viz. - film

Walter Benjamin on photography and film

Laura Thain — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 08:14:16 +0000

To wrap up our semester on viz., our staff showcases new static content we've added to our "teaching" and "visual theory" sections. Below is my discussion of Walter Benjamin's canonical essay on photography, film, and the politics of mass media, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Each day this week, we'll feature a new piece of static content on our blog. We hope instructors, students, and persons interested in visual rhetoric will browse our archives (linked in the top bar) and find useful material for research, pedagogy, and all forms of intellectual inquiry.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. 1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Reprint ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. 217–52.

By Laura Thain

In this seminal essay, originally published in French in 1936, Benjamin outlines shifts in the way art produces meaning after the advent of the photograph. His essay takes places in fifteen parts, which explore how film is physically produced, how that production influences the way that audiences interact with film, and how those audiences reconcile film with their pre-existing value structures and beliefs. Benjamin ultimately suggests a method of reading photography and film that accounts for both their material production and how that material production supersedes or alters prior methods of criticism. Central to critical practice in the age of mechanical reproduction is the establishment of critical distance between audience and media form, so that the audience can resist pure enjoyment and instead ask how photography and film can help us see differently, even as they attempts to perfectly replicate the way we already perceive the world. Writing from Paris, Benjamin, a Jewish German expatriate disturbed by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, explores the political implications of new, mechanized art forms in a rapidly-changing 20th century.

I. “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. “

Benjamin begins by outlining a history of artistic reproduction. Even the ancient Greeks had technologies to reproduce art, like founding and stamping. The principle difference between earlier forms of reproduction and photography, argues Benjamin, is speed. Photography, which allowed the artist to create with his eye rather than his hands, eventually developed into moving picture able to contain speech. This is the point from we might begin to consider mechanical reproduction an artistic form in its own right, rather than a way to reproduce pre-existing art forms.

II. “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”

Before photography, a piece of art’s authenticity resided in the original copy. This is because the original work of art occupies a particular time and space, handed down from person to person since its creation, bearing evidence of its own provenance. Any copy that comes after an original work of art was a “forgery” of the original, and therefore, practically worthless.

Art created via mechanical reproduction doesn’t fit into this old model for two reasons. We can’t call the scene captured on film the “original” like we can do with a painting, because the camera lens creates art from its subject matter—the subject matter alone is not art. In this way, the camera can even surpass what the eye sees in the original scene, because the lens can see slower, faster, or closer than the human eye under the right adjustments. Secondly, mechanically reproduced art does not occupy a single time or space like a painting does. Photography and sound recording are forms of telecommunication because they allow us to see and hear things from a different time and place.

Because mechanically-reproduced art has no claim to authenticity by means of singularity or originality, Benjamin posits it loses some of its connection or essence. He coins the term “aura” to encompass that which the painting has but the photograph lacks—the aura is all the contexts a thing gathers since its inception. Photographs, by contrast, exist in multiple places simultaneously, and each viewer experiences them within a distinct and separate context. No longer can we trace a provenance of photography. Thus, we lose the artistic object’s relationship with tradition.

III. “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope.“

Benjamin talks here about the relationship between human senses and the media that humans use to communicate those senses. The way we perceive and process information has two causes: “natural” and “historical.” Our natural way of sensing is biological and grows with us innately. But our historical way of seeing is shaped by our culture—but the modes of art we understand and become familiar with. Benjamin claims that classical cultures did not realize this distinction, but wiser now and more modern, we might.

The tension between natural and historical sense is also the tension between experiencing something and seeing it represented in a mechanical representation. He uses the example of a mountain vista. We like the idea of seeing mountains on a warm summer day, and because we seek the “aura” of the real experience, we consume endlessly reproductions of it in photographs and magazines. And because the public desires equality and accessibility in the industrial age, photographic representations of the mountain become a more stable reality than the mountain itself. But the photograph can never have the aura of the original experience.

IV. “…for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.“

Art’s function, Benjamin argues, is historically tied up with ritual, and ritual depends on the existence of an original, authentic piece of art. Even though the same piece of art might get tied up in several different rituals over time, ritual remained an important way that viewers made sense of art. However, as mechanical reproduction increased, artists needed to find new justifications for art outside of ritual—“art for art’s sake.” This attitude toward art denied that art had any social function.

This is the biggest hint that art in the age of mechanical reproduction has an even clearer social function than ever before. Freed of “parasitic” ritual (in which the piece of art is the authority), art was now free to be a form of communication built from new contexts and orders. Art was produced not for ritual then, but for reproduction. In this sense, art can only be political when it breaks free from the “aura,” and this process is only possible via mechanical reproduction.

V. “Works of art are received and valued on different planes.”

While works of art in the past were the center of ritual and therefore were primarily of “cult” value, mechanical works of art are the center of exhibition. When works are created for ritual, they function as a type of magic and can only be recognized as art over time. However, when works are created to be exhibited, they are considered works of art from the start.

VI. “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.”

Benjamin recounts a brief history of photography. The first popular photographs were portraits that allowed loved ones to become cult objects, especially after their death. However, soon, photographs became visual evidence of certain places at certain times. Soon, people need captions for photographs to tell them what they are seeing. Rather than being cult objects, photographs become new centers of meaning; therefore, they take on special political significance.

VII. “Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised.”

Benjamin discusses how photography made possible a language of pictures that “transformed the entire nature of art,” and uses this section to transition into a discussion of film as a new site of artistic meaning.

VIII. “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.”

Benjamin dissects the difference between a stage actor’s performance and a screen actor’s performance. The film actor performs differently than the stage actor because his audience is not present, putting them in a position of “critic” rather than spectator. The camera forces the perspective and position of the audience, and this becomes a crucial tool in establishing the relationship between actor and audience in the medium of film. Because the audience’s perspective is fixed by the camera’s lens, there is no possibility for the kind of “cult value” Benjamin ascribes to earlier forms of art and portrait photography.

IX. “[W]hat matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else.”

While the stage actor constructs the narrative of the play, the camera constructs the narrative of a film. Disparate moments are reassembled by mechanical means to tell a story, sometimes beyond the intentions of the film actor. The film actor, then, is prized for his realism and the extent to which he can successfully provide the self-performance necessary to the film’s narrative. The camera fragments and disrupts the actor’s “aura” through mechanical reproduction, replacing the presence of the actor with the presence of the camera. This presents a new space for artistic reproduction similar to that which Benjamin ascribes to the photograph. No longer must audiences believe in the reality of performance to understand that performance as artistic—now, audiences can celebrate the performance as constructed, and judge its artistic value based on that construction.

X. “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.”

Benjamin discusses the politics of labor involved in filmed performance. Through the technology of film, the actor is able to translate his “mirror” image to the public, but this aura-less reproduction is a mere commodity to which the actor has no more connection than a factor worker to the products of his labor. To replace the aura, film studios construct “cults of personality” which attempt to hide the film’s status as a commodity. While film has revolutionary potential, the material conditions of its production in Western Europe limit its political value.

Film also has the potential to make its audience its stars. Like other forms of mass media that precede it, specifically, print journalism, newsreels offer every day audiences the potential for filmic representation. In addition, film audiences feel, like sports fans, compelled to critic and comment on the thing they watch, which makes them feel like participants in the film’s creation of meaning. For this reason, Benjamin argues, the line between reader and writer in the 20^th century has become considerably blurred. There is enormous power embedded in an audience’s conception of themselves as co-authors of film, and for this reason, the film industry relies on spectacle and distraction to neutralize film’s revolutionary potential.

XI. “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

Benjamin further elaborates on film’s creation of spectacle. He explains that a spectator watching the process of filming (rather than the film itself) could only avoid seeing the tools of film production by looking through the lens of the camera itself. Otherwise, being present during filming means seeing the tools of film production all around you. This is a major difference between stage and screen that we might take a sign that technology has finally brought about its own invisibility.

Benjamin reads this phenomenon in terms of rhetorical distance. He contrasts painting and film using the analogy of the magician vs. the painter. The magician increases critical distance to perform his magical healing, whereas the surgeon closes the critical distance between himself and his patient by literally penetrating his body. Painting also relies on mysticism and distance to create aesthetic value. Film, on the other hand, closes the distance between the real and the imaginary so completely that the imaginary appears real.

