STORRE

Drawing inspiration from Benjamin’s analysis of the small ‘crystals of the total event,’ and Barthes notion of imagistic punctum, this essay examines an irritating ‘cinematic splinter’ derived from Arrival (Villeneuve US/Canada 2016). The grating key scene witnesses the film’s only significant African-American character, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), remind the white linguistic professor, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), that ‘a more advance race nearly wiped out the [Australian Aborigines].’ Exp...

First paragraph: Climate breakdown threatens the lives of us all. Scientific research has suggested that we are in the process of a “mass extinction” event that could lead to “biological annihilation” on a large scale. Records indicate that population decay and the rapid extinction of a large number of vertebrates in recent years amount to “a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation”.

This article argues that Malthusianism as a series of discursive regimes, developed in the Victorian-era, serves in times of austerity to reproduce an elite understanding of social exclusion in which those in a state of poverty are to blame for their own situation. It highlights that Malthusianism is present in the public discourse, becoming an underlining feature in news coverage of the so-called ‘underclass’. Our findings broadly contradict the normative claim that journalism ‘speaks truth ...

This article focuses on previously undocumented film initiatives that emerged within counter-cultural scenes in Glasgow, presenting the case study of New Visions, a film and video festival established in 1992. Drawing on primary sources including institutional archives, festival brochures, and interviews, this article argues that Glasgow’s alternative film culture had a symbiotic relationship with the arts and the music scenes, a relationship made concrete through the use of shared spaces and...