Film magazines have played a significant role in constituting the history of film culture in the twentieth century and have been crucial in the enhancement of the audiences’ affective engagement with cinema. As demonstrated by the existing scholarship as well as the other chapters in this edited collection, stars have been a highly visible part of these movie magazines, including the film ads that appear in them. The association of the audiences with the stars is dependent on the latter's clarity and discernability, that is, they must be ‘seen’. But how do movie magazines engage with the representation of a star/character whose defining characteristic is invisibility? In this chapter, I look at the figure of the Invisible Man, the protagonist in Universal's 1933 monster film The Invisible Man (Whale), as it appeared in the pages of Universal's house organ Universal Weekly. Since the publicity machinery in the 1930s was dependent on the print medium, inevitably predicated on the visible, I look at the ways in which Universal publicity executives negotiated the problems encountered while trying to advertise a film that had a central character who was invisible.

The Invisible Man: A Visibly Different Horror

A simple keyword search on Project Arclight throws up a very interesting set of statistics. The resulting graph shows that during the period 1930–1936, there is a gradual spike in the usage of the word ‘horror’ in the printed paratextual literature on American popular cinema. The word ‘monster’ also follows a similar pattern and increases during this period. It is not just a coincidence that Universal Studios had a very successful run of a series of horror films that started with Dracula (Browning 1931) and ended with Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer 1936). Although Universal was not in the league of the ‘Big Five’ studios, its success during the 1930s was due to its veritable monopoly on the horror film market. A careful examination of film magazines and journals during the period 1930–1936 shows that popular print was replete with images of monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy and others.

In April 1948, readers of the popular French fan magazine Ciné-Miroir were introduced to a new starlet, Dora Grey (nee Denise Gillard), a 19-year-old fashion model who had been cast in the forthcoming film Meurtre au music-hall (Murder at the Music Hall), to be shot in the Paris studios of Osiris Films and on location on the Cote d’Azur. Unlike other actresses whose pictures graced the pages of Ciné-Miroir, however, Dora Grey never actually existed. Or rather, she was the fictional protagonist of the ‘roman en images’ (novel in images) La Passion de Dora, Starlett audacieuse (The Passion of Dora, Audacious Starlet), a serialised comic written by Gerard Heliotte and illustrated by ‘Gal’, which ran in the weekly magazine until July 1948. Over the course of fifteen issues, La Passion de Dora offered Ciné-Miroir readers a genre-bending narrative that combined elements of melodrama, adventure story and gangster film. Week by week, the backstage saga of a young woman's efforts to make it in the movies took twists and turns involving professional and personal rivalries, attempted murder, kidnapping and transvestism, all told in an innovative style mixing images and text.

This chapter investigates La Passion de Dora from a number of angles. It first situates it within the context of the movie magazine in which it appeared, comparing and contrasting it with regular features of Ciné-Miroir that addressed readers through a combination of words and images. Next, it considers it as an example of the ‘drawn novels’ that were popular in women's romance magazines in the immediate postwar period. Finally, it discusses La Passion de Dora as an informal pedagogical tool that took readers behind the scenes to show them the mechanics of filmmaking and provide a playfully reflexive explication of the promotion and publicity methods by which stars were manufactured and marketed to French audiences, a process in which Ciné-Miroir itself is seen to play an active role. In line with recent scholarship on postwar French fan magazines, I suggest that La Passion de Dora was an innovative example of media hybridity that contributed to the formation of an ‘ordinary cinephilia’ among the readers of Ciné-Miroir, simultaneously entertaining them and expanding their knowledge of the cinema so as to make them more expert viewers of films and more expert readers of fan magazines.

In 1937, American publisher Albert Griffith-Grey attempted to launch a new movie magazine. Introducing his new publication into an already crowded market, Griffith-Grey justified his venture by explaining that this was to be not just a new publication, but a new type of publication entirely: a movie magazine not designed for movie fans. Instead, his proposed publication would have ‘contents directed to the discriminating class’, as Film Daily noted (20 July 1936, 2).

Attempting to inaugurate a new kind of publication, Griffith-Grey seemed to have made assumptions about the gender of the usual readers of regular movie magazines:

With its comparisons to male-oriented business and lifestyle magazines, and its promotion in ‘serious’ lifestyle magazine and trade journals, Cinema Arts set out to capture a serious-minded cultural readership. Larger, more high-minded, and more expensive than its rivals on newsstands, Cinema Arts lasted for just three issues.

