The value of fan magazines as historical artefacts has until fairly recently been contentious. In his 2011 article, Mark Glancy discusses the fan magazine's place in popular culture during the Second World War. He notes that historians had been reluctant to use fan magazines as a primary source of historical evidence since they are neither transparent nor neutral in their views. Further, and somewhat more revealing of certain historians’ underlying biases, Glancy reports that the readers of the magazines are also found wanting since historians’ ‘reluctance has stemmed partly from the traditional view of fans as passive, gullible, undiscriminating consumers’ (2011, 455).

Similarly, in Star Attractions: Twentieth-Century Movie Magazines and Global Fandom (2019) editors Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Lies Lanckman cite Anthony Slide's generally held assumption that the fan magazine was aimed at a reader who was ‘an average member of the moviegoing public who more often than not was female’ (1). They explain that fan magazines initially ‘summarized the plots of particular films in a story format’ but widened their content to encompass reviews, news and articles focusing on stars and related gossip (1). Therefore, if we replace the word ‘fans’ with ‘women’ in the quote by Glancy and consider this in combination with the seemingly lighthearted nature of fan magazines, it is not unreasonable to infer a gendered bias so entrenched that there was a failure to recognise the value of the magazines as primary historical evidence.

Using articles from a single issue of Photoplay, January 1955, this chapter will demonstrate how magazine editors communicated information about stars to their readers via a blend of visual signifiers and subtext. Four male stars are prominent in this issue – Victor Mature, Marlon Brando, Edmund Purdom and Rock Hudson – the presentation of whom demonstrates how editors constructed multilayered profiles avoiding explicit proclamations, but relying upon visual cues and allusions to tropes and stereotypes to hint at various subtexts, confident their skilful readers would pick up on their insinuations.

The final season of Silicon Valley sees the tech entrepreneur Gavin Belson learn that he might lose control of Hooli. In a desperate attempt to stave off his defenestration he offers another trademark, self-aggrandising speech. ‘Look,’ he declares, ‘forget all the bullshit about making the world a better place. The most valuable companies in this valley were built and run by … by savages, who cheat to win. Zuckerberg, and Jobs, and me.’ Here, Belson highlights not only the centrality of Zuckerberg and Jobs to Silicon Valley's mythology but also that their ruthlessness lies at the heart of their legends. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood also cements them as Silicon Valley icons, although unlike Belson, its films offer a less laudatory view of their subjects’ savagery. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) follows Zuckerberg through his brief studies at Harvard University, where he codes Facebook's predecessor and decides to launch the now ubiquitous social network, before heading to Silicon Valley to follow Facebook's expansion. It presents Zuckerberg as a gifted computer engineer with human failings that ultimately inform his social media behemoth. Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015) focuses intently on three key moments in Jobs's public life: the presentations of the Apple Macintosh 128k in 1984; the NeXT cube computer four years later; and the iMac in 1998. Jobs (Joshua Michael Stern, 2013), meanwhile, traces Jobs's life from his Reed College days in the early 1970s to his triumphant return as Apple's Chief Executive Officer in 1996. Both exist in dialogue with Pirates of Silicon Valley (Martyn Burke, 1999), a made-for-television movie that acts as a dual biopic of Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates, focusing on the tension between the two while tracing their lives from their college dorms to Jobs's 1997 announcement of a collaboration between their two companies. While some of the rickety sets signal Pirates’ low-budget status, the 1999 Emmy Awards recognised the quality of its casting and writing, indicating that we dismiss it at our peril.

As the film scholar Dennis Bingham argues, classical biopics offer a ‘Great Man’ theory of history, presenting their subjects as preternaturally talented visionaries who triumphantly overcome the scepticism of their peers.

