Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble","authors":"Damien Pollard","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907668","url":null,"abstract":"Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble Damien Pollard (bio) Cinema and other forms of screen-based media have many ways of representing the air, of somehow rendering its presence in an image or a soundtrack palpable. The air’s kinetic interaction with solid objects in the form of wind, its saturation with liquid particles in the form of fog or steam, and its intimate implication in the movements of the breathing body all testify to its tangible profilmic materiality.1 One of the most complex and least attended of the air’s many onscreen revelations, however, is the bubble. Bubbles seem to have drawn the attention of both amateur and professional filmmakers from the medium’s formative days. Georges Méliès’ magical “trick” film Les Bulles de savon animées / Soap Bubbles (France, 1906) features a man using a pipe to blow bubbles that are, in fact, human faces before himself floating away in an animated bubble. A few years earlier in 1902, Alfred Ernest Passmore had recorded a one-minute film of his wife and three young children blowing bubbles (real ones, unlike Méliès’ performer) using pipes in their garden in London. The children embrace the task enthusiastically, blowing hard and staring intently at the bubbles coming from their pipes as the camera holds the scene in a static wide shot. The short film revolves around the elusive appearance of the bubbles, and they exert a visual gravity that is perhaps out of keeping with their ethereal and ephemeral nature. [End Page 95] Yet, in a sense it is unsurprising that the bubble should attract the nascent filmic gaze. Bubbles had been of great interest to the visual arts for centuries: in the seventeenth century, for example, painters seized upon the image of the bubble as a showcase for technical skill. Wayne Martin explains that this is due to “the painterly challenge bubbles present: how does one create, in oil, a convincing representation of a maximally transparent object? It is worth taking note of the technique that is used: a light circle conveys a visual edge. . . . In short, one paints a bubble by painting what it reflects.”2 The bubble in these paintings serves as a spectacular celebration of image making per se but has also often garnered important moral and allegorical significance. Angelica Frey explains that “interest in bubbles in the arts, literature, and sciences reached a high point in the seventeenth century, when they became closely associated with the concept of vanitas vanitatum, the fragility and transience of human life. Homo bulla (man is a bubble) was a concept dear to the baroque era.”3 Artists such as Hendrick Andriessen, Peeter Sion, and David Bailly often invoke bubbles in this way, depicting them alongside skulls, hourglasses, and decaying fruit so that they might lend their ephemerality to the works’ articulation of human existence’s fleetingness. In vanitas painting, the bubble thus serves two purposes. It is both a demonstration of a painter’s ability to give co","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spectatorship’s Scenes beside the Screen","authors":"Kate J. Russell","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907674","url":null,"abstract":"Spectatorship’s Scenes beside the Screen Kate J. Russell (bio) Caetlin Benson-Allott. The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 354 pages. $85.00 hardcover. $29.95 paperback. Caetlin Benson-Allott’s The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television is an invigorating study of the material culture that surrounds spectatorial and cinephilic environments, recentering what is taken for granted in spectatorship studies to demonstrate how “stuff” shapes the viewing experience in fundamental yet unacknowledged ways. The book makes a significant intervention into spectatorship studies, arguing that what is often dismissed as peripheral in examinations of viewing environments actually influences and alters how viewers make sense of media objects. This approach accounts for diverse objects and experiences surrounding the scene of the screen, including the format of ephemeral programming listings, the food and intoxicants consumed and their centrality to cinema’s commercial interests, the industrial machinations that dictate accessibility, and the media coverage of violence that creates moral panics. In recentering these marginal [End Page 249] areas of study, Benson-Allott also carefully considers the different viewing subjects that are imagined and created by the material cultures surrounding media, attending to how racialized, gendered, and classed viewers respond to media and its offshoots and are in turn interpellated by them. It is an innovative approach that looks sideways as well as backwards in time, looking at what is beside (and inside) the viewer and the screen when consuming media and its auxiliary products. The introduction lays out the book’s intervention into a number of overlapping areas of study, namely media industry studies, spectatorship and reception studies, new cinema history, and material culture studies.1 This chapter teases out underexplored aspects of these fields of study and expands their parameters to conceptualize creative ways of making sense of media consumption and reception. For instance, The Stuff of Spectatorship is attentive to critiques of apparatus theory and its presumption of a universalized viewing subject, but it also pushes apparatus beyond the technologies through which films are exhibited, incorporating the surrounding material culture into its analysis. This material culture, the inanimate objects that