While much could be made of the circumstances surrounding Cinema Arts’ launch and sinking, including the misogynistic presumptions about its readership, I take Griffith-Grey's slight against the seriousness of the then contemporary movie fan magazines as a point of departure for this chapter, since my aim is to dispute the inevitable triviality of these publications. In doing this I will consciously delve into a particular recurring element of movie magazines, the prize competition for readers, which ostensibly bears out all Griffith-Grey's implicit snobbery, especially since, in the contest I will consider, the top prize was a one-week trip to Hollywood, and the runners-up awards included a refrigerator, a radio, and ten Max Factor make-up sets, all rewards likely to be coveted most by female readers.

Contemporary cinema is rife with films dealing with ethical issues, moral problems or cultural-political concerns. This is evident in the rise of new ethically and politically engaged cinema, particularly within diverse cultural traditions and social contexts, amidst the dissemination of what is loosely called ‘world cinemas’ (see Nagib 2011; Chaudhuri 2014; Martin-Jones 2011, 2019). Contemporary documentary, moreover, is where many socially charged ethical problems and cultural-moral debates today are vigorously examined and creatively explored. It is where cultures across the globe can find cinematic ways to address, reflect upon, question, and explore some of the most important moral-ethical and cultural-political issues of our times. Most discussion of the ethical dimensions of documentary, however, has focused on the question of truth and objectivity in relation to documentary presentation (the ethics of representation), or on the question of ethical practices of informed consent and transparent communication in the treatment of documentary subjects (the ethics of production). What of the ethical dimensions of spectatorial experience, the way documentary film can evoke emotional engagement, critical reflection, even social action? How might the medium of documentary be used to solicit ethical experiences in viewers as part of making arguments, presenting claims, or exposing problems? As I explore in what follows, such questions raise the question of documentary cinema's ethical potential, a question I propose to address via the notion of a cinematic ethics: the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience (see Sinnerbrink 2016: 3–24).

The idea of cinema as medium of ethical experience offers a way of understanding what cinema can do: its transformative potential to sharpen our moral perception, challenge our beliefs through experiential means, and thus enhance our understanding of moral-social complexity. It can also provoke philosophical thinking through morally confronting or provocative forms of ethical experience conveyed and evoked through film. In this way it can bring together the three important aspects of the cinema-ethics relationship: ethical content in narrative cinema; the ethics of cinematic representation (from filmmaker and spectator perspectives); and the ethics of cinema as symptomatic of broader cultural, social and ideological concerns. To these three dimensions we can add a fourth: the aesthetic dimension of cinema – the role of aesthetic form in intensifying our experience, refining and focusing our attention, and thus of conveying complexity of meaning – as a way of evoking ethical experience and thereby inviting critical reflection.

As Bingham observes and as the previous chapter suggests, biopics are ‘supposed to have a basis in reality’ but like many historical films often display a flexible approach to past events. The film critic A. O. Scott goes further, arguing that biopics are allegorical: ‘narrative vessels into which meanings and morals are packed … modern, secular equivalents of the medieval lives of the saints; cautionary tales and beacons of aspiration.’ Biopics might deviate from the historical record for numerous reasons: Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014), for example, did not include any of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr's speeches, and to heighten the drama, constructed a very different President Lyndon Baines Johnson from the real man. Such departures from the historical record might irritate historians or the people whose lives appear on screen. Yet this is not as problematic as it might first appear. Elisions, adjustments and fabrications often point to wider emotional, political, social or cultural truths. So, Dr King might not have uttered the precise words we hear in Selma, but we understand the key themes of the speeches he gives during the film's depiction of the titular civil rights campaign. Moreover, the historical record is not necessarily consistent. Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires and the closest Facebook has to an official historian, David Kirkpatrick, agree on Mark Zuckerberg's bluntness and poor social skills, but Kirkpatrick – who thought The Social Network ‘horrifically unfair’ – rejects Mezrich's suggestion that this interfered with Zuckerberg's ability to find a girlfriend.

The point here is not to dwell upon the differences between the film and the past (not least because that would be to ignore the gulf between Mezrich's account and other accounts of Facebook's foundational years, for example, or to concur with the business journalist Joe Nocera's banal conclusion that Steve Jobs is a work of fiction) but instead to think about the way each film shapes emotional truths about Zuckerberg and Jobs. As important, this hints at the malleability of history and the postmodern condition where the absence of absolute truths invites multiple interpretations to jostle with each other for supremacy.