Moving from foundational myths to twenty-first-century California, two films exemplify Hollywood's indictment of Silicon Valley's disruption of the American economy and its failure to respect its employees’ human lives. The Circle (James Ponsoldt, 2017), adapted from San Francisco native Dave Eggers's 2013 novel, uses its titular fictional tech company to attack Silicon Valley's Taylorism, authoritarianism and antihumanism. Thanks to its union of elements of Google, Facebook, PayPal, Twitter and Amazon, combined with its removal of online anonymity, the Circle dominates the world of the near future. The demands it places on its workers are such that they must abandon their private lives, temporally, geographically and eventually biologically. Dismissed as a feature-length advert for Google, The Internship (Shawn Levy, 2013) initially seems a whimsical, utopian mirror image of The Circle. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson essentially play themselves: Billy and Nick, two irreverent, optimistic and determinedly wacky Generation Xers – the generation of Americans born between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s – who have been cast aside when the watch distributor for which they work collapses. They improbably win internships at Google, where their can-do attitude wins the hearts of their fellow interns and secures all of them contracts at the corporation. The British film critic Mark Kermode denounced the film as ‘one of the most witless, humourless … self-satisfied, smug, unfunny comedies I have ever seen’. Yet a deep reading reveals that it presents Google as a Potemkin Village, where a utopian appearance covers the neoliberal dystopia at Google's heart. Reading The Internship against the grain – or, rather, analysing its political unconscious – enables us to consider more deeply the ideological assumptions that drive many people in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Also largely dismissed by critics, The Circle – which was financed by Image Nation Abu Dhabi – pitched itself as a dystopian critique of Silicon Valley, helped by a number of pointed casting choices. Playing against type, America's favourite uncle, Tom Hanks (as the Circle's head, Eamon Bailey), and the comedian Patton Oswalt (as the Circle's Chief Operating Officer Tom Stenton) reference the ruthless-capitalism-with-a-benign-façade that characterises tech evangelists such as Google's founders.

The ecological crisis calls for vast and rapid socioeconomic changes that seem less than imminent. The changes seem remote, rather, and outside our grasp. And for many reasons: most concretely, the current system of socioeconomic power is a colossal obstacle, which can inspire a sense of futility. The system also tends to bind our desires, channel our attentions and shape worldviews, which affects what we find worth pursuing, possible, and even thinkable. Additionally, as is often pointed out, the development of industrial capitalism came with an overly dualistic and anthropocentric separation between human history/society and natural history. This separation not only enabled the over-exploitation of nature, but also helped create modes of existence as alienation from nature. Certainly, the current crisis makes the two sides of the separation appear ‘entangled for everyone to see’ (Latour 2010: 484). But seeing does not seem to drive us towards thinking and acting in ways required by the situation. Perhaps we need visions that both capture our situation and stretch beyond our situation towards credible new modes of existence. Here art can play a role. This can even be posed as an ethical-artistic challenge: how to help foster a new sense of planetary belonging for alienated modern subjects, while remaining rooted in – rather than escaping from – historical-political realities of causes and obstacles?

This chapter explores John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015) as an intriguing response to such an ethical-artistic challenge. Vertigo Sea is a video work projected on three large screens in a secluded dark room with cinematic sound that offers an ‘immersive experience’, as Nora Alter writes, comparable to ‘the effect of Richard Serra's large-scale steel objects, or Olafur Eliasson's sublime installations’ (2018: 3). It outlines a complex planetary whole, into which spectators tend to be gradually pulled. What they are pulled into, I should first clarify, is neither an image of nature as organic unity and oneness, nor an idealised sphere to get back to, nor a utopian blueprint – i.e., wholes as unengaging clichés or general abstractions that tend to veil differences and socioeconomic and historic realities. Instead, Vertigo Sea charts a whole that is immersive, visionary and critically historical and in ways sensitive to a feeling of planetary alienation.

This edited collection emerged due to a shared sense amongst the editors that more needed to be said about how cinematic ethics is intertwined with the sociopolitical. This sense arose from the observation of a growing focus on this topic within the field, as seen in, for example, recent conference papers and publications in journals focusing on film-philosophy. With the turn to ethics in scholarship at the interdisciplinary intersection of film and philosophy now firmly established, it became clear that we should foreground the complex contextualisations, associations, imbrications, combinations and assemblages combining the ethical with the sociopolitical. Alongside this realisation was the growing awareness that cinematic ethics also requires a broader understanding of screen ethics to include examples of screen media ‘types’ which proliferate in our media-saturated world. Not a provincialising of cinematic ethics, but a recognition of the need to broaden the panorama to include television, digital media, virtual reality technology, and so on.

The contributions in Contemporary Screen Ethics together indicate how political the examination of screen ethics is. The manifestation of such politics, however, typically focus on the sociopolitical as opposed to the political strictly speaking (as in the politics of government, for example). Thus, collected in this anthology are chapters which examine screen ethics in relation to a range of topics which can be understood to be sociopolitical. It is worth outlining a few examples.