XII. “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”

Benjamin now turns to a discussion of the implications of mass production to popular culture. Paintings, he argues, could not have a mass audience because they could not be reproduced and publicly viewed. But because films are manufactured via reproduction, we must consider how the mass public reads these objects. Benjamin asserts that the public “uncritically enjoys” the conventional—the thing they are used to and familiar with—and responds with “aversion” to anything new.

XIII. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

Benjamin implicitly asks his reader to reject and resist the “uncritical enjoyment” of conventional film and instead look at how we can use this new technology to perform new kinds of critiques. Because the technology allows us to rewind, revist, slow down, or speed up action, sound, and experience, we can use the film to “see” as we’ve never seen before. Just as psychoanalysis asks us to think about and articulate the unthought and the unspoken, film asks us to see the unseen.

XIV. “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.”

Benjamin argues demands for new forms of artistic expression predate the development of film, and that this is a pattern we can trace throughout history. Artistic expression always demands more than technology can provide. In fact, art can be seen to push technological developments as it provides the ideological context for them. Art understands that new media eventually become normalized, and so art always strives to push the available means of technology beyond its present capabilities.

XV. “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”

Benjamin concludes by asking the public to consciously understand the processes by which they view film and “apperceive” or make sense of the film in terms of their pre-existing beliefs. This, according to his larger argument, is what a larger method of film criticism should consider. The chief danger of film is its ability to hypnotize its audience into acceptance via its hyperrealism. Public attention to and interest in how a film constructs narrative, reality, time, and movement is necessary if film is to accomplish its revolutionary potential.

Further reading

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919).

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964).

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (2000).

Erasing Wyldstyle: Heteronormativity in the LEGO Movie

clsloan — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:43:33 +0000

Artist Jason Freeny's LEGO Anatomy Model

Image Credit: hiconsumption.com

In my last post, I laid out the theoretical groundwork of biopolitics for a critique of the subversive potential of the LEGO movie. Biopolitics, or the epistemological and sociopolitical forces that determine how individuals understand bodies and “life,” lets us examine both the LEGO movie's own critique of social constructivism and comment on the movie's failure to adequately separate itself from static models of gender and sexuality.

The movie looks most promising in its progressive depiction of the positive biopower of the multitude. First of all, the revolutionary potential of the LEGO Movie is distinctly global in scope. Individuals from radically different worlds comprise the heterogeneous, but unified, community of Master Builders. This representation suggests that big business and corrupt politics can be overcome only by spanning various ways of life and drawing energy from multiple cultures. Hardt and Negri argue that despite Empire's dominating, international reach, the negative impact of globalization might be countered by a new, post-proletariat class, the multitude. These laborers are linked together through their mutual exploitation under the power of Empire, but these very powers that exploit them facilitate community formation. In the LEGO Move, of course, Lord Business attempts to segregate the worlds. His oppressive power in each realm, however, inspires Master Builders to come together despite the borders between their worlds.

The Master Builders

Image Credit: Yahoo! Movies

Secondly, the very structure of this universe serves as a perfectly apt metaphor for the subversive potential of the multitude. Lord Business builds his Empire out of LEGOs, constructing what appear to be stable landscapes, buildings, and, less concretely, paradigms and daily routines for his citizens. These backdrops, however, can be dissassembled by Master Builders, individuals with the amazing capacity to create structures without instructions, the imaginative heroes of the movie. Lord Business's ultimate act of villainy involves his plan to freeze the LEGO worlds in place using “the Kragle,” a secret super weapon (super glue, in fact) that will destroy the dynamism that makes the LEGO universe so promising.

Finally, the LEGO movie makes a truly sophisticated theoretical move (not to mention a savvy business move) in its counter-radical support of revolution from within the system. Hardt and Negri argue that multitude derives its energy from Empire, and can cause reform, even structural collapse, only from inside Empire itself. If Emmett learns about the joys of thinking outside the instruction manual, the initial political radicalism of the Master Builders gets sharply reined in. Essentially, Emmett proves to this group of visionaries that an individual following social codes has just as much creativity and imagination as the most talented Master Builder. In Wyldstyle's moving speech to the multitude, broadcast to all LEGO worlds from Lord Business's own communications system, she admits that institutions constructed by Empire have generated a truly creative, powerful populace. She says that Emmett was

a face in the crowd, following the same instructions as you. He was so good at fitting in no one ever saw him. I owe you an apology cuz I used to look down on people like that. I used to think they were followers with no ideas or vision. Because it turns out Emmett had great ideas. Even though they seemed weird and kind of pointless, they actually came closer than anyone else to saving the universe. And now we have to finish what he started by making whatever weird thing pops into our heads. All of you have the ability inside you to be a groundbreaker, and I mean literally. Break the ground! Peal up the pieces, tear apart the walls! Build things only you can build. To defend ourselves, we need to fight back against President Business's plans to freeze us!

I can change just about everything except my own name!

Image Credit: Lego.com

Unfortunately, this film fails to demonstrate that gender roles and sexuality are just as ripe for imaginative deconstruction as everything else in the LEGO universe. If part of the central message is that everyone, including “average” folks that revolutionary radicals might accuse of being brainwashed, is special, Emmett himself only aspires to greatness because of his attraction to Wyldstyle. In a conversation with her, he admits, “when you said I was talented and important, it made me want to do everything I could to be the guy you were talking about.” Even when Emmett meets Wyldstyle, the movie subtly highlights the liberatory potential of romance. Emmett first sees her digging around after hours at the construction site. He consults his instruction manual and reads aloud, “If you see anything weird, report it immediately. Well, I guess I'm gonna have to report y....” He break off because at this point Wyldstyle throws back the hood of her jacket and tosses her lovely LEGO hair. Emmett, completely arrested in his action by her beauty, watches her in awe. Sexual attraction, in this case, causes Emmett to unintentionally deviate from “the instructions.” Biopolitical critics like Foucault have pointed out that painting sexual fulfillment and romance as “subversive” only reaffirms the importance of sexuality and gender, a strategy that ultimately fails to imagine new possibilities since capitalist societies rely so heavily on the heterosexual family structure.

In addition, the movie ultimately breaks Wyldstyle down into Lucy, her “original” identity, a move I found just as inexplicable as it was disappointing. Emmett initially points out that “Wyldstyle” isn't quite a normal name, and this joke is played for laughs at multiple points. When Wyldstyle takes Emmett to Vitruvius, the prophetic Master Builder who originally predicted the rise of “the Special,” adds another, decidedly less humorous, angle to her name. When she identifies herself as Wyldstyle, he asks, “Are you a student I used to have who was so insecure she kept changing her name?” Watching this exchange, I became immediately flummoxed. This is the only point in the film where change is figured as a result of “insecurity” instead of creativity. Wyldstyle, a Master Builder, can take apart alleys to make motorcycles, but apparently she cannot take those sorts of deconstructive liberties with her own identity. Instead, she must admit that her name is “Lucy,” and, eventually, both Emmett and Batman (her brooding boyfriend) address her by this much tamer appellation. In a LEGO movie about the joys of breaking things apart, the satisfaction of putting them back together “incorrectly,” the glee involved with sticking dragons on luxury condo buildings, the female protagonist's primary arc involves rediscovering her “real” identity.

WHY, LEGO Movie? Just...Why?

Image Credit: examiner.com

I haven't had space this post to talk about the meta-level of the LEGO movie. All of the lovable main characters, in their fight against oppressive sociopolitcal and economic systems, are actually being controlled by humans, you know, playing with LEGOs. There's a lot more to say about this metafictional structure (does it completely undermine their rebellion?), but I'll only mention one irksome point. We never actually see any “female” players. The standard, white, middle-class family referenced here is comprised of “Dad,” the Lord Business-style bad guy, “the son,” the creative mind behind Emmett's rebellion against order, “Mom,” a voice upstairs upstairs whose only line involves calling Dad and Son up to dinner, and “the daughter,” a young girl who also obtains the right to play with Dad's LEGOs thanks to her brother's imagination and heart. The very safe heterosexual family here seemed so much like a cop out in a movie about reconfiguration, creative possibility, and the jouissance of chaos almost ruined this otherwise highly intelligent movie for me. Until I listened to “Everything is Awesome!” again. A quick fix for any disillusionment.