Scrutinising one issue of a fan magazine, while especially paying attention to design and desire, is admittedly specific. While studies of single films continue to be produced and provide useful insights (including Jeffers McDonald 2017), fan magazine scholars generally do not examine a single fan magazine issue. For example, considerations of particular fan magazine titles – such as Sumiko Higashi on early, and 1950s, Photoplay (2017 and 2014, respectively), Jane Bryan and Mark Glancy on Picturegoer during both World Wars (both 2011) – cover several issues of these publications. The relatively recent increased access to multiple issues of various digitised fan magazine titles might be presumed to encourage a broader rather than narrower focus. However, the intense singleissue spotlight allows for the truisms which persist about fan magazines to be investigated more effectively. Such detail is sometimes seen in the analysis of discrete fan magazine articles in studies of individual stars. While these may be positioned in the context of coverage about the star appearing in other magazine issues, Tamar Jeffers McDonald's 2013 study of Doris Day also explores how readers are led through single magazine issues by mentions of the star (41). Jeffers McDonald cites Sally Stein's and Ellen McCracken's comments on the structure of women's magazine issues. According to Stein, ‘the interruption of articles’ causes a reader's attention to spill across the issue and is an ‘inconvenient occurrence’ (Stein 1992, 149), while for McCracken this delay in completing reading an article is pleasurable (McCracken 1993, 8). Regardless of its emotional effect, Jeffers McDonald resolves that ‘[t]he placing of an article or picture within a magazine therefore proves to be as potentially significant as what is being said or portrayed’ (2013, 42).

Although article placement in an issue is important, there is a variety of ways in which one fan magazine issue can be approached. In addition to intense focus on an article (and its location in a magazine), overall tone, matters of race, gender, stardom, advertising, and so on can be studied. Periodical scholars Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman (2010) advocate examining a single issue of a magazine to determine the magazine's implied reader, contents and format.

The System of Autonomous Lordships in Syria

Writing 30 years ago, Michael Köhler coined the phrase ‘the Syrian system of autonomous lordships (des systems syrischer Staatswesen)’, to describe how political power was dispersed among a small collection of minor potentates in bilad al-sham during the three decades that preceded the First Crusade. Although Köhler did not explicitly define the ‘system of autonomous lordships’, beyond a shared prioritisation of independent power by minor rulers in Syria, their development was triggered by the advent of Seljuq rule from 463/1071. The following chapters present a new chronology for the development of what should rather be called the system of autonomous lordships in Syria – as this phenomenon was not unique to bilad al-sham, with comparable potentates and minor dynasties emerging in the regions across the Mediterranean during this period – with an earlier date, 454/1062, proposed for the formation of the first autonomous lordship in Syria.

It is first necessary to explain what is meant by the term ‘autonomous lordship’, at least in the context of this book. Simply put, it describes urban-based political elites who were able to pursue their own political agendas, without ceding military or financial resources to regional rivals or the ruling hierarchies in Constantinople, Cairo or Isfahan.

The ‘system’ refers to the coexistence of multiple ‘autonomous lordships’ in Syria. Set definitions are difficult to apply universally, and ultimately each autonomous lordship developed in a unique political and temporal context. It is perhaps best to conceive of each individual polity as existing on a constantly fluctuating continuum, with annexation at one end and autonomy at the other. Individual events, such as the death of a ruler or military defeat, could severely alter a lordship's ‘autonomous’ status.

For much of the early fifth/eleventh century, Byzantine emperors and Fatimid caliphs had been able to directly appoint rulers or governors (wali) to rule over key settlements in Syria. However, as the fifth/eleventh century progressed, it become increasingly more difficult for those in Cairo or Constantinople to remotely assign governors to bilad al-sham, whilst Seljuq appointees were nearly always accompanied by large armies led in person by the sultan or a coalition of prominent amirs.

In 2015, Google's co-founder Larry Page saw the Disney science-fiction film Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015). According to the New York Times, ‘he didn't like it’, feeling that its vision of a future led by genius inventors and the technological wonders they develop was, if anything, ‘too utopian’. The Times's reporter went on to conclude that Page ‘hit on a central problem with attempts to imagine the future in the sunny way that many in Silicon Valley see it: a perfect future makes for a boring story’. Page's comments reveal some central assumptions of what might be termed a Silicon Valley perspective: that its corporations hope to develop a perfect future for humanity; that these corporations’ founders have opinions that matter; and that old Hollywood cannot fully capture or represent the future these seers envisage. In a similar vein, two Hollywood films about Silicon Valley corporations have key characters opining on their role in forging our human future. Both are fictional, but one bases itself on real-life events and the other traces events that are far from inconceivable. The fictional Google intern Billy McMahon gasps in The Internship (Shawn Levy, 2013), ‘I’ve seen the future and it's beautiful … Google. The place is amazing’, while Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015) has its titular character protesting to a group of bureaucrats, ‘I sat in a fucking garage with [Steve] Wozniak and invented the future!’

