The interaction between American drama and cinema – put more crudely, Broadway and Hollywood – has fluctuated significantly in the last century, but the link between the two was for many years crucial.

In reacting to the zeitgeist, or prevailing focus, of an era, the superhero has previously fought Nazis, participated in Cold War tensions, and addressed the careful balance of government oversight and civilian independence following acts of terrorism and subsequent legislation. How, though, are superheroes reacting to our zeitgeist, the age of digital media?

“Who’d have thought there were so many different sorts of duck?” asked my wife. As the restrictions of lockdown eased during 2020, we’d opted to focus our precious hours of outdoor exercise by walking around the local nature reserve, a delightful area with a modest lake large enough for a good selection of wildfowl but too small to accommodate a barquentine.

Last year, Ian Greaves wrote an illuminating CST blog about the ‘turmoil’ COVID had created for the film journal Sight & Sound . As Greaves discusses, lockdown saw the return of extended reviews of new television in Sight & Sound with a separate television reviews section starting in Summer 2020.

What is television’s capacity to elicit empathy? ‘Stories move us. They make us feel more emotion, see new perspectives, and bring us closer to each other’ (Netflix, 2021). Television can grant us extended access to a diversity of perspectives and narratives. Meanwhile, interactive technologies and the internet promise more personal and collective relationships with the small screen, and with each other, than ever before.

Is it just me, or do you currently want to spend a lot of time sticking your head in the sand? I live in the UK, and if you live elsewhere, less Johnson-or-similar-run, you will probably not have quite that urge. But… it’s COP26, the world leaders came together, and you could feel them heating the atmosphere with their speeches. The sense of having only hot air delivered as policy is frustrating;

Anniversary celebrations are being planned to mark the start of BBC radio in 1922 and Channel 4 TV in 1982 next year, as John Ellis’s blog last week discussed. But rather than celebrating a beginning, I thought I would look at the time when television stopped, after a mere three years of existence, during the Second World War.

In the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (2017) , Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff and Ben Winters write, ‘screen music and sound has consistently ignored aspects of process in favor of the interpretation of completed texts’ (p. 5). Such calls for analysing media production processes have been made since at least the 1980s (Maltby 1983;

Media Journeys 2021  Special Issue: Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance  Making Monsters: The Production of Terror   We are seeking proposals for article contribution for a special issue in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance on the intersection of adaptation, special effects, and monstrosity. Monsters stalk through modern media.

Call for Book Proposals Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East Peter Lang Publishing

There’s an avalanche of anniversaries coming in 2022, a veritable tsunami of television history. The big one is the BBC’s centenary, starting with the publication of David Hendy’s The BBC: A Peoples’ History in January, and running through the year to climax in November. It’s a pity that BBC4 can no longer commission historically-informed documentaries to go with this event.