The Building Blocks of Biopolitics: The LEGO Movie, Empire, and Multitude

clsloan — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:59:56 +0000

Image Credit: Forbes

Not only did seeing The Lego Movie (2014) lodge the parodic pop song “Everything is Awesome!” firmly in my skull, it also sent me scrambling for a way to intelligently theorize the film's highly sophisticated commentary on politics, capitalism, gender and the body. I emerged from my search with a brief history of biopolitics firmly in hand, and, with “Everything is Awesome!” still running through my head, I will now start assembling the theoretical pieces needed to construct an insightful critique. Part 1 of my ruminations on The Lego Movie, then, provide an introduction to the theories I'll be using in Part 2. Stay tuned, all, because EVERYTHING IS AWESOME. Hopefully these posts will nicely compliment Scott's awesome thoughts on how The Lego Movie capitulates to some disturbing movie cliches in the name of creativity.

The Lego Movie deals specifically with the way politics intersects with everyday life. Thomas Lemke's useful Biopolitics, an Advanced Introduction, defines biopolitics as “a constellation in which modern human and natural sciences and the normative concepts that emerge from them structure political action and determine its goals” (33). In other words, the ways we understand “life,” through science, sociology, and other disciplines, affect political action. For the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the theorist credited with the birth of biopolitical thinking, it is a “specifically modern” (Lemke 33) form of power, a historical phenomenon. Biopolitics replaces the absolute authority of old sovereign rule with disciplinary mechanisms designed to keep bodies bound by certain space and time restrictions. Power, in a biopolitical disciplinary society, reveals itself in regulatory measures that determine the lives of its citizens. Institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons and military barracks exemplify the principles of a disciplinary culture.

Foucault argues that the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society in eighteenth-century Europe sparked the emergence of disciplinary societies. Other theorists have since expanded upon Foucault's work, tweaking and refining his understanding of the link between “life” and politics. Gilles Deleuze, for example, argues that our society has moved past its disciplinary moment into a radically different area: one of control. In their groundbreaking 2000 work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri use Deleuze's concept to demonstrate the importance of globalism and capitalism for today's sociopolitical structure. According to their work, in a society of control, power “extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations” (24). If discipline relies on institutions regulating the movement of bodies, control internalizes the process so that individuals effectively regulate themselves. Institutions become less prominent, but each and every aspect of social life becomes saturated with biopower.

For Hardt and Negri, biopower is “a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it” (23-24). They call the global prominence of biopower, bolstered by the international reaches of capitalism and global communications technologies, “Empire.” Empire is a modern, diffused form of sovereignty, a global presence, spread through all dimensions of social, political and economic existence. Empire, however, derives its energy from the “multitude,” a radically new sort of global proletariat, a group that simultaneously fuels Empire and threatens it. Instead of despairing over the total reach of Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that “the passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation...The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges” (XV, “Preface”). The positive biopower of the multitude stands in promising opposition to the restrictive biopolitics of Empire.

As Thomas Lemke points out, however, Hardt and Negri seem to arbitrarily assign a liberatory, ontological existence to the bio(em)powered multitudes. Treating “life” as a “transhistorical entity” (Lemke 74) can problematically break down into “natural” assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and identity. There is a danger in the power of the multitude: could the emancipatory principles of global biopower function as another way to re-inscribe hegemonic ideologies? Judith Butler's Gender Trouble can intervene neatly into any revolutionary impulse that relies on foundational identity politics to carry it through. Butler's work largely dismisses feminist politics that rely on idealizing “repressed” female identities; the glorification of the maternal and the retreat into lesbian political consciousness does not, Butler argues, dismantle compulsory heterosexuality. Rather, these strategies reaffirm socially constructed gender identities and re-inscribe “woman” as a starkly delineated, ontological category. Carrying Butler's theory from gender politics into the broader realm of biopolitics, we are prompted to ask: if we assume an essential, prediscursive, creative power from the multitude, what hegemonic principles might be unintentionally reinforced in any revolutionary moves “against” Empire?

The Lego Movie, a 2014 computer-animated film, seems practically created to serve as a fictional, highly stylized thought experiment for Hardt and Negri's liberation of the multitude. The movie follows Emmett, a regular old Lego figurine living out his normal life in an urban Lego landscape that looks suspiciously like a vision of corporate America. Up-beat, top-of-the-charts pop music assures the citizens of this Lego world that “Everything is Awesome!” even as their leader, President Business, casually drops references about the end of the world and putting disobedient individuals “to sleep.” No one can pay attention to these cryptic signs anyway, since, after all, it's almost Taco Tuesday.

Image Credit: GeekTyrant

Seriously, though. Taco Tuesday sounds awesome. Just like this music video!

Through a series of accidents, Emmett falls in with a group of revolutionaries bent on taking President Business down, reuniting all of the various Lego worlds and liberating Lego citizens around the Lego globe. The revolutionaries are all “Master Builders,” individuals with the uncanny ability to take apart the tidily assembled Lego landscape in order to craft their own unique creations. Gradually, Emmett learns to delight in deviating from his rule book and the revolutionaries learn not to underestimate the “normal,” apparently brainwashed citizens of President Business's society. Ultimately, Emmett and the Master Builders rely on the creative powers of the masses in order to dismantle President Business's overly strict, rule-bound world. The Lego Movie can be read as a rather sophisticated allegory about using the master's tools (or Lego pieces) to effectively deconstruct the master's house. In just such fashion, the multitude might reconfigure Empire, turning their mutual citizenship into teamwork, their individualism into self-pride and their indoctrination into a weapon.

Image Credit: Comics Bulletin

"Yes, excuse me? I thought we were being subversive?"

This reading, however, leaves out several crucial points. If a capitalistic, tyrannical global Empire can be so easily compromised, why doesn't the function of gender roles shift in the utopia of the multitude? Arguably, Emmett only finds the strength to break apart this global Lego Empire because of the promise of a relationship with Wild Style. The movie prompts Wild Style herself to discard her revolutionary monicker, a name she has chosen for herself, and return to Lucy, her given, much less threatening, name. The actual “bodies” of these Lego figurines also provide a fertile ground for a performativity critique. The sexes assigned to the protagonists come from repeat performances of gender prompted, of course, by the way the “hand in the sky,” the human actually playing with the Legos, understands it. Can reimagining Empire actually dismantle all of our problematic ideologies or must hegemonic building blocks, like the ontological existence of gender, fuel the deconstruction of other social injustices?

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 2

Laura Thain — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:58:53 +0000

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film. In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

I ended my post with the suggestion that the embedded “meme” or mimetic function of gifing was the essential element of gifing as a medium that allows for a conception of gif celebrity. Here, I’d like to explore the early stages of that celebrity in the predecessor to the gif: the “meme” itself.

Early this year, Business Insider published a puff piece of “What 6 Viral Internet Meme Stars Look Like in Real Life.” Most of this content was pulled from the popular internet archive Know Your Meme, which more fully documents who ascertained the true identities of these “meme stars,” and how. (A large portion of the investigative activity took place on the message boards of the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit, which has been much discussed as a source of controversial tactical media.)

Image Source: Know Your Meme

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

The public’s interest in the real identity behind these “meme stars” has two important implications in the rhetoric of the meme. First, it privileges the “real” or “authentic” person behind the meme as the ultimate site of authenticity by identifying it as the meme’s point of origin. (This is the implicit reason archives like “Know Your Meme” seem interested in the “real” image of the speaker in the meme—it is the point of origin from which all “memeing” springs.) This particular privileging of the authentic persona of the meme star as the site of authenticity signals a shift from meme “fame” to meme “celebrity”—much as DeCordova describes in early 20^th century film.

Second, this interest in attaching the meme to an “original” speaker gives us a way to tie the discourse on “memeing” to linguistic and rhetorical conceptions of the “utterance” as a basic linguistic unit. As I’ve previously discussed, the meme is a unit of cultural transference, usually in the form of a compressed emotion or attitude. We can understand this in terms of “utterance” as a theoretical term beginning with Saussure, who defined the utterance as the most basic unit of signifying, and thus, the most basic unit of language.

