and for which ends? Is the kind of ecological pathos already framing the original material itself critically transformed and if so in which senses? Does Vertigo Sea merely go for a reproduction of the natural beauty often attributed to original material, and as simply juxtaposed with terrible images, or does the repurposing also entail an alteration of the very notion of natural beauty? This article critically explores all these questions mainly through the frameworks of Situationist detournement, Deleuze's ideas about art and cliches, and Adorno's notions of authentic art, re-enchantment, and natural beauty-frameworks that are conversely critically discussed through Vertigo Sea. It aims to reveal Vertigo Sea as on the one hand an experiment in finding vital artistic strategies for re-enchanting (in non-idealizing ways) planetary nature in the Capitalocene, and as on the on the other hand a thematization of the difficulties in doing so. While appearing among a contemporary art scene increasingly concerned with local and/or global relations having to do with ecology in this new era, Vertigo Sea presents us with a highly original case primarily through its unusual choice of main source material and its complex treatment of this material.

This article returns to the experimental theory and practice of Third Cinema as developed in the late 1960s in parts of Latin America. It focuses on two of its aspects that have not been systematically researched: Third Cinema as conceptualizations and maps of global capitalism. In doing so this article takes up and reconfigures Fredric Jameson's notion of "cognitive mapping" and introduce the theory concept-cognitive mapping. This latter theory aims to contribute new thoughts and perspectives to ongoing debates on aesthetic forms capable of a critical grasp of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism.

This study creates and develops a concept called the untimely-image including two sub-concepts called contours of the new and the untimely-site. The untimely-image concerns the clearing for and the expression of figures of “potential” in thought in the form of moving-images. The aim of these concepts is to form a critical framework for evaluating and conceptualizing political film as expressive, not of the new itself but of its “untimely” contours.

The untimely-image, and its many implications, is developed over the course of six chapters. Chapter 1 extensively defines “contours” and “new” as operative in this study, and also introduces a theme that runs through all the chapters: how to think the contours of the new in relation to the cult of the new in consumer culture and in relation to the larger mechanisms of advanced capitalism. Chapter 2 defines the parameters of the untimely-image as specifically regarding moving images, and continues the development of this concept. In Chapters 3 to 6, The Wire (David Simon, 2002-2008) serves the double function of complicating and giving specification to the elaboration of the untimely-image as well as a case in which the untimely-image is used as a critical framework. The Wire and the untimely-image relate in processes of juxtaposition, wherein they meet, cross over, separate, and reproblematize each other. An untimely-image is fully defined in relation to concrete political issues. The untimely-image is therefore advanced by articulating the components and characteristics that, independently of the concrete issue, remain in every case, as well as by putting the concept to work regarding two specific problems in The Wire: its expression of blackness and its mapping of advanced capitalism.

This article sets out, first of all, to systematically debunk arguments that attribute to the serial The Wire a medium specificity of “television,” and second of all, to supply means for new conceptualizations of this kind of serial-drama media object. These matters are treated on the levels of technological materiality, media definitions, form, content, and production. The purpose is to lay the foundation for a more attentive and clear conceptual comprehension of what is approaching or has already begun to arrive: a time in which the initial phase of broadcasting of serial moving-image dramas are either skipped or greatly diminished in importance, and in which they exist mainly in the form of On Demand streaming, or, more interestingly, in the form of DVD or downloaded files.

This article focuses on how critical reviews of Bulworth can be said to draw attention to political discourse when discussing the film's satirical aspirations. This entails a consideration of contemporary American reviews, which are discussed in relation to a conceptualization of satire in terms of a discursive practice. It is concluded that satire is understood, in quite unproblematic terms, both as a determinant for and as attributing a tone to the political discourse.

Capitalist enterprises continuously push consumption of commercial products on children, for instance in the form of transmedial worlds in which multiple stories can play out across media and over time. The popular Swedish children's franchise Bamse has undergone an obvious capitalist expansion over time, with more and more commodities being made available for purchase. At the same time the brand continues to be promoted as a force for spreading good values and thus provides a valuable service to its audience of Swedish children. The present article explores, through a combination of paratextual analysis and political economy, how these inculcative and commercial goals coexist in a tense but seemingly functional configuration.

This paper explores medial relationships actualized by various media representations of DC Comics’ famous supervillain, the Joker. A recurring trope in Joker narratives, going back to his very first appearance in DC Comics Batman #1 (1940), involves him using media to spread his brand of terror across Gotham City. While the previous research on the Joker has sometimes noted the character’s transmedial travels, none has dealt extensively with the recurring placement of him in relation to specific media technologies and formats. Further, as such the character is an exemplary case for contributing to the contemporary discourse on intermediality. The present paper argues that the Joker exemplifies how intermedial references (c.f. Rajewsky, 2005) can simultaneously cue a sense of immersion and have a destabilizing effect on the actual experience of spectatorship. The analyses put emphasis on moments of what Tina Kendall (2010) has called “a spatial and temporal layering of representational forms” (190), which here specifically refers to moments when the Joker is represented on, in, or alongside television.

This article uses the concept of intermediality to explore four different adaptations, across three different media, of the infamous supervillain the Joker. Independent of the medium representing him, a recurring practice is to have the Joker engage with media technologies. Television, in particular, is often used, as in the cases discussed here: Tim Burton's film Batman (1989) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), the comic book Batman: Death of the Family (2014), and the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009). Understood as media combination, intermedial referencing (Rajewsky (2005) Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermedialites 6: 43-64), and through concepts such as contingency and liveness (Doane (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press), these intermedial moments, by way of emphasizing the materiality and temporality of media, are found to promote immersion while simultaneously causing tension by destabilizing the act of viewing.