American Blockbuster honored in Choice Magazine

MHRC Co-Director Charles Acland’s American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder was recently selected as Choice magazine’s 2021 Outstanding Title.

In American Blockbuster Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of the blockbuster movie, the most visible, entertaining, and disparaged cultural form. Acland narrates how blockbusters emerged from Hollywood’s turn to a hit-driven focus during the industry’s business crisis in the 1950s. Movies became bigger, louder, and more spectacular. They also became prototypes for ideas and commodities associated with the future of technology and culture, accelerating the prominence of technological innovation in modern American life. Acland shows that blockbusters continue to be more than just movies; they are industrial strategies and complex cultural machines designed to normalize the ideologies of our technological age.

Find more information on the book here

Playback: Genealogies of Interactivity

October 9-11, 2019, Concordia University

Use, re-use, engagement, creation, distraction, immersion, seduction, play, critique—media and culture consist of practices that shape experience, meaning, and communities. The basic dynamism of media present and past, though, is not always accommodated in our critical, theoretical, and scholarly approaches. We need critical explorations that recognize and assess media and their full cultural complexities in history and across contexts. This includes examinations of both minor and major media forms and formats, and their specific iterations and uses as content, event, institution and apparatus.

This symposium brings scholars from Concordia University together with students and faculty from the Institute for Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt, Germany) to explore the complexities of our media and cultural histories.

Symposium Hosts:

Communication Studies, Faculty of Arts and ScienceFilm Studies, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Faculty of Fine Arts

In association with the Media History Research Centre, Concordia University and Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film,” Goethe University

For more information on the symposium, presenters, and schedule, please visit our event page at: http://www.concordia.ca/events/genealogies-of-interactivity.html

Introducing The Residual Media Depot


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“This is not a media archaeology lab. This is not an archive. This is a research collection.”

Wershler introduces the  Residual Media Depot in Milieux Institute‘s Pause Button zine. The Media History Research Centre director recently launched the research collection, primarily composed of early video game consoles. Naming the collection proved more difficult than anticipated. In his article, Weshler carefully considers terms such as archive and media archaeology lab in his search for the perfect name. What is it? http://ow.ly/yDVP306S8Ni