But Saussure’s conception of the utterance gives us a very particular way to consider context, and therefore intertextuality, as a network of social convention in which the identification of a point of origin, no matter how artificial, is of no use. By Saussure’s structuralist approach, the signified is an abstract, intangible object; we can approach, but never reach it, by examining its signifiers. Because the utterance is the most basic form of communication, to break it down further would be to enter the realm of pure language, which only exists in abstracts. (In short, it’s just turtles all the way down.)

Bahktin, however, considers the utterance to have a dialogic quality—utterances are by nature responses to previous utterances. An utterance, then, can be broken down and linked to a previous utterance. As Bahktin argues, utterances cannot be “self-sufficient,” and they rely on intertextuality (what Baktin calls “the dialogic”) in order to render meaning. In “Speech Genres,” he affirms

The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.

If we consider a meme a type of utterance, Bakhtin’s account of the function of the utterance helps us to understand why the discourse on memeing is so invested in identifying a point of origin of a meme’s unit of speech. Audiences are compelled to attach the utterance to a speaker when faced when an intertextual network of constantly shifting meaning attached to a single object (the meme); by identifying the original “speaker,” each variation of the meme attempts to counter the uncertainty of speech and assert the power over their own reading of the significance of the utterance vis a vis the “first” utterance. By this means, meme “stars” become meme “celebrities.”

But gifs function as memes too, although they draw from pre-established sites of celebrity as often as they create celebrity by means of repetition. And while the meme offers meaning by swapping out a distinctive white block text, the gif either appears without text at all, allowing gestures to function as utterances (as is the case of the archive RealityTVgifs) or is attached to a text related to personal experience (in tumblrs like OfficeHoursAreOver, WhatShouldWeCallMe, AllMyFriendsAreMarried, etc.).

Perhaps the reason gifs tend to rely on pre-established celebrity more often than they create fame from scratch is because the lack of text and the emphasis on gesture makes assigning the utterance to a speaker all the more crucial to the gif’s memetic function. However, as any gif proliferates, its intertextual dialogue creates a space that is distinct from, and often nearly independent of, the gif’s original context (usually, a scene in a television show or movie). The origin of the utterance becomes as inconsequential to the gif’s meaning as the meme’s “actual” identity—it becomes a site of authenticity only as much speakers recall it to establish their own ethos. However, as I’ve pointed out earlier, knowledge of the meme’s origin is often inconsequential to understanding or proliferating it.

Ultimately, the “origin” of the gif—its original context—becomes the site of authenticity in gif celebrity much as the personal, private life of a movie star is the site of authenticity in film celebrity. It stands in as legitimate, original context that presents itself as objective or “real,” but is just as available for response and reinvention as the gif itself (that is, that the gifs context is still a subjective category). This layering is ultimately a result of gif’s reinvention of older media forms and its marriage with a distinctly new media characteristic. Thus, examining the relationship between gif celebrity and early film celebrity demonstrates productive points of intersection, but the divergence of these intersections is crucial to understanding the gif as a mechanism of new media and Web 2.0.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 1

Laura Thain — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:30:10 +0000

Image Source: Gorgonetta

As gifs begin to occupy more and more space in internet discourse, I’ve been contemplating the various ways they reinvent older media forms. New media theory tells us this is an inevitable historical trajectory; it is not just a characteristic of post-broadcast media but embedded in mediation as an ideological concept. What I find particularly interesting about gifs is not just how they remediate the television shows, films, Youtube videos, and memes from which they derive meaning, but also how they relate to a much older form of media: silent film. And in such a reading, the overlap between the production of fame and celebrity in the silent film tradition and in current gif discourse is remarkable—and worth discussing.

In order to describe such a relationship, we might first turn to scholarship on the production of celebrity in the realm of silent film. A problem we must account for in exploring this topic is that, while mass-produced and marketed motion pictures begin at the turn of the 20^th century, no form of cinema stardom existed in mass media until at least 1910, if not later. One common historical narrative argues that celebrity resulted from the battle between actors/actresses and film production companies. Although audiences wanted to know the names of performers, production companies resisted billing their actors and actresses in order to maximize their profit margins. It was not until the breakup of Edison’s Patents Trust by anti-trust legislation and the victory of independent film studios that the “star system” emerged as the direct result of specific shifts in production.

Clippings of Florence Lawrence, Biograph Picture's first leading lady, "obituaries" after her death was faked as a pubicity stunt by her agent, Carl Laemmle. Note the anonymous poem referring to her as the actress "whose name we've never known"--before her fake death, Lawrence was known only as "Biograph Girl." Image Source: 11e14thstreet

Richard DeCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Illinois, 2001) provides a productive counter-narrative. De Cordova argues that celebrity cannot be accounted for by examining shifts in production alone—we must understand its development as a discursive category. “The star system,” he argues compellingly, “is not simply the creation of one person or even one company; nor is the desire for movie stars something that arose unsolicited [among audiences].”

Instead of focusing solely on the development of film production, DeCordova describes a larger phenomenon: the emergence of a “discourse on acting.” A precondition of this discourse was the separation of the actor from the film itself. As the public began to understand moving pictures as a remediation of theatre, conceptions of the actor in the filmic space developed to account for the role of the actor and the actor him or herself. A difference between on-screen and off-screen presence was established. The result of such a distinction is what DeCordova calls a “picture personality.” Audiences traced these “personalities” across films, producing a discursive space in which actors and actresses were recognized intertextually and the role of an actor in one film was associated with the character he played in others. (In this sense, all actors and actresses of early film became recognizable to the public as “character” actors and brought with them from film to film assumptions about the dramatic space they inhabited. Mary Pickford was the ingénue, Douglas Fairbanks the swashbuckling hero, Charlie Chaplin the tramp, etc.) Still, picture personalities were associated with the films in which they appeared, not their private lives.

Mary Pickford in a 1920 publicity still. Image Source: Library of Congress

DeCordova concludes by arguing that the term “star” (a true film celebrity) can only be applied when an actor’s personal life is available for public consumption. The personal (“off-screen”) life of the actor becomes the new center of truth and authenticity. Only then can we consider actors in films true “celebrities.”

What does any of this have to do with gifs as a medium? Like early film, gif fame depends on intertextuality. The discursive space occupied by the gif strongly resembles the discursive space DeCordova gives to the “picture personality.” Gif fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning. Like silent film, gifs have an embedded “meme” function. If we read memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation” (OED) we can see the meme in silent film—how it communicates cultural concepts through characterized gesture and intertextual association, through the actor, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The gif accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, gifs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity created after the “picture personalities” of early silent film, even as they rely on that celebrity to creative enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. One need not, for instance, be familiar with the TV show or film from which a gif is extracted if one is familiar with other intertextual applications of the gif as an ideological concept (its embedded function as “meme”). For example:

Audiences need not watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta to interpret the signature gesture of Nene Leakes here.

Image Sources: RealityTVGifs

This Harry Potter-inspired gif can be coupled with a variety of captions--it captures an emotion, rather than a specific narrative.

Image Source: WhatShouldWeCallMe

This happens in terms of both a gifs adherence to and defiance of its own “meme” function. In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore the “meme” function of both silent film and gif culture, drawing parallels between the two in order to further demonstrate how gifs reinvent old media not only in terms of discursive space, but in the formal characteristics of the medium itself.

For Part 2 of this post, click here.

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.

Part II: Suspense is Better than Action

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:31:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888)

Part II: An Objection is Entertained

Last week I argued that suspense makes for more arresting visual effect than does what passes for “action” in Hollywood these days. My main point was that human frailty creates suspense and that psychological realism will do much to improve action cinema. Bigger visuals are not necessarily better at creating an emotional response in the viewer.

Now, you may say to me: Chris, you are not taking into sufficient account how big real visual events have become.

You act as if we lived in the forties still; you seem to want an action cinema which would treat destructive action as if it rarely happened. But it happens every day, and has happened diurnally for some time now, and a few times on a grand scale.