lurk around the scene of spectatorship, have the potential to influence one’s experience of the text, to create distinct meanings, in ways that have not yet been fully explored in studies that attend to either the imagined transcendental subject of apparatus theory or the presumed individualized viewer of reception studies. Benson-Allott introduces her methodology through an exploration of television guides, the ubiquitous accompaniments to home viewing that were so central in deciding what to watch, but as Benson-All","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sex, or the Illegible: AIDS Video Art and the Erotics of Abstraction","authors":"Robert J. Mills","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907673","url":null,"abstract":"Sex, or the Illegible: AIDS Video Art and the Erotics of Abstraction Robert J. Mills (bio) A typeface “A” emerges from an empty black screen, its faded orange hues casting an extended glow across the otherwise impervious background. After a moment’s pause, this background is slowly eclipsed. A textured image of whites and purples fades in and takes its place; it might be marble, liquid captured in stasis (figure 1). Stasis is, however, shortly met by motion; a shadowed overlay of two men performing anal intercourse begins to play, at times taking on a glitch-like repetition, at times tending toward a rhythmic sensuality. As if responding to this newfound corruption, the once-prominent “A” fades out, absolving its engagement in the video’s graphic hedonism and resigning itself to a plane of total obscurity. For the remainder of the sequence, an aesthetics of the in-between endures; we watch a screen disorganized and afloat, left entirely uncoordinated amid these impressionistic layers competing restlessly for our attention. So begins André Burke’s A, a video experiment produced and first screened in 1986 that grapples foremost with the AIDS crisis as an epidemic of erratic miscommunication. Throughout this eight-minute work, an array of such hastily networked colors, textures, bodies, and voices converge in various constellations, staging a response to the ongoing plight that is replete with a number of embedded confusions. In the outlined opening, we watch a screen [End Page 223] rife with both visual accumulation and a respondent abstraction; although the image’s surface transforms insistently, unfolding across various planes and sites of action, meaning does not necessarily follow suit. Here, that is to say, the video’s fluid movement between discordant representative registers functions less to determine concrete figurations than to facilitate interpretive slippages. As the orange “A” gradually fades away, repositioning the graphic background as an abstracted foreground, a whole host of ordinarily guiding hierarchies, or means of orientation, are upturned. When narrative strands are elsewhere teased—more often than not through disembodied voices, echoes from an immaterial offscreen—they are similarly redoubled and refracted, set against one another and quickly dissipated. From the outset, then, A’s operative philosophy is introduced forthrightly: signification—be it linguistic, pictorial, or cinematic—is porous, insubstantial. The sanctified legibility of an ordinarily functioning symbolic system is frustrated and disturbed throughout, recasting our attention from the represented singular to the alien process of representation itself.1 Foregrounded in this way, A’s discursive surface emerges consistently as an explicit site of rhetorical constitution: an active, potent sphere of politicized negotiation. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In the opening moments of A (André Burke, 1986), standard hierarchies of signification ar","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ways of Lying: Parafiction in Contemporary Latin America","authors":"Jeronimo Duarte-Riascos","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907667","url":null,"abstract":"Ways of Lying: Parafiction in Contemporary Latin America Jeronimo Duarte-Riascos (bio) In 2009, Carrie Lambert-Beatty noted the emergence of fiction as an “important category in recent art.”1 She was, of course, not referring to fiction as is traditionally understood in the humanities but rather to certain “unruly experiments with the untrue.”2 Her article “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” dissected a number of such experiments,3 a group of interdisciplinary contemporary artistic practices that produced “fictions that [were] experienced, however briefly, as fact.”4 Lambert-Beatty proposed the term “parafictional” to refer to this phenomenon and explained that “with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact. They achieve truth status—for some of the people some of the time.”5 This truth status can be achieved through a variety of methods; sometimes stylistic mimicry is key, and at other times it is the consequence of a sort of conceptual trompe l’oeil.6 But perhaps most importantly, the truth status that is produced by a parafiction is always dependent on an operation of belief. Plausibility, Lambert-Beatty explains, is the attribute managed and produced by parafictioneers.7 The spectator of a parafiction encounters a work that is designed and structured to accommodate belief but belief about something that the work is not.8 A parafiction invites you to believe in a fiction while, at the same time, obscuring the fictional nature [End Page 65] of what is being presented. In other words, it is presenting art to convince you that what you are being presented is not art. The cases Lambert-Beatty studies vary immensely in format, location, and duration. They include a museum in Istanbul celebrating the life of Safiye Behar, a Turkish