Feminist-informed explorations of screen ethics herein lead to three distinct contexts. First, considerations of decolonial analysis of the figure of the housemaid in a range of Brazilian cinematic genres and modes (intersectionally considering gender, race and class), which gesture towards an ethics of relationality that could be more inclusive of such otherwise marginalised figures. Second, the teasing out of what an ethics of care might look like in terms of documentary filmmaking practice, once more recognising of the nuanced intersectional nature of such practices and their subjects. Third, the affective nature of the ethical gaze when films explore sexual and gendered violence in the media and film industries.

We might equally consider the various approaches to race which open up discussion of, for instance, how televised stand-up comedy can make an ethicopolitical intervention into the circulation of stereotypes, or, how popular genre films may encourage people to ethically encounter otherness anew in a context which has normalised alignment with a constructed, racialised gaze.

The second set of precursors to Silicon Valley cinema follow in the footsteps of Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987), critiquing American capitalism by depicting groups of financial traders dictating the rise and decline of American firms and thus by extension the entire economy. As such, like the technology thrillers, they highlight fears of shadowy cabals manipulating our world for their own benefit. Each film engages with the fallout from the economic collapse of 2007–2008. Their venal and corrupt capitalists see no ethical problem in using illegally obtained information to manipulate stock values and boost their personal finances. As important, their critique of the influence of toxic masculinity and the traders’ devotion only to their own wealth accumulation develops a deeper philosophical connection with Silicon Valley cinema, one surrounding Ayn Rand's valorising of the self-interest of the self-appointed great men of our times.

Based on its anti-hero's memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) recounts Jordan Belfort's rise to Wall Street notoriety courtesy of his preternatural sales skills and his willingness to flout both convention and the law when selling stocks. Obsessed with money and the attendant opportunities for sex- and drug-fuelled bad behaviour, Belfort finds his company under investigation by the FBI and the American Securities and Exchange Commission, with his conviction and jailing following soon afterwards. This downfall presages a shift into a different grift: motivational speaking, where he dispenses the supposed secret to financial success to conference rooms full of suckers desperate to make a fast buck in sales. Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011) reveals how analysts at a fictional investment bank discover in 2008 that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to it underestimating the risks attached to mortgage- backed securities. The firm's heads, operating according to capitalist exigencies, decide to sell as many of these assets as they can before the price drops so low that it will endanger the firm. This throws the rest of the securities market to the wolves, with the film ending on the verge of another Wall Street Crash. The mysteries of these mortgage-backed securities are unravelled in the documentary Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010), which details the close relationship between bankers, regulators and academics in the decades before the 2007–2008 financial crash, indicting all three for greed, laziness and corruption.

Appendix IV: Damascus under Siege

This chapter analyses some of the imaginary constructions of local audiences which can be identified in Chilean fan magazines of the 1940s, focusing on the case of Ecran, the main specialised film fan magazine of the period. It derives from a broader ongoing research project which investigates historical cinemagoing practices in the city of Santiago, looking to map movie theatres and film experiences from the past. Following the film consumption and reception focus present in much of ‘new cinema history’, which examines cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange (Maltby, Biltereyst and Meers 2011), this research aims to reconstruct audiences’ experiences and to situate them as part of local cinema history, understanding this as a social history of film cultures that goes beyond films themselves. This point of view aims to reposition audiences within film studies, as empirical research can assist us in contesting the idea of a single universal ‘spectator’, and can allow us to discuss the specificities of local audiences in greater detail.

We will therefore refer here to different audiences formed in relation to the circulation of texts, images and objects produced by the mediatisation of culture (Warner 2002) in Chile. We will consider being part of the audience as a condition, ‘a mode of existence of subjects’ (Mata 2001, 187) within their social context. During the 1940s, both the cinema and print media industries were part of the same media ecology, in which film fan magazines mediated audiences’ film experiences. We are interested therefore in analysing how such fan magazines can reveal some characteristics of historical audiences, either directly, by giving space to their voices and/or describing audience behaviour, or indirectly, by targeting particular articles at an implicit audience that went to the movies and read the magazines.

Fatimid Bilad al-sham

Much like the Byzantine Empire, the Fatimid Caliphate had long-standing territorial interests in bilad al-sham that dated back to the fourth/tenth century. The Mirdasid dynasty had wrested Aleppo from Fatimid control in 416/1025, and although the Egyptians regained the city briefly between 429 and 433/1038 and 1042, dominion over Aleppo for a sustained period proved to be elusive. Instead, Cairo had to settle for intermittent tribute payments and the khutba in Aleppo being made in the name of the Fatimid caliph, which had been common practice in the city since 360/970. The Egypt-based caliphate also maintained control of the coastline settlements in bilad al-sham from Tripoli southwards, in addition to Damascus and Jerusalem further inland.