Admittedly, the world has gotten a lot more frightening; it is indeed, as Cormac McCarthy found a way to express it, no country for old men. All the more reason to adhere to psychological realism! When “death looks gigantically down” (Poe), we feel it more gigantically, I would argue, when it is measure against something like sanity, or just plain safety. Sheriff Bell provides that measure, in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). The Coen brothers, who adapted McCarthy’s novel into the best action/suspense thriller of which I am aware, never lose sight of it either.

Note, for instance, how the camera “eyes” firearms in the scene excerpted below from the film version of No Country (2007). (Warning, the violence in this scene, unlike that of many action movies, is disturbing.)

Courtesy: No Country For Old Men (2007)

The viewer does not see the firearm until the penultimate moments. Instead, we see Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) eyeing something very uneasily. When a firearm discharges, it is a very frightful thing, even when you are certain you will not be shot. The vast majority of action movie makers have forgotten this, and they are to be blamed for their lapse. The Coen brothers and McCarthy, by contrast, eye a gun in the way that you would if it were in the room with you.

Hollywood, do you want to arrest the viewer’s attention: then treat guns as the awful instruments of destruction and nihilism that they are. A person is made of most supplicating flesh, and a bullet of the most indifferent lead.

It is true -- and this is our tragedy -- that very many of the world’s suffering denizens live intimately with the continual threat of firearms and even massive explosives. Weapons are not less frightening for being ubiquitous; they are all the more terrifying for that. As William Faulkner could say by 1950: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” What McCarthy and the Coen brothers have shown is how this question becomes a problem of the spirit. You cannot show this, I think, with visual effect alone, hence the crucial importance to No Country of Sheriff Bell’s narrated monologues.

Hollywood, I believe you are well aware of the Faulknerian condition; but I think you are going about exorcising our demons all the wrong way. Observe this scene from the highly entertaining but all too scopophilic Independence Day (1996):

Courtesy: Independence Day (1996)

What are we doing when we imagine the total destruction of famous buildings? We are warding off the evil spirits.

“But alas,” writes Mike Davis (Dead Cities and Other Tales, 2003) “they have come after all; brandishing box-cutters. Although movies, like kites and women’s faces, were banned in the Hindu Kush version of utopia, the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. (on September 11, 2001) were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scène.” The U.S., in Davis’s view, has responded to cinematic terrorism cinematically: “The ‘Attack on America,’ and its sequels, ‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America Freaks Out,’ has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of All Fears, and so on.”

The dog which escapes the destruction in the scene excerpted from Independence Day (1996) says it all. Blow-em-up action cinema is every bit as much a response to the Faulknerian condition as is No Country For Old Men. But where that movie presents a problem of spirit, the blow-em-ups are trying to make us laugh it off; or are they trying to immunize us against our fears. Faulkner again: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Please, Hollywood -- I do not plea with but beg of you -- do not compete with reality for grandiosity of visual effect! We are sick to death with the visual reality of unimaginable events, and the way to heal is not to match on the silver screen, in super high definition, each new cataclysm.

The Artist's Speech

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:11:13 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute. He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles: “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!!!” So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk? David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles. Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues. However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin. We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits. These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist. But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary. As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films. Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait. When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself. He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop. His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama. It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture. The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them. Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain. Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number. Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer. The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism. Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics. Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen. Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech. Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama. The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts. In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance. The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies. By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.” I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation. Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole. While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations. In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium. The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this. By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech. By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:23:57 +0000

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center not only features this collection in past and future exhibitions, but also displays its contents on its windows, which show several of the film’s storyboards on the Center’s north and northeast walls. What the storyboards can tell us both about film history and Gone with the Wind itself is something I want to briefly examine here.

As discussed by Alan David Vertrees in his book Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, David Selznick and Gone with the Wind are central to the history of cinematic production design. Selznick created the title “production designer” for William Cameron Menzies, the man who drew Gone with the Wind’s storyboards—drawings which suggested the flow and look of each scene. Gone with the Wind was one of the first live action pictures to be entirely storyboarded. Thus, while production designers were originally responsible for scenic design only, Menzies influenced Gone with the Wind’s entire look, including color, lighting, composition, and camera movement. His achievement garnered him a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” The film’s original trailer gives some sense of what Menzies accomplished:

The Harry Ransom Center’s windows show storyboards depicting the film’s fire sequence, which a Gallup poll of North American audience members deemed its most memorable episode. However, the Ransom Center’s archives also include storyboards of other sequences, and I took this opportunity to delve into the Selznick Collection’s storyboards to learn more about what storyboarding in Hollywood’s golden age entailed, and what effects these visuals might have.

Searching through several boxes of Gone with the Wind storyboards held within the Selznick Collection, I was interested to note their variety. Some of the boards (like the ones for the fire scene) were relatively compact squares; others, like the ones I found portraying the Twelve Oaks barbecue that takes place early in the movie, are more substantial: made entirely of wood, at least a foot across in length, and reasonably heavy. My photograph here tries to capture what these storyboards actually look like.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Despite their age, their colors are quite striking, as the storyboard depicting the O’Hara family’s arrival at Twelve Oaks shows.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Menzies incorporates various color palettes into the film to visually highlight the differences among the film’s early antebellum scenes, the later stark Civil War sequence, and the bleak Reconstruction period. However, Menzies often doubles the heroine’s fiery personality with reds: Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta is illuminates by the flaming buildings around her; a burning sky backlights her defiant declaration that she’ll “never be hungry again”; the burgundy ball gown she wears to Ashley’s birthday party after being caught embracing him marks her as a scarlet woman.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The color palette also is distinguished from particularly difficult scenes where Scarlett shoots a Union officer, or faces assault from men in the Shantytown near her mills. The storyboards do not illustrate the scenes in detail, but provide a sketch for what it should look like. Pencil lines are still visible among the color.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

These storyboards are uniquely valuable not only for their place in film history, but also for thinking more about how artists like Menzies and Selznick visually composed Gone with the Wind’s epic romance. The “sketchness” of the storyboards conveys some of the sense of fragility inherent in the film’s narrative. By movie’s end, Scarlett is forced to rethink all her ambitions and desires, to recognize both the fragility of her world and her own mistaken understandings of Rhett and Ashley. Her narrative resembles the mental acts of revision that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy undergo in Pride and Prejudice, but with a more complicated finale: instead of uniting, she and Rhett part. Gone with the Wind perverts conventional romance by denying love at the close.

Yet, the film’s last shots complicate the trailer’s claim that “the screen has never known a love story to compare with this, when Rhett Butler meets Scarlett O’Hara.” Instead of despairing when she loses Melanie and Rhett, the people who loved and supported her, Scarlett’s face and the music express hope as she and the viewer both realize her truest love: Tara, her family’s home. It is Tara that provides her the strength to assert that “tomorrow is another day,” and the final shot of Scarlett standing outside her family home, posed against a sky filled with red clouds takes the viewer back to her refusal to give up in the face of poverty, hunger, and despair. Menzies’s visual logic makes Gone with the Wind more than a love story between a man and a woman; it is instead a love letter to America, written to Americans shaken by the Great Depression. Gone with the Wind celebrates both a defiant land and the hopes of the people who populated it. In representing the film through Scarlett’s escape from a burning Atlanta on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center embraces Gone with the Wind as an American narrative worthy of further study.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

David A. Harper — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:31:21 +0000

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

I found myself watching The Hunger Games at the urgent behest of my eldest daughter, a staunch tween member of “Team Peeta.” Before the movie, we had made a bargain that I would read the entire Hunger Games series and take her to the film if she would read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It seemed like a good deal at the time. While The Hunger Games movie didn’t put her in mind of Shaftesbury, she did direct me to the image below:

Image Credit: iFunny.mobi

Like the best jokes, this one works on several levels. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series, makes the Roman “bread and circuses” connection explicit in the third novel when Katniss is informed that “in the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses.”[2] Indeed, “Panem” is the name of the fictional nation that uses the annual Hunger Games as a strategy of control. My initial assessment after reading the series was that Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story “The Lottery” had mated with Stephen King’s prescient 1982 sci-fi novel The Running Man and produced dubious offspring. But I left the movie musing that it is somehow too easy to assess The Hunger Games as a commentary on a culture obsessed with cheap, voyeuristic reality TV. In a way the books never could, the movie takes advantage of the social and visual experience of going to the movies to breathe new life into the “bread and circuses” paradigm.