Jew, communist, feminist, teacher, and translator who was a close friend (perhaps lover?) of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey; a BBC live interview in which the spokesperson for Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility for what has come to be known as the Bhopal disaster; and a marketing project by Nike Inc. to rename Vienna’s Karlsplatz as the Nikeplatz. All of these examples have an act of deception at their core. The museum existed, but Safiye Behar was a character created by Michael Blum on the occasion of the Istanbul Biennial in 2005. The interview took place on December 2004 and was aired on the BBC World network, but the interviewee was not Dow Chemical’s representative; he was Andy Bichlbaum, a founding member of the artist-activist collective the Yes Men. Karlsplatz was never really going to be renamed Nikeplatz, but the artists behind the work (Eva and Franco Mattes in collaboration with Public Netbase) mimicked and produced a real marketing campaign that successfully convinced many platz goers. All of these works’ fictiveness, however, was disguised even as it was also, most of th","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dancing the Dance of Another: Allegory, the Diagram, and Suspiria (2018)","authors":"John W. Roberts","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907666","url":null,"abstract":"Dancing the Dance of Another: Allegory, the Diagram, and Suspiria (2018) John W. Roberts (bio) Nothing lets me think more clearly through a problem than reading and alternating between two mysteries at the same time. —Martha Graham, Blood Memory Introduction The climax of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 adaptation of the 1977 horror film Suspiria presents the viewer with a mystery. Suspiria’s narrative follows Susie Bannion, an American ingenue who comes to Berlin in the autumn of 1977 to audition for the renowned all-woman Markos Dance Company. Susie’s audition is impressive, and soon she is preparing to dance the lead role in the group’s upcoming performance, a visceral exploration of postwar women’s experience titled Volk. The lead choreographer, Madame Blanc, invests Susie with confidence and more: it turns out that the dance company is a cover for a coven of witches led by Mother Markos, the company’s namesake. The witches groom Susie to participate [End Page 33] in a ritual transfer of Mother Markos’s spirit from the former’s ailing body to Susie’s youthful one, giving her magical dancing power in the process; one kind of training belies another. The witches’ previous protégé, Patricia, was believed to have run off to join the Red Army Faction (RAF)—whose terrorist hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 and subsequent violent implosion provide a narrative backdrop against which the film’s story unfolds—but in fact became suspicious of her matrons and conveyed her misgivings about the Markos group to her psychoanalyst before her disappearance. The analyst, Josef Klemperer, is a Holocaust survivor who still visits his country home in East Germany in the hope that his wife, Anke, who disappeared during World War II, will return. Josef investigates the company and becomes convinced that something is amiss. The witches eventually capture Josef and make him a witness to their grotesque ritual, but the ritual is itself derailed by the revelation that Susie is in fact Mother Suspiriorum, an ancient witch come to exact retribution against Markos, who has usurped Suspiriorum’s occult authority. At the film’s climax, Susie/Suspiriorum kills Markos and purges the coven of her followers, followed by a denouement in which she visits Josef to apologize for his ordeal and magically erase his traumatic memories of both the ritual and his wife. The mystery of the climax involves the bait and switch between Susie and the ur-witch Suspiriorum. The viewer is left pondering whether the ritual transferal worked as intended but with the unintended consequence that it is Suspiriorum who invades Susie’s body before Markos herself can do it or whether Susie was in fact Suspiriorum all along, and her infiltration of the Markos Dance Company was just a ruse in service to this act of sabotage against Markos. The film, for its part, withholds any clear explanation of a causal sequence leading to the eruption of violence. Either way, one thing is clear: the bloodbath is precipitated by","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907675","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hate Speech in Threads: Stitching and Posting a Resistance in the Tiny Pricks Project","authors":"Malaika Sutter","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907671","url":null,"abstract":"Hate Speech in Threads: Stitching and Posting a Resistance in the Tiny Pricks Project Malaika Sutter (bio) On February 24, 2020, President Donald J. Trump tweeted the following: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”1 The first sentence of this tweet was then shortly after reposted on the Instagram account @tinypricksproject, this time in red thread on a blue and white surgical mask worn by an elderly person (figure 1).2 The tweet is stitched on a mask, an object that has become indispensable since the COVID-19 pandemic, that acts as a textile canvas. The stitched words reach deep into the mask, thus rendering the object useless, an act akin to the words of Trump, who insisted that the virus will disappear “like a miracle.”3 The piece is part of the Tiny Pricks Project, created and curated by artist and activist Diana Weymar.4 Initially the project’s aim was to collect as many stitched Trump quotes as possible by the next presidential election in 2020, but the project has become larger, extending to other topics “with over 3600 