Cinema and Media Studies

Arsenjuk and Resmini’s contribution examines Trumpian imagery as the visual form of a politically disarticulated reactionary coalition. It argues that Trumpism achieves unity through spectacle: a proliferating and serial image regime that compensates for the loss of political articulation. Drawing on Benjamin, Jesi, Jameson, and Wajcman, the essay shows how contemporary Trumpian visual culture, especially in its AI-generated forms, is structured by seriality, discontinuity, and hypercrisis rather than by the dialectical temporality of historical fascism. Trumpian imagery thus appears as an unstable attempt to produce myth under conditions that render myth impossible. The article proposes seriality as a key category for understanding the historical specificity of Trumpist spectacle.

A milestone in the cinematic representation of neoliberalism, Maren Ade’s 2016 breakout hit Toni Erdmann offers a wide-ranging depiction of the contemporary global economy and its reshaping of our psychic and social lives. Emerging from the German art cinema movement known as the Berlin School, Toni Erdmann achieved unexpected success with audiences worldwide, attaining theatrical release in at least 37 countries and winning more than 50 international awards. Yet the film’s viral popularity and critical acclaim proved perplexing to some commentators, especially given its oxymoronic status as a German comedy; its sprawling, nearly three-hour duration; and its formally unremarkable, even nondescript style.

This is the first edited collection to critically address in its entirety questions related to the displaying of Chinese contemporary art. It includes chapters by scholars and cultural workers from diverse backgrounds involved in the interpretation of artistic as well as curatorial discourses and practices. Each of those chapters gives a detailed account of a particular, socio-culturally informed, approach to the making and showing of Chinese art - including in relation to queer identities, transculturality, the use of social media, artivism, social engagement, institutional critique, and neo-Confucian aesthetics. Together they present a vital intervention with established curatorship amidst the intensely interconnected and increasingly multi-polar cultural conditionalities of early 21st-century contemporaneity.