Editor's Introduction

This issue of the journal ("The Poetics of Feeling") addresses the question of how the moving-image arts design emotions into feelings—particularly in extreme cases, as emotions take shape amidst the outer chaos of revolution and war or the inner chaos of hate and grief. Can love, for example, escape ideology, transcending the vast social, political, and material forces that "stage" experience? The first paper in this issue, by Crystal Downing ("Staging Ideology and Love in Good Bye, Lenin!"), explains how love, with elaborate counter-staging, just might pull it off. Or can love sink so far into unreality that it forsakes the real altogether—and is there anything wrong with that? Tony Hughes-d'Aeth ("Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Love") examines three disturbing versions of the problem. What about anger? What happens when the "style" of an art is so deliberately detached from its history that it redesigns hostility—toward both women and history—as aesthetic delight? When do facts matter to art? Katherine Farrimond ("Postfeminist Noir") investigates what might be concealed—psychologically and historically—by the posture of style. And, finally, how might the most sublime of emotions—awe—be dismantled and reconstructed as contempt, almost by accident? Kathleen McClancy ("The Iconography of Violence") tracks the visual evolution of soldiers to their unexpected demise in our living rooms.

The present issue also contains seventeen new book reviews, edited by Paul Cohen. Many of the reviewers have published manuscript-length articles in Film & History and are now looking more narrowly and compactly at a single work or two, offering a compelling perspective from which our readers may engage current scholarship.

The 2013 Film & History conference will take place in Madison, WI, in November (20-24), giving participants a rich opportunity to engage further, and more convivially, in scholarly pursuits. David Bordwell will present the keynote address during our plenary banquet on Saturday evening (Nov. 23). Meanwhile, planning for the 2014 conference is underway.

The staff at Film & History wish to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of Jim Welsh—co-founder, in 1973, of Literature/Film Quarterly—to the study of film, literature, and history. Jim died on October 3 this year. He will be sorely missed.