Tiny Pricks and over a thousand participants globally.”5 It started on January 8, 2018, when Weymar stitched her first piece, an excerpt from Trump’s [End Page 170] tweet from January 6, 2018.6 “I am a very stable genius” is embroidered in yellow thread on top of a brown cloth displaying an embroidered bouquet of flowers, a needlework piece made by Weymar’s grandmother in the 1960s.7 Weymar collects, curates, and exhibits artworks made by herself and other artists from all over the world.8 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Diana Weymar, “This Is a You Problem,” Instagram photo, February 25, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B8_sZoInLuv/. The quotes alongside ornamental images are carefully stitched on selected fabrics. The statements often feature tweets; thus, the digital form becomes a tactile form. Weymar then photographs the textile artworks and creates a post on her Instagram account, rendering the tactile form digital again. Sometimes the artworks are photographed in a particular setting or in a particular assemblage in which other objects enhance the embroidery’s statement or give it a different twist. Although the tactile is digitalized, the tactility nevertheless persists through the audience’s “immersion” that triggers memories of haptic experiences.9 Posting the artworks also [End Page 171] means that they are now more widely accessible. People can like and comment on them with words and emojis, tag friends, follow the individual artists, be inspired, and create new embroideries. The project is thus in this sense cyclic and creates both a material and a digital archive. While the project has received considerable media attention from the New Yorker, Vogue, and Financial Times, among other periodicals, it has not yet","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Refoliating Vietnam in the Post-9/11 American Homeland: Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace","authors":"Kodai Abe","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907672","url":null,"abstract":"Refoliating Vietnam in the Post-9/11 American Homeland: Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace Kodai Abe (bio) The spectacular images of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, evoked a variety of cultural and historical memories in regulating the shock. For most spectators all over the world, the conventional aesthetics of the Hollywood film, an American product par excellence, ironically served as the handiest framework to register the sublime event. Most Americans remembered the recent domestic terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. The 9/11 attack, some observed, was the worst intelligence failure and a cunning surprise attack ever since Pearl Harbor. Others immediately feared that it might be caused by nuclear weapons, and the collapses of the twin towers reminded them of the two mushroom clouds above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The designation of “ground zero” soon followed. Thomas Franklin’s photograph of three firefighters raising an American flag on the rubble of the World Trade Center was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, echoing Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning composition capturing US marines atop Iwo Jima during World War II. Such visual associations of 9/11 with other historical events often facilitated the reinforcing of American exceptionalism—the mythic idea that the United States is young, innocent, benign, and unique—through [End Page 199] strategic manipulation of the cultural contexts in which those images are represented to elicit specific affective reactions. Conjuring an array of traumatic American victimhood as well as its “good” and “just” use of military force, the United States secured national support for the reinvigoration of militarism under the aegis of the war on terror, thereby rationalizing, sanctifying, and perpetuating its violence. As Joseph Darda argues in examining 9/11 visual productions, the Bush administration manufactured “exceptionalist optics”; it succeeded in orchestrating our “unconscious optics” (per Walter Benjamin) when looking at 9/11 images such as Franklin’s so as to acknowledge and subscribe to American exceptionalism.1 National hegemonic discourses not only control how an event is mediatized but also condition and determine the ways in which we look at and react to events on the unconscious level. Against the post-9/11 resurgence of patriotism, many critics have made concerted efforts to exhume a buried national memory that most jeopardizes American exceptionalist discourse: the Vietnam War. Since the military defeat in Southeast Asia, the memory of Vietnam has remained a highly contested issue in talking about American politics and warfare. For conservatives, Vietnam is a trauma that Americans are suffering from, and it is imperative to forget or revise it in order for Americans to recover from it and move forward (to a new war); for liberals, the war must be remembered as nothing other than American violence inflicted upon people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as ","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition","authors":"Benjamin Crais","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907670","url":null,"abstract":"Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition Benjamin Crais (bio) “There is no material more discredited in cinema than the village. There is nothing more difficult, nothing more frightening for the director. Yet there is nothing more necessary.”1 So begins an article published by Sergei Eisenstein in 1926 upon commencing work on The General Line (1929). Secured by the mythic status of the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), wherein