A thirty-five-year period of crisis from 437/1045 resulted in a sharp decline in Fatimid influence in Syria, in addition to significant territorial losses in Sicily, North Africa, Yemen and Arabia. The main causes of this crisis were a combination of severe drought in Egypt as a result of low water levels in the Nile, the outbreak of civil war in Egypt between rival factions of the military, and the declining influence of the bureaucratic class, known broadly as ‘the men of the pen’, who were replaced by military figures like Badr al-Jamali. Ronnie Ellenblum has pointed to evidence of climate change along the Nile delta and on the Eurasian Steppe as the source of the political turmoil afflicting Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean during this period.

Much of the analysis of events in northern Syria has been framed in the context of this wider Fatimid decline. Michael Brett's comprehensive work on the Fatimid Caliphate, for example, attributed developments in Tyre, Aleppo and the region as a whole to an ongoing ‘growth of municipal autonomy’ throughout the Mediterranean, rather than anything specific to northern Syria.4 There has been some research on Fatimid policy in fifth/eleventh-century Syria and Palestine, though Bramoulléand Bianquis, Mouton and Yared-Riachi focused more on Damascus, the coastal settlements of Tyre, Acre and Tripoli, and the Red Sea. To date, Fatimid activity in the northern parts of the region, and in particular their interactions with the emergent ‘Seljuq’ potentates, has largely been overlooked.

This chapter examines cinema's potential to ethically regard sexual and gendered violence and film aesthetics’ capacity to screen rape culture without subjecting women to essentialised visual modes of subjugation, or similar sexual violence, in the context of Asia's media and film industries. It explores Nina Wu (2019), a psychological thriller about an aspiring Taiwanese young actress, Nina Wu, who moves to Taipei from her rural hometown. After juggling insignificant media odd jobs for eight years, Nina finally gets an opportunity to audition for a lead role in a 1960s spy romance thriller, Spy Romance. To her dismay, Nina learns that this role requires her to get naked in a risqué sex scene. Whilst she lands the part, the audience eventually learns that the film's executive producer, Fat Cat, drugged and raped Nina during her audition. A film about making a film, Nina Wu interrogates the circumstantial contexts, psychological aftermaths and other consequences that enable sexual and gendered violence against women within Taiwan's media and film industry. Initially the chapter considers Nina Wu in relation to the #MeToo movement and the specificities of its Taiwanese context, establishing in the process how the film's engagement with rape culture relates to ongoing debates concerning cinema, ethics, the gaze and affect. For the remainder of the chapter the film is analysed in terms of its aesthetic features (especially its shot composition, mise-en-scène and cinematography, self-reflexive storytelling, and the tracking shot), drawing out thereby both Nina Wu's illumination of how rape culture is enabled in the Taiwanese film and media industry and as a consequence, the insights this particular film offers concerning the correlation between screen ethics and cinematic affect.

Beyond Hollywood and outside Anglo-American contexts, Nina Wu problematises rape culture as a symptom of deep-seated misogynist and patriarchal structures of power that protect perpetrators within the Taiwanese film industry. In Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, Clifford Christians and coauthors argue that the #MeToo movement expresses itself differently in socially conservative cultures within Asia, especially because social barriers and gender inequality make it difficult for women to speak up about sexual violation and assault (2020: 80). As such, #MeToo or #TimesUp in Asia may manifest differently, where empowering individual women to speak out about specific incidents of sexual harassment and assault is insufficient (i.e. to think beyond the dichotomy of perpetrator/victim as the construct of rape culture).

The movies Sleight (2016), directed by J. D. Dillard, and Us (2019), directed by Jordan Peele, were released in the United States during a political moment heavily influenced by the Trump presidency (since January 2017) and the post-9/11 era (since September 2001). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to lay out how the Trump presidency logically extends, rather than ruptures, the US landscape since the events of 11 September 2001, I nonetheless take this idea as a point of departure and backdrop here. In the main, Americans, during the past twenty years, have been positioned to fear, be anxious about, and show heightened concern for ‘foreigners’ and ‘enemy others’. This posture has not fundamentally changed during the last several years and actually appears to have strengthened (Norman 2016). As a simultaneous phenomenon, the categories of perceived threat(s) to American citizens and the United States as a nation have undergone stark expansion. Presidential or state discourse has marked a primary mechanism for propelling and bolstering these conceptions (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2010).

