Who did it? Leaking narratives on Michael Haneke's Caché

to be published on newmediaFIX.org

The Deus Ex Machina trick Haneke played on the spectators on Caché tells more than meets the eye: the transition from modernist to postmodern cinema/audiovisual, and the understanding of how the focus has changed from one “era” to another is essential to understand how new media can be perceived on contemporary society.

The Gaze of Magibon: critical discourse analysis on multi-million viewed YouTube videos

Presented at Salford University, UK, June 2009. Digital Culture

This study aims to throw lights on the phenomena of self-broadcast videos, focusing on the distance between author and the character presented on screen, on how such videos may be perceived by society and on collateral implications of this communication. In order to do that, YouTube was selected as the medium, and among YouTube users, the user Magibon was selected.


The phenomenon broadcasted by Magibon is in the eye of the storm of the miracle society is experiencing in Post-YouTube Era of self-broadcast. The “Hello, World!” message is (and it always is) accompanied by a full set of attached/embedded messages and for many reasons Magibon stands out as an icon — and official partner — of such phenomena, which provoke, amazes and disturbs the audience.

Young Parenthood, Anxiety and family ties: The Allegory of The Ring

As David Kellner analyzed Poltergeist in the chapter in Media Culture “Social anxiety, class, and disaffected youth”, this essay aims to analyze the contemporary film The Ring by the same optic: “media culture provides social allegories which articulate class and social group fears, yearnings and hopes” (Kellner, 125).

In the Reagan era, Steven Spielberg, whose films are mainly about “family entertainment”, produced Poltergeist, a film directed by horror film director Tobe Hooper. It was an era of uncertainty and social downward perspectives, and the film depicts a family being haunted by spirits that want them to leave their house – a beautiful suburbia house, the whole ideal of the American Dream residence. There is, indeed, no better way to describe the loss of a house (caused by the inability of the family’s father to pay the mortgage, in example) than seeing it being completely destroyed and consumed by unseen forces – the unseen forces of unemployment, economical recession and political crisis.

Two decades later, Spielberg again produced – and not directed, as if he wouldn’t like to have his public image as a director “tainted” by horror films – a blockbuster and widely popular horror film that again, apparently, transcoded to film the anxieties inherent to a specific social group.