the “first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory,” cinema has often been taken to be the art of industrial modernity.2 Following what Inga Pollmann identifies as a “mutual definition of cinema as a modern medium and modernity as cinematic,” film scholars have often situated prewar European cinema within the context of urbanization, mass consumption, industrial production, and other hallmarks of modernity (of which, as Pollmann writes, cinema is understood to be emblematic).3 Yet, over thirty years after Auguste and Louis Lumière pointed their camera at the factory gates, Eisenstein would declare that the most urgent task facing cinema lay in peasant villages. Cinema, he exhorted, must “make images of agricultural character and chronicles” to compel the people of early Soviet Russia to face the “urgent” problem of peasant agriculture and its modernization. Three years later and under [End Page 138] a new title, Eisenstein’s agrarian film was released.4 “How might we write a history of cinema,” Brian R. Jacobson asks, that makes concerns with nature as “central to the narrative as technological and stylistic innovations or the worlds of machines, technologies, and urban life?”5 This essay considers The General Line—a depiction of the introduction of industrial technology and collective property relations to a rural peasant village—as opening onto such a history on the basis of industrial modernity’s unevenness. Indexing this unevenness is what in the history of Marxist theory has been referred to as “the agrarian question” (after Karl Kautsky’s book of the same name). “In its broadest meaning,” T. J. Byres writes, “the agrarian question may be defined as the continuing existence in the countryside of a poor country of substantive obstacles to an unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development, both inside and outside agriculture.”6 At the time of the film’s production, the peasantry constituted around 80 percent of the entire Russian population and worked with agricultural equipment that, in the words of one observer, was “at least as old as the Pharaohs.”7 Leon Trotsky, surveying the conditions that had enabled the Bolsheviks to make the revolution of 1917, developed the concept of “combined and uneven development” to analyze the conjunction between the peasant countryside and the presence of heavy industry in the cities. Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, he argued, was characterized by politi","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production","authors":"Mal Ahern","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907665","url":null,"abstract":"Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production Mal Ahern (bio) Air-conditioning (AC) made images modern. It enabled two of modernity’s paradigmatic and seemingly opposite visual forms: abstract painting and the mass-produced image. AC transformed art conservation, securing the field’s scientific authority and adapting it to the demands of modernist painting. AC also played a crucial role in the development of industrial mass production, including the production of “mass images” in newspapers and magazines and on film. In both cases, AC transformed the labor of image maintenance and production by de-emphasizing the roles of gesture and manual inscription in favor of environmental management. Rather than touch up a damaged canvas, the twentieth-century conservator preferred to prevent visible changes from happening in the first place; rather than manually align color impressions, the twentieth-century printer sought to control flows and atmospheres in the pressroom. Of course, printing and preservation alike continued to require manual touch-ups and corrections long after AC transformed these practices. But expectations changed with the new technology: manual intervention on the image surface became more the exception than the rule, conceived as an act of repair or quality control, rather than regular maintenance. Climate control thus helped secure romantic and modernist ideals of the image’s autonomy—the artist’s control over and ultimate responsibility for [End Page 3] the image—by restricting the hand of the craftsperson whose work it was to preserve and transmit that image to others. Every image has two realities: every image exists as both object and appearance. W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed that we call “pictures” those local manifestations of more fluid and intangible “images.”1 While the image-as-appearance appeals to the eye, the picture-as-object reacts to and interacts with its environment. Wood and fabric swell and contract, wet ink seizes up or runs faster and thinner, and pigments fade in sunlight or darken with oxidation. In Nicole Starosielski’s recent work on the role of temperature in media, she argues that all varieties of matter “have their own thermo sensitivities.”2 We can say the same for materials’ sensitivity to light, humidity, and the surrounding air. Everything tangible will react to the matter and conditions that surround it; every picture will inevitably change over time. The “image,” in Mitchell’s terms, transcends the specifics of the more tangible, contextually rooted “picture.” An image can survive the destruction of the individual pictures that host it; it can live on in reproductions or reinterpretations or even in verbal descriptions and memories.3 What counts as the “original” or “true” image—indeed, whether and how we separate appearance and object at all—is historically and culturally contingent. Consider, as do Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood in Anachronic Renaissance, the shock of a Western visito","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}