In an article for Huffington Post, Greg Garrett noted that The Hunger Game’s dystopia evokes both 1930’s Depression-era America and the Roman “bread and circuses” tradition. Garrett writes, “So long as we are distracted… we may forget for a moment about our own lives, our own hunger. We may forget that we live in a nation that is less free than it was a decade ago, a nation with fewer societal safety nets, a nation with fewer opportunities for young people.”[3] Well said. But let’s face it; the majority of Americans have never known anything more than metaphorical hunger. Turning our gaze toward our own very real problems is a start, but only a start. To do only that is to become a Panem Capitol dweller who realizes she lacks freedom. Breaking free of the thralldom imposed by our own enticing bread and circuses requires we turn our gaze outward and recognize responsibilities extending beyond the borders of self, town, state, or nation.

The theater where my family viewed The Hunger Games was a trendy one that serves meals during the show. While we waited for our group to be seated, the people in front of us consumed two pitchers of the theater’s own microbrew. Once inside, we were treated to a menu mimicking foods found in the books. No, not squirrel, berries, or any other survival food found in the impoverished districts or the arena. This was high-end Capitol fare, like lamb stew with plumbs and some purple melon wrapped in prosciutto. In typical American fashion, the portions were huge. All told, my family probably spent over $100.00 to sit in stadium seats watching a decadent society watch starving children kill each other for sport.

Image Credit: People.com

That purple prosciutto melon was a tip off to what sets The Hunger Games phenomenon apart. It casts the movie audience in the role of Panem Capitol dwellers watching the games. The effect is emphasized by how rarely the movie shows Capitol citizens reacting to the action in the arena. Instead, we stand in for that audience, watching the carnage directly or through the mediation of the charismatic game show host, Caesar. The outlandish Capitol fashion (think Eighteenth-century meets Lady Gaga) may be meant to distance these people from us, even dehumanize them, but as the movie rolls on we become them.

Shaftesbury recognized that the difference between being a “spectator” or an “actor” is perhaps only one of degree. The Hunger Games has us watch colonial children kill one another while we participate in our own consumer culture of excess. God forbid you were out refilling your eight-dollar popcorn tub and missed Thresh bashing little Clove’s head in against a giant metal cornucopia.

Image Credit: Netroots Foundation

The tricky thing about a movie about bread and circuses is that it can become simply another circus, particularly if the audience remains unaware of their complicity. What are we forgetting – what are we being distracted from – by this particular circus and by the more ubiquitous barrage of media white noise? I couldn’t help but reflect that only about a week prior to the release of The Hunger Games the viral social media campaign “Kony2012” had filled our feeds and prompted anxious articles in The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] ForiegnPolicy.com,[6] and in other mainstream media outlets. The rapidity with which critiques of Kony2012 surfaced revealed a deep mistrust for new social-media fueled activism, as well hinting at even less savory reasons for lashing out at the video.

For a moment, Kony2012 brought our attention to the plight of child soldiers, real starving children who kill one another. Of particular impact is the moment nine minutes into the film, where the filmmaker attempts to explain Joseph Kony to his own five-year old son. The moment has power precisely because, in order to expose the exploitation of children, the filmmaker exploits his own son. It is uncomfortable, but it is meant to be. When we watch fictional children fight in the Hunger Games arena, however, we are partaking in an entertaining diversion, both within the framework of the fiction that makes us a Capitol citizen, and in our role as real consumers of media. A little more discomfort might be in order.

Shaftesbury wasn’t arguing for the abolishment of the theater in 1711, no more than I am denying the value of entertainment. I study Renaissance and Eighteenth-century literature for most of my day, so for me to take such a stance would be absurd. But I do think we should reflect upon what it means to be identified not with the rebellious underdogs of District 11, but with the effete, privileged citizens of the Capitol who move from one distraction to the next as children kill each other and the temperature rises.

Works Cited

[1] Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 447.

[2] Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay. (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 223.

[3] Greg Garrett, "The Hunger Games: Why It Matters"

[4] Max Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012"

[5] Josh Kron and J. David Goodman, "Online, a Distant Conflict Soars to Topic No.1"

[6] Joshua Keating, "Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Horsey Beginnings: Setting the Stage

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:34:28 +0000

Image Credit the Bureau of Land Management

In George Lucas's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo rides a tauntaun out into the frozen wastes of Hoth; he needs to find his friend, Luke Skywalker. In George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Deanerys Targaryen, a princess in exile, takes center stage in a ceremony for the sake of her child-to-be. She has to eat a raw, fresh horse heart. In Washington County, a Portland woman and her friend buy a near dead horse, shoot it in the head, cut it open, and take pictures, lots of bloody pictures. The following post does not contain these images (a future post will, though).

Image Credit Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Han Solo has to find his friend. He saddles his tauntaun and rides out into the rapidly freezing night. He's told that he won't get far. His tauntaun will freeze before he reaches the first marker. Han doesn't care. Han doesn't care about his tauntaun, and there's no real distinction made, on his part, between this living transportation and his normal mechanical means of getting around. The tauntuans are pretty strange; they look like a kangaroo-dinosaur blend. What almost instantly endears them to the audience, though, is that he saddles the animal; it has reins. Han's a real space cowboy now. He, for a moment, has a real live horse. These tauntauns, too, have perhaps the most pathos filled utterance of any creature in Star Wars. They are filled with emotion. Well, that's the case until Han cuts his now dead tauntaun open and we see that it's filled with guts. Han, as he stuffs Luke into the tauntaun, notes its stink. The tauntuan--dead, sliced open, and stuffed with Luke, is left without a shred of dignity.

Image Credit Game of Thrones via Nerdy Gamer Girl

[A slight note to the reader. While I didn't feel terrible about spoiling a thirty year old movie Game of Thrones (show and book both) are slightly more recent. So, (slight) spoiler warning.]

Deanerys, still pretty much a child, is married off to an older man, the leader of a people dependent on horses. He frightens her, but she learns to love him, and she learns to love the horses. When she discovers that she is pregnant she is taken to some elders and told to eat a horse heart to prove that she's woman enough bear her husband's child. In the book, Martin doesn't spend terribly much time describing the horse eating, but in the show they give us a lavish scene. We don't see the heart cut from any horse, and in some ways it's presented as its own object, free of any horsey connections, much as you might buy from a store. Well, not quite store like. The heart is still, seemingly, full of blood, and as Deanerys works her way through the several pounds of flesh she gets covered. The scene is hard to watch; she, covered in blood, shiny and slimy, nauseous. She chokes down every bite.

Image Credit The Searchers via Gone Movie

We don't, as a general rule, eat horses in the United States. Wikipedia has a nice run down of various historical reasons horsemeat is taboo in different cultures, but one of the most convincing reasons that I have heard for the American distaste of horse meat is that horses are looked at less as beasts and more as companion animals. People talk about cowboys and their relationship with horses as fundamentally ingrained in an American imaginary. And while I don't know if there is any particular research to back up these claims, having grown up watching westerns as a little boy they strike a chord with me. But the horse, the cowboy's companion, is always still an animal. It can be killed, but its killing, while not a damning act is at least worrisome. Horses occupy the curious double space of both means of transportation and friend.

Image Credit Lonesome Dove via American Bedu

[My post is full of spoilers today. Both Lonesome Dove and True Grit are pretty old, but with the new True Grit getting released recently I thought that I'd give a heads up for anyone that is about to watch it.]

They have personality when the story demands and none when it doesn't, and these switches seldom need justification. In Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove there are named horses and unnamed Gus cuts his unnamed horse down and uses it to hide from gunshot--neither McMurtry nor the reader skip a beat in killing the animal. A good portion of the first chapter, and throughout the rest of the long novel, Captain Call interacts with a horse; he has a relationship with the Hell Bitch. She's as tough, tougher maybe than he is.

