Lynn Spigel

Jan Olsson

DIVA critical reassessment of television and television studies in the age of new media./div

Essays on a Medium in Transition

Television After TV

Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well-documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million-dollar franchise's principal star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

Hitchcock à la Carte

John Fullerton

Allegories of Communication provides insights into the shifting configurations of moving-image technologies. Contributors focus on technological change and the intermedial aspects of moving images from a variety of perspectives underscoring the need for cross-disciplinary dialogue. They discuss hardware concerns, questions of styles, reception patterns, and the cultural and social underpinnings of mediated vision. The distinction between the analog and the digital offers a focal point with implications for the charting of movements from the turn of one century to the next. Distributed for John Libbey Publishing

Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital

Allegories of Communication

Sweden’s early film industry was dominated by Swedish Biograph (Svenska Biografteatern), home to star directors like Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. It is nostalgically remembered as the generative site of a nascent national artform, encapsulating a quintessentially Nordic aesthetic—the epicenter of Sweden’s cinematic Golden Age. In The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, veteran film scholar Jan Olsson takes a hard look at this established, romanticized narrative and offers a far more complete, complex, and nuanced story. Nearly all of the studio’s original negatives were destroyed in an explosion in 1941, but Olsson’s comprehensive archival research shows how the company operated in a commercial, international arena, and how it was influenced not just by Nordic aesthetics or individual genius but also by foreign audiences’ expectations, technological demands, Hollywood innovations, and the gritty back-and-forth between economic pressures, government interference, and artistic desires. Olsson’s focus is wide, encompassing the studio’s production practices, business affairs, and cinematographic conventions, as well as the latter-day archival efforts that both preserved and obscured parts of Swedish Biograph’s story, helping construct the company’s rosy legacy. The result is a necessary rewrite to Swedish film historiography and a far fuller picture of a canonical film studio.

From Commercial Circulation to Archival Practices

The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph

Kingsley Bolton

Introduction: Mediated America: Americana as Hollywoodiana / Jan Olsson, Kingsley Bolton -- Italian marionettes meet cinematic modernity / Jan Olsson -- "A red-blooded romance"; or Americanizing early multi-reel feature cinema: the case of The spoilers / Joel Frykholm -- Song of the sonic body: noise, the audience, and early American moving picture culture / Meredith C. Ward -- Constructing the global vernacular: American English and the media / Kingsley Bolton -- You only live once: repetitions of crime as desire in the films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930-1937 / Esther Sonnet -- Punks! Topicality and the 1950s gangster bio-pic cycle / Peter Stanfield -- Importing evil: the American gangster, Swedish cinema, and anti-American propaganda / Ann-Kristin Wallengren -- Sun Yu and the early Americanization of Chinese cinema / Corrado Neri -- If America were really China or how Christopher Columbus discovered Asia / Gregory Lee -- Civil rights on the screen / Michael Renov -- Goodbye rabbit ears: visualizing and mapping the U.S. Digital TV transition / Lisa Parks -- Archival transitions: some digital propositions / Pelle Snickars -- Are Americans human? / Evelyn Ch'ien -- Afterword: Rethinking the American century / William Uricchio.

Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century

Lennart Wohlgemuth

"Dialogue is often considered to be the hub of international relations, not the least in development co-operation. However, it is extremely difficult to achieve dialogue, in its true sense, between partners in development. Its efficiency is severely constrained due to the asymmetry in financial and human resources and knowledge. Dialogue in development co-operation is in that respect not an interaction between equals. How to overcome such constraints is a challenge for all actors involved and the main line of inquiry in this study. More than twenty practitioners with long experience of working with development co-operation present personal reflections and ideas about the concept and process of dialogue."

Dialogue in Pursuit of Development

This book is a source for inspiration to managers and organization designers. It describes how internal structures of an organization can be designed to enable sustainable success in a constantly changing environment. The book helps the reader to understand how to do the design of an organization. It integrates organizational theories with hands-on and practical approaches in how to get the work done. Most organizations have a great potential to improve performance and market success if they apply a systematic approach to organization design. Elements in the internal structure have to work together and interact with customers and other external stakeholders. Sustainable efficiency can be achieved if we build effective organizations by the design of a structured Management System. This book describes a systematic approach in the development of a Management Systems. It explains how the design of business logic is done in a Management System Architecture. The book then describes how this Architecture is transformed into a practical implementation by using seven Management System Building Blocks. • Purpose • Organization Structure • Process & Rules • Governing • Plans • Records • Deliverables More info at www.managementsystem.se

Effective organizations via a structured Management System

Practical Organization Design

Marina Dahlquist

Doron Galili

Valentine Robert

Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity. Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form

Corporeality in Early Cinema

In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it. With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future. Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

Jan Olsson

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