Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the heyday of fan magazines, Introduction to Advertising was published in several editions in the United States. Authored by advertising executives and academics, this industry handbook included advice on the distribution of advertisements and editorial material in magazines. It was recommended that advertisers exploit readers’ desire to finish articles. These should terminate among advertisements ‘to increase the probability of the advertisement's being read’ (Brewster, Palmer and Ingraham 1947, 85). This was considered so commonplace a practice that ‘every magazine reader has doubtless learned from his [sic] own experience that it accomplishes this result very effectively’ (85). We cannot know whether such reading strategies were followed by those perusing fan magazines. However, analysis of the interaction of advertisements and editorial material in fan magazines is particularly important because these elements are especially entwined. As well as using stars to advertise films, these publications promoted items endorsed by stars, which readers could buy to emulate them. Stars themselves are products, with editorial material not only sating readers’ desire for information about stars’ lives but contributing to their image. Sumiko Higashi's Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (2014) provides some useful comment on the relationship between advertisements and editorial material in the ubiquitous US fan magazine. Since structure has rarely been addressed in relation to fan magazines, and there is criticism that scholarship has unjustly focused on Photoplay due to its availability (Petersen 13 November 2013, n.p.), this chapter considers the contents and structure of Photoplay alongside four other magazine titles. In addition to the August 1955 issue of the little-known Filmalaya, I explore the 3 September 1955 issues of the British weeklies Picturegoer and Picture Show and September 1955 UK and US versions of the monthly Photoplay.

Concern with the interplay of advertisements and editorial material has more often been discussed by scholars addressing women's magazines. Since, as Sally Stein comments, women's magazines are ‘underwritten by advertisers’ (1985, 9), academic work focuses on the address to the increasingly powerful female consumer. Stein's ‘The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-Class Magazine 1914–1939’ (1985) tackles the structural relation of advertisements to other features in the US women's magazine Ladies Home Journal at five-year intervals.

The ‘Counter-Crusade’ and ‘la maqam’ Paradigms

There are two seemingly contradictory, but interlocking historiographical frameworks through which historians have approached the Islamic Near East's responses to the onset of the Crusades. The first is the ‘counter-Crusade’ movement, which is generally applied to nearly all Muslim military, social and cultural reactions to Frankish entanglements in the eastern Mediterranean. The second is Michael Köhler's ‘la maqam’ or ‘no place’ theory, which contends that the Frankish polities established in the Levant were almost directly integrated into the Syrian political milieu by local autonomous rulers, who prioritised mutual survival over the religious obligations of jihad against the Franks.

The term ‘counter-Crusade’ (contre-croisade) was first coined in the 1930s by the French Orientalist René Grousset. According to Grousset, the counter-Crusade encompassed any attempt by Muslim peoples to combat the Crusaders, from 491/1098 onwards. Just one year after the publication of the first volume of a three-volume history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Grousset's ‘false conception’ of the Muslim counter-Crusade was strongly disputed by Hamilton A. R. Gibb. For Gibb, Grousset's interpretation of the ‘counter- Crusade’ was far too broad, as there was no Muslim ‘mass movement … swept forward by a wave of emotion’ until the time of Nur al-Din ‘at the earliest’.

Gibb's assertion that there was no organised opposition to the Crusaders during the first fifty years of the sixth/twelfth century was built upon by the Israeli scholar Emmanuel Sivan, who charted the development of an anti- Frankish jihad or counter-Crusade movement around the ‘pivot’ of Nur al-Din's career. As such, Sivan was the first to conflate the counter-Crusade with medieval Islamic conceptualisations of jihad, placing great emphasis on the writings of the early sixth/twelfth-century Damascene hadith scholar ʿAli ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 500/1106). Recent scholarship, based upon a broader range of source materials including religious hadith literature and jihad poetry, has corroborated much of Sivan's thesis.

However, some historians have drawn a distinction between counter- Crusade activity by Syrian and Egyptian political elites and non-elites, and jihad sentiment among the religious classes. There are also ongoing debates about the chronology underpinning the counter-Crusade movement.

What is the relationship between digital media and the material world, and how might our use of the former change our understanding of and place within the latter? A central concern of digital media theory from the late- 1990s onwards, the ethical aspects of this technological and (potentially) ontological change in relation to film is summed up by Markos Hadjioannou in From Light to Byte: Towards an Ethics of Digital Cinema (2012). As he describes, analogue cinema's indexicality ‘enables a realization on the part of the spectator of her or his existential position within the world and so qualifies an ethical implication in the image as the potential for responding to, and acting in, the world’ (2012: 177). Digital media, by contrast, offer not indexical trace but interactive, present-tense simulation, and so, for Hadjioannou, ‘cannot conjure up an image of the world as an existential guarantee’ (2012: 177). While assertions around the radical differences between analogue and digital capture have been challenged (see, for instance, Cubitt 2011), it is certainly the case that digital images and the networks that produce them offer a new kind of visual modality. In a digital age, vision becomes a method of filtering, rather than encountering, and the image becomes interactive and navigable (Manovich 2001; Verhoeff 2012). Images are no longer only observed, they are swiped, clicked, tagged, filtered, and shared. If they provide evidentiary proof, it is less as an authentication of a past moment than a trace of a flexible present, a conditional marker of temporary conditions.

All of this alters our ethical relationship to images. The new digital visuality is not principally voyeuristic or scopophilic but rather cartographic, defined by an informatic mode of automated recording and registering that seeks legibility and apparent usefulness. This is not to say that this is entirely novel: the digital's ‘cartographic gaze’ of remote presence certainly inherits impulses to catalogue and quantify familiar from colonial visual modalities – image-making and image-circulation remain methods for distant control and ideological persuasion (Specht and Feigenbaum 2019). Through interactive digital images, the perception of the user is extended beyond their temporalspatial confines. This is achieved through the digital generation of an algorithmic world, one which is less concerned with aesthetic appreciation than it is with bodily immersion and virtual presence.