Image Credit True Grit via The Diplomacy of Kasey Driscoll

Han's search for Luke and tauntaun sacrifice mirrors Rooster's race to save Mattie's life in True Grit. Throughout the story (equally held up in both films, and I assume the novel) horses are front and center. They're haggled over, argued about, praised. And though different characters approach them with different intensities, Mattie’s care and affection for the horses isn't played off as a little girl's whims. Her strength, throughout the story is apparent, and her relationship with her horse Little Blackie is presented as genuine and admirable. But Rooster sacrifices Little Blackie--sacrifice cleans things up too much. He brutally rides him to death. In the more recent film this point is amplified. Rooster rides Little Blackie as far and fast as he'll go, then stabs him to push him further. Once Little Blackie falls Rooster shoots him. But Mattie is saved. The climax of the film revolves around this horse. The characters are forgotten and we feel for the horse; Rooster disgusts us. Minutes after the horse is dead he is forgotten, though. The film ends firmly focused on Mattie and Rooster, neither are disgusting.

That horses are disposable and relatable for many people raised on westerns and American horse culture is why the story of Jasha Lottin is so strange. In next week's post I'll be focused on her actions and pictures.

Angst and Paralysis: Visualizing Melancholia from Albrecht Durer to Lars Von Trier

Ty Alyea — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.

Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancholia .4VS Image Credit: NIH - Images From the History of Medicine

Though a predecessor in some ways to depressive disorders and depression, the concept of melancholia carries with it a number of spiritual and behavioral connotations that cannot be mapped onto contemporary (American) diagnostic categories without losing a number of significant and complex meanings; the complete edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), for example, devotes 1400 pages to the topic. Thankfully, a multitude of paintings and woodcuttings can help us demonstrate dimensions of melancholia that depart from contemporary mores of classifying and understanding such diseases.

Though melancholia proper was frequently associated with men as well as women, a significant contingent of artists chose to visualize the malady in the representation of dejected women. One can notice a number of significant similarities in the works of Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), pictured at the top of this post, and Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancolicus .4 VS (1514-1562), directly above this image.

Cranach's painting depicts the melancholy figure as an angelic figure who is sitting in the corner of a room, looking blankly ahead. Since antiquity, Melancholia was understood in humoreal terms as an overproduction of black bile--in fact,the word "melancholia" simply means "black bile" in ancient Greek. And we can see this blackness in the top-right corner of the image. In the darkness we can barely make out the images of what appear to be witches on broomsticks--perhaps haunting the mind of this angelic figure whose countenance and posture seems to be in stark contrast to the disposition of the swinging cherubs. One almost gets a sense of a kind of swirling of the mind contrasted with the body's immobility. Likewise, we see a little dog sleeping at her feet. Solis's image includes some distinct similarites: the woman in this image sits with her face buried into her hands amidst a grouping of animals. As a counterpart to the stick held by the subject of Cranach's painting, we see that Solis's toga-wearing figure seems to be holding a sort of measuring compass. Does anyone have an idea of the significance of these items?

Albrecht Durer's Melancholia I Image Credit: Wikipedia

These images, in turn reflect some of the elements found in Albrecht Durer's depiction of melancholia. Durer (1471-1528) was an instructor of Cranach's, and we can see some similarities in their stylistic choices. Once again, we see the reclining dog at the feet of an angelic woman, and a sphere image as well. To take a guess at an answer to the question I offered in my previous paragraph, I will venture to guess that the compas in Solis's image, like the spheres in Durer and Cranach's pieces, may have something to do with rational/scientific creation--perhaps to an extent that it has an effect on spiritual existence. We may also note that Durer's image is replete with images of bells and (what appear to be) time pieces. And in the background of this otherworldly image, we see light (or perhaps the rays of "melancholia" itself) radiating from the distance.

Which brings us to our final images from Lars Von Trier's film, Melancholia (2011). As we see halfway through this trailer for the film, we notice a nude Kirsten Dunst laying on rocks, taking in the glow of a rogue planet, aptly named "Melancholia," which is on a collision course with the earth. Given this contemporary setting, Von Trier's choice to depict depression as a personal and cosmic apocalypse seems to be a throwback to the way in which the malady has been depicted for the bulk of its history. An analysis of the film yields further comparisons, as Dunst's character rejects scientific explanations (or in this film, wishes) that attempt to mitigate the danger. However, somewhat subversively, we see that the main character relishes in her melancholy, and fully accepts the doom it brings. Viewers might also note that one of the first images in the film is a horse that sits on the ground just as we first see Dunst's character--a strange image that nonetheless fits perfectly with five centuries of melancholia's representation.

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: “Almost the Same, But Not Quite” Tokyo in Solaris

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

I just watched Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. The movie’s a whirlwind of mourning, longing, and technologizing. I won’t talk much about the plot here. Instead, I’ll talk about a scene, amongst many, that caught my attention. This scene, in the distant, fuzzy future of the movie’s setting, places us in the passenger seat of a self-propelled car on an impossibly busy highway. In Tokyo, Japan. In 1971. Like Solaris, many TV shows and movies have made use of present-day, real world metropolises to conjure up imagined future cities. In this first segment of a series called “Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film,” Tokyo in Solaris is “almost the same, but not quite” what we’re used to seeing.

In a scene that runs upwards of four minutes, Tarkovsky captures a “future” city where cars weave through fast-moving traffic along a multilane/multilevel highway. Tall buildings with dazzling billboards and glittering neon signs scroll alongside our moving vehicle. Eerie electronic notes punctuate a mostly silent drive. This scene might sound commonplace, especially for those of us familiar with the highways of Texas and California.

Los Angeles Freeway Interchange Image Credit: Stock Connection/World of Stock

But in the context of the film, it’s an unsettling drive through a future city (though the scene was filmed on Tokyo’s highways). According to the audio commentary on the Criterion Collection edition of Solaris, film critics Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie claim that Tarkovsky expressly asked for permission from the USSR to film in Japan. Although Tarkovsky’s original goal was to film the World’s Fair in Osaka (held in 1970), he was granted permission to leave for Japan in 1971 and ended up filming everyday traffic in Tokyo instead. Some critics (namely the New York Times’ Dan Kois) call the scene “the most boring” in the entire movie. Yet, to me, the scene feels anything but unnecessary and ordinary when taken in context. Even while watching the movie in the Austin of 2011, I was struck by how unsettled the scene made me feel. The extra-long takes, the startling electronic sounds, the unexpected cuts between color and black-and-white film all disoriented me.

Image credit: Screenshot from Solaris scene

I keep thinking that this scene is—per Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry”—“almost the same, but not quite” the same as the highways I’m familiar with. And, I don’t think so just because I’m not used to seeing Japanese characters during interstate drives. Akira Kurosawa reads the scene with a “shudder.” To Kurosawa, “By a skillful use of mirrors, [Tarkovsky] turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city.” Given that the film’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, uncannily finds someone (or something) rather like his dead wife, Hari, on Solaris, the theme of mimicry is Tarkovsky’s signature move for disorientation. Being thrown off kilter when we see Tokyo and Hari is exactly the point.

The (Future) Image of Los Angeles: Chris Burden's "Metropolis II"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

Los Angeles, the city we all (excluding Randy Newman) love to hate, is the inspiration for Chris Burden’s new kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," using 1,080 toy cars, many steep ramps, and a few powerful motors. The sculpture is expected to debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this fall. Despite the sculpture’s not-yet-finished state, it’s already causing quite a buzz in the blogosphere, with coverage in the New York Times’ Wheels blog, LACMA’s Unframed blog, and GOOD Magazine’s Culture blog.

As a former Angeleno, the city and the ways that it’s depicted in art, film, and literary productions fascinate me. This fascination is well-documented by filmmaker Thom Andersen in his three-part video essay released in 2003, Los Angeles Play Itself.

Image credit: Bright Lights Film Journal

In Andersen’s movie, scenes from hundreds of movies traipse across the screen while a narrator laments the fact that Los Angeles has been maligned by the movies that are filmed and set in the city. According to Andersen, the city has been blown up and knocked down in film, if not completely evacuated of all the things that make it great—its pockets of diversity, its scruffy beauty, its simultaneously chaotic and laid-back lifestyle. By the end of Andersen’s epic on Los Angeles, we wholeheartedly agree with his musings about “Who knows the city?” For Andersen, and for fans of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the answer to this question is “Only those who walk, only those who ride the bus. Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say, nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk. They claimed nobody takes the bus, until one day we all discovered that Los Angeles has the most crowded buses in the United States.” Being on the ground, in the streets, is what matters.

