KOSMORAMA NEWSLETTER #9
Congratulations!
This month 60 years ago saw the publication of the first issue of Kosmorama. So we’re seizing the opportunity to toast ourselves in this issue by letting former editor Dan Nissen take Danish-speaking readers back through the decades in an article (Kosmorama gennem 60 år - Fra kampskrift for filmkunst til formidlet forskning) on how different editors have shaped the form and content of Kosmorama – Denmark’s oldest film journal.
This editorial, however, will not just reminisce about the merits of the ‘good old days’ when Kosmorama was a print journal. A little more than a year has passed since Kosmorama went online and a few words on the transition from print to web and how this changes our profile seem appropriate.
Two major changes
During the past year the content of Kosmorama has undergone two major changes as compared to the print journal. The first of these changes is that editing team is now situated at the Danish Film Institute in close proximity to the extensive collections of the DFI’s library and its film- and picture archives. This is something we wish to take advantage of. Thus the second major change is that several of the articles published since our first online issue make use of both embedded film clips and images of documentation related to article content.
In other words we publish both primary and secondary sources on certain topics. And as a consequence a number of articles are now turning into mini-websites rather than old fashioned analogue texts consisting of 5-8000 words and a handful of illustrations. This, we believe, offers the reader who really wants to learn more the opportunity to do so. And having some of the source material readily available on the same page adds transparency to the articles.
Attracting global readership
One example of this approach is C.Claire Thomson and Mary Hilson’s article Beauty in Bacon: "The Pattern of Co-operation" and the Export of Postwar Danish Democracy in which we embedded not only film clips but also the legal text stipulating how Dansk Kulturfilm, the official institution behind the production of the analyzed film, should operate. This example also illustrates the obvious shortcoming of this method vis-à-vis readers without Danish. The vast majority of the documentation we can employ is, of course, in Danish. But even when we publish articles in Danish only, as was the case with the last issue of Kosmorama, which presented silent movie director Urban Gad’s personal account of how he and his superstar wife Asta Nielsen fled Berlin at the outbreak of WWI, we are delighted to note that our readership is truly international: more than half of the reader’s sessions registered took place in the U.S., and a considerable number of readers were located in Germany, France, Britain and in the other Scandinavian countries.
So we have managed to become an international journal even if a large share of our publications and background materials are still in Danish only. The publication of Gad’s account was, in fact, part of a WWI commemoration event taking place at the Cinemateque in Copenhagen. So this example also shows that even when the topic of an issue is firmly anchored at the Danish Film Institute and the film cultural activities taking place very locally, the article still attracts a global readership.
Upcoming topics
Nevertheless, we intend to increase substantially the number of articles published in English. Within the next year we are planning two major themed issues, one on body language in the moving image, a research topic on which literature is scarce, and another issue on the newsreel mediation of the Suez Crisis in 1956. These two upcoming issues are the results of a number of workshops and conferences organized by two international research networks, the Network for the Study of Body Language in the Moving Image and The Newsreel Network.
Scholars from those networks come from a dozen countries, have convened at Lund University in Sweden, at Copenhagen University and at the Danish Film Institute, and we are pleased and proud to announce that readers of Kosmorama will be the first to know the results of more than two years of international research networking on body language in the moving image and on how the Suez Crisis was presented to viewers in the newsreels of a number of the countries involved in the conflict.
In short, we are delighted to see that you read our journal and we look forward to editing Kosmorama for at least some of the next 60 years to come.
You can find all the Kosmorama articles in English here: Kosmorama/English/Articles
Enjoy your read!!
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