Classical Hollywood cinema was a narrative art, a spectacle centered on stars, and an industry producing entertainment for profit. These accounts would be familiar to almost anyone exposed to mainstream…
Peer Reviewed Articles
Hitchcock’s Closed Systems
Alfred Hitchcock had an odd affection for rear projection, matte paintings, and composite shots—in short, an affection for cinematic artifice.1 In his early version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Gaumont-British,…
Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World
On the morning of November 30, 2015, observant Parisian commuters — yawning at bus stops, crowding onto subway platforms, or walking to their local cafes — could hardly have missed…
Introduction: Design Culture Studies: Between Infrastructure and Image
The essays in this special issue address their reckoning not to designers or designs but to design cultures, that is, to institutionalized and enmeshed modes of designing that sought or…
Container Culture: Film, Packaging, and the Design of Corporate Humanism at the CCA
To start, two Chicago-based designs on paper as material and medium (figure 1). In 1940, Hungarian multimedia artist, educator and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy published a brief article, “Make a…
Afterword Form Now: As Limit and Beyond
The title of this double special issue of Post45 invites us to consider whether each individual essay endorses, condemns, practices or in some way “unbinds” formalism. It also raises the question about…
Notes on Shade
Many things in this world haven’t yet been named; many things, even if they have been named, have barely been described. One of these is the practice of “reading” —…
Queer Formula
In literary studies, queer theory came on the scene around 1990 wielding its formalism as the sign of its politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s cheeky description of queer theory…
Zadie Smith’s Style of Thinking
Form, writes Ali Smith, can be “a matter of need and expectation,” offering “clear rules and unspoken understandings.” But in practice, she adds, form is “also a matter of breaking…
Form contra Aesthetics
Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies. This time around it claims greater power…