These films are but two in a 2010s trend in Hollywood cinema which sees various filmmakers question Silicon Valley's role in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century culture, revealing Hollywood's proprietorial investment in curating the popular understanding of Silicon Valley and its visions of the human future. At first glance, they might appear to have little in common beyond their shared use of real locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Steve Jobs is a prestige biopic directed by a major filmmaker, while The Internship is a light-hearted comedy. They are joined by yet another chapter in Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer robot franchise, Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015), and The Circle (James Ponsoldt, 2017), a dystopian thriller, while other Silicon Valley-related films range from biopics to superhero action blockbusters.

By the 1940s, Picturegoer was the UK's longest running and most popular film periodical, with an estimated readership of 500,000 per issue (Glancy 2011, 458). Published by Odhams Press, it had started as a weekly magazine in 1913, and after going monthly between 1921 and 1931 returned to weekly frequency in 1931, before merging with Film Weekly in September 1939. In this chapter, I will be considering a single issue of Picturegoer, from 2 March 1940. On this date, the quiet period of the ‘phoney war’ portion of the Second World War (1939–1945) ended for Britain, with the bombing of a cargo liner off the Isle of Wight and the loss of more than 100 British lives. By April, the war had begun in earnest. It was a liminal moment, when the transatlantic countries were both on the cusp of the transition to total war. I will be examining this issue of Picturegoer, in order to explore its presentation of glamour, assumptions about proper gendered behaviour during wartime, and how these coalesce in the pages of a British film fan magazine, while excavating ‘hidden histories’ in relation to everyday lives and wider popular culture.

In his 2011 article ‘Picturegoer, the Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During the Second World War’, Mark Glancy gives an overview of this movie magazine's historical evolution within the context of cinemagoing in the UK, locating it in relation to its main rival: the less popular British fan magazine Picture Show and Film Pictorial. Glancy analyses the effects of the war on all aspects of Picturegoer's content and production. He argues that, although the magazine addresses women, it is the male point of view that dominates, as it was assumed that the masculine voice ‘represented a more intelligent and patriotic perspective on films’ (Glancy 2011, 459). He analyses the tone, content and significance of the cover images, reviews, editorials, adverts and letters pages, revealing the ways in which the publication mediated between film audiences and the films and their stars. Although he does not directly cite the 2 March 1940 issue of Picturegoer in this article, he does mention it elsewhere as revealing much about British treatment of ex-pat Hollywood stars Cary Grant (2020) and Vivien Leigh (2013).

This chapter critically reflects upon Gilles Deleuze's cinematic ethics, which considers cinema to have the potential to restore belief in humanity's ability to act upon the world, or, to put it in a more Deleuzian manner, to provide a reason to believe in this world. Through close analysis of the Chinese documentary Wo sui si qu/Though I am Gone (Hu Jie, 2006) – in which time-images are used to reconsider history – a key point of Deleuze's cinematic ethics is highlighted for further investigation: namely, in a world of cinemas broadly conceived, it may not always be precisely this world which a cinematic ethics asks us to rejuvenate our belief in, but this world's history. Or more precisely, to rejuvenate a belief in the possibility that other records of the past can potentially relativise the official version of history.

This nuancing of Deleuze's cinematic ethics is relevant to our globalised world for two reasons. First, due to the need to understand not the so-called ‘end of history’ but rather the elusive totality of world history. Second, due to neoliberalism globalisation's preference for authoritarian governance, especially the state of exception (Agamben 2005: 87). The second of these is of particular importance. Although the historical moment the documentary engages with – China's Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 – is politically far-removed from the present-day reality many experience worldwide, what it can nevertheless illuminate, which remains pertinent, is the way in which the state of exception shapes history. Neoliberal globalisation's attempted normalisation of the state of exception makes the emphasis on history in the time-image (which is so integral to Deleuze's cinematic ethics), extremely apposite. As the time-images in Though I am Gone indicate, histories obscured during a state of exception can remain ‘alive’ for the present. Thus, Deleuze's cinematic ethics, when understood in relation to both the engagement with world history found in a world of cinemas, and, more broadly, globalisation's emphasis on the eradication of alternative pasts in the state of exception (the return of which indicate the contingency of the present's norms), provides not only a reason to believe in this world, but also, in this process, emphasises the importance of believing in this world's history (the maintenance of its potential to relativise the official version of history).