The last several years have also witnessed a number of films released by black directors, including but not limited to Dillard and Peele, that have featured black actors. Such films as Get Out (Peele 2017) and Black Panther (Coogler 2018), along with BlacKkKlansman (Lee 2018), The Equalizer 2 (Fuqua 2018), and Creed II (Caple 2018) offer examples of these box office and critical successes. Brian Welk notes that ‘Black filmmakers had a record year at the box office in 2018, earning $1.5 billion at the domestic box office from 16 films’ (2019). And Trey Williams adds, ‘while it wasn't so long ago that Hollywood studios and producers argued that a star like [Denzel] Washington couldn't open a movie abroad because he's black, Equalizer 2 grossed nearly half of its $190.4 million in ticket sales from theaters overseas’ (2019).

I have suggested elsewhere (Bloodsworth-Lugo 2019) that philosophers of film are well-served to consider lessons contained in recent films directed by black filmmakers, especially as these lessons are situated against a backdrop of lived (racial) realities within the contemporary United States and its particular political dimensions.

In the very first episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin Belson spots from his panoptic office window a multitude of Hooli computer engineers wandering around the company's grounds. ‘They always travel in groups of five,’ he muses, ‘a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.’ Belson here revealingly highlights Silicon Valley's racial diversity. Yet his observation overlooks the under-representation of African and African American people in these groups and the fact that each man in each group seems no older than thirty. His final elision relates to the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman's observation that sexism is much more prevalent and explicit than racism in Silicon Valley: no women appear in the groups he sees and thus employs. The Circle and The Internship confirm this heavily masculine and almost completely white environment, even as both over-represent women and global majority people in Silicon Valley corporations. As important, each film highlights Silicon Valley's problematic approach to the concept of diversity, while both force their leading female characters to ensure a series of punishments that at once highlights Silicon Valley's casual misogyny while extending the gender critique embedded in the biopics of Jobs and Zuckerberg.

Racial Diversity

The Internship ostensibly presents Google as a paragon of diversity and anti-discrimination, beginning with Vaughn and Wilson's introduction to Google's workers. As if to reinforce the notion that Generation Xers lived in a different age, they must endure a humiliating interview process before being inducted into Google. Echoing their former boss's lamentations about a computer-driven economy, this is not a face-to-face meeting but one that takes place in a virtual zone. Naturally, as unemployed, superannuated oldies, they do not possess a home computer with a broadband connection fast enough to host live video, so they retreat to a public library for the interview. Significantly, they meet in the children's section, suggesting that Google will release them from their emasculating perpetual Gen-X childhood and enable them to grow (up).

This edited collection focuses on movie magazines: magazines produced for movie fans from the 1910s onward. Although the first magazine of this type began in the United States, with the publication of The Motion Picture Story Magazine in 1911, the phenomenon soon spread around the world. This collection aims to emulate this diversity by bringing together scholars working in a broad range of disciplinary and international contexts, and above all, in joining film history and magazine history, fields which cover similar ground but have nonetheless largely operated in separate spheres before now.

While work on movie magazines is still relatively rare, even rarer is that which focuses on the magazine as an object of material history. Most articles and full-length monographs that examine these colourful and fascinating publications are content to quote from isolated articles, rather than studying items in their full printed contexts. Yet, we contend, the full meaning of any article, editorial, photograph, reader's letter or advertisement can only be grasped when considered in situ: the juxtaposition of these different contents inevitably impacts on their meaning.

Our volume, then, builds upon previous work, but adds a greater emphasis to the visual rather than textual aspects of the magazine. A few scholars have previously addressed design in fan magazines but our edited collection's core focus on the visual aspects of these magazines – one of their key pleasures for contemporaneous and contemporary readers alike – both underlines the importance of studying the fan magazine holistically and provides new and detailed examples of the various ways in which design was employed to engender desire. For these movie magazines use the whole of the designer's toolkit to seduce the reader: with text, they made use of font choice, size and colour, as well as varieties of all of these; with illustration, they engaged line drawings, photos, colour and blackand- white to create interest. Wrapped around the contents, the front and back covers stirred excitement and longing, with their usual combination of glamorous star on the front and full-colour advertisement on the back. And throughout these publications, clustered in the first few pages, accumulated in the rear ones, and interspersed throughout, advertisements invoked yearning and aspiration.