The project and its author.

What antefilm is

Antefilm is a research instrument and an open record. It applies a five-attention protocol — construction, address, exclusion, prescription, circulation — to global cinema from 2001 onwards, recording each film alongside what is enacted, on record, beside it. The protocol treats mass form as constitutive rather than reflective (Comyn 2018), and asks not how a film represents the world but how it makes one available as future-reality.

The site is hand-coded, lightweight, and openly readable. New records are added to a single source file as the corpus grows. The work is in early stages: three records open at launch, with the corpus to be extended over the project period.

Author

Dr İbrahim Efe is a communication scholar working on digital media, political discourse, and the mediatisation of migration. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University (2012, under Prof. Ruth Wodak) and is currently Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, and Lecturer of Communication Studies in the Department of New Media and Communication, Ibn Haldun University. His scholarship investigates how social media platforms, algorithmic visibility, and online publics reshape political discourse — most recently on the rise of the anti-refugee far-right in Turkey (Journal of Language and Politics, 2024).

He is also editor of Webdipnot, an independent reading-guide project that maps headline divergence, ownership structures and framing patterns across Turkey's media ecosystem. Antefilm extends the same critical-discourse and circulation-focused approach into a different register — global cinema as one site of political imagination's circulation.

Why this project

The protocol was developed in the course of work on Interstellar and exit imperialism, forthcoming in a peer-reviewed article. That work proposed reading post-9/11 mass cinema as one of the operations through which a political imagination becomes globally available, alongside policy enactment, institutional discourse, and operational record. Antefilm was built so that the protocol could be applied beyond one case — a working corpus, revisable, citable, and open.

The author's wider research interest is in circulation studies within communication research: how meaning travels, what infrastructure carries it, and what registers must remain off-record for a framing to hold. Antefilm is an open extension of that programme.

How to cite

For a specific record, append the record's URL fragment, e.g. https://antefilm.com/cases.html#interstellar.

Contact

For corrections, source updates, or suggestions for new records, contact the author at efeibrahimefe@googlemail.com. Editorial proposals are read; not all suggestions are taken up.