Chris Burden brings us the streets of a future Los Angeles with his “Metropolis II” kinetic sculpture. Burden’s metropolis has no discernable landmarks, no “A-ha! That’s Los Angeles!” buildings.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

But, there are a lot of freeways—in lanes sometimes 10 or more across, multicolored cars fly past. In a movie about the second Metropolis installation posted on the Gagosian Gallery’s YouTube page, Burden explains his reasoning for why he decided to make an installation where the toy cars never have to stop. As images of cars dart across the screen, Burden jokes that “I love hearing that the cars are going 230 miles an hour. That makes me really hopeful for the future. That’s about the speed they should be running. Not 23.4 miles an hour, which is what my BMW says I average driving around LA. It’s about to be over. The idea that a car runs free—those days are about to close. So, it’s a little bit like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and your model had horse buggies everywhere while automobiles are about to arrive. So, something else is about to arrive.” Burden’s “something else” are cars that don’t need people to guide them through the city, since there are no people that could get in the way of the self-sufficient cars.

The most striking feature for me while watching the movie about this installation is that there are no future people in this installation, no future pedestrians who can truly “know the city.” In “Metropolis II,” what we get is a people-less, car-overrun metropolis. The one image that stands out most for me is one of Burden (I presume) standing amidst the installation as it’s running, wearing headphones to dampen the incessant noise.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

I’m not exactly sure what to make of this image, but it seems to me to represent a conflict of interests with the Andersen/pedestrian camp and the Burden/car camp. This image has gotten me thinking about how Los Angeles is often depicted as a car-centric, post-modern configuration of sprawling neighborhoods. Isn’t it time that the city breaks out of this constricting stereotype?

Isn’t Thom Andersen trying to change our preconceived notions of Los Angeles with his movie? Isn’t that what the city’s recent strides to improve public transportation in the spread out metropolis is all about? Filmmaker Roman Polanski once famously said that “Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world...provided it’s seen by night and from a distance”; it seems that, with Burden, Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world…provided it’s devoid of people to impede the city’s cars from going as fast as they can. The important question to ask is: Does Burden’s image of Los Angeles do anything to change our minds about the city people love to hate?

Abraham Lincoln is Watching Over You: The Strange World of Victorian Spirit Photography

Jake Ptacek — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:28:25 +0000

For my first viz. post ever, I thought I’d take a look at the Victorian phenomenon of spirit photography. Truly timely, right? But in the wake of Errol Morris’s new book on photography, Believing is Seeing, which is concerned with sussing out the relationship between objective truth and the photograph, thinking about this mid-Victorian malarkey suddenly seems more culturally relevant to me than it did, say, a week ago. After all, the controversy over spirit photographs represents the first serious sustained debate about photography’s truth-telling powers. But more importantly, spirit photography remains, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun, visually haunting: at its most basic rhetorical level, its wish-fulfilling nature provides access to powerful cultural fantasies. Read more after the break.

Probably the single most (in)famous spirit photographer, William Mumler is a prime example of sheer American hucksterism. Born in 1832, he worked as a jewel engraver until 1861, when “spirits” began appearing in Mumler’s amateur photographs. Capitalizing on the nascent rage for Spiritualism and a powerful sentimentality engendered by the mass casualties of the American Civil War, Mumler set up shop as the nation’s chief spirit photographer. Mumler’s career skyrocketed until 1869, when a trial for fraud, initiated in New York City, made him notorious. One of the events of the season, Mumler’s trial represents a key moment in the history of photography, as for the first time the medium’s relationship to truth was being brought into the legal arena. The trial saw P. T. Barnum testify against Mumler, where Barnum (prophetically?) circulated a photograph of himself with the blurry head of Abraham Lincoln in the background as evidence that spirit photographs could be faked. Though William Mumler was found not guilty, the trial effectively ended the first portion of his career. After 1869, Mumler continued to circulate spirit photographs—including some of his most famous—but biographical information becomes much more scarce.[1]

William Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph, shown above, captures a beatific, almost Christ-like Abraham Lincoln resting his transparent hands on the shoulders of Mary Todd Lincoln (harder to discern in all digital copies I’ve examined is the faint presence of Thaddeus Lincoln in the upper left-hand corner). Mumler claims in his autobiography not to have known the subject was Mary Todd Lincoln—though he had previously photographed her (without spirits) in 1865—but instead thought she was a “Mrs. Lindall.” His surprise when he learned the “true” identity of his illustrious sitters may be imagined. Though even by Mumler’s standards the 1872 photograph isn’t a particularly convincing piece of work—Lincoln’s head seems strangely posed and stiff—it’s an audacious piece of mythmaking. The photograph collapses the distinction between the national and the familial. Mary Todd Lincoln, still dressed in black, still mourning her loss, stares out directly at the viewer, not challengingly, but with the beginning of a smile. Behind her the iconic face of Lincoln looks downward, evading the viewer’s gaze, but he is smiling. The viewer is encouraged to identify with Mary Todd—the grieving survivor—as she comes to realize a sense of security and protection in the ghostly hands of the great American myth, Abraham Lincoln.

Not every spirit photographer was—or could be—as audacious as Mumler, yet all spirit photographs work by fulfilling a complicated set of desires. On a personal level, they allow their subjects one more chance to see, whether in a cloudy mist or transparent blotch, loved ones thought gone. Edouard Buguet, a Parisian spirit photographer, confessed during his trial to a number of fraudulent practices. Yet, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his excellent 2006 book, Faces of the Living Dead, “witness after witness—journalist, photographic expert, musician, merchant, man of letters, optician, ex-professor of history, and colonel of artillery—came forward to testify in his defense…. One after another they left the witness box protesting that they chose to believe the evidence of their own eyes, rather than Buguet’s confession.” There’s something deeper at work here than a basic fear of being exposed as a “gullible dupe,” as Jolly puts it, though that’s a part of it, of course.

Spirit photographs touch on matters of serious belief. They provide seemingly objective proof that identity continues on after death in a reassuring, even comforting form. These aren’t generic ghosts or tormented souls—these are people we can identify: family members, departed lovers, former schoolteachers, or even, as above, old assistants. The desire to recognize is paramount in spirit photography. Buguet testified that many of his frauds relied on dummies with false beards or studio assistants wearing drapes, with a collection of 300 or so heads that could be swapped out and exposed onto the plates. Yet his clients would identify the same head as different people: “the mother of one sitter, the sister of a second, and the friend of a third” (Jolly 22). Along with the ability to be recognized, the spirits in these photographs share another common trait—they are frequently quotidian. Though they sometimes appear swathed and veiled in drapery, often they show up in normal dress. Perhaps they look at us, or at the sitter, or rest hands or arms on them. But mostly they just seem to be around, hanging out on the margins of our experience. Rather than being upsetting, the most powerful spirit photographs suggest that there’s no break or discontinuity between the reality the living experience and that which the dead experience. We go on, even if life doesn’t.

Of course there’s an incredible comfort in this idea, especially for Western audiences after the 1850’s—and spirit photography seems to be almost entirely a phenomenon of France, Great Britain, and America. Decimated by war, famine, and social upheaval, while simultaneously undergoing the first serious pangs of religious doubt, early spirit photography promised the West that modernity didn’t have to be as unsettling as it seemed. Underlying the phenomenon of spirit photography is a persistent faith in technology. It’s a weird paradox: on the one hand, spirit photographs act as a “Take that!” to materialists, confirming the existence of an unseen spiritual existence; on the other, the photographs strengthen the claims of technology to impartially and fully document material reality.

Today, of course, it seems naïve to put so much faith into the photograph, which we now know is an infinitely manipulable medium. Except, of course, that we still do. The recent success of Paranormal Activity and its sequel—a third is on the way this October—only caps a decade which saw a return to a belief in photography and film as central media for the inscription and dispersal of “spirit.” Films like The Ring series and White Noise, the increased interest in “electronic voice phenomena” (EVP), and (pseudo)scientific television programs like the History Channel’s MonsterQuest and MysteryQuest, all point to a continued cultural fascination with the possibilities of visual “proof” of continued, non-corporeal existence. (That all the examples I’ve cited construct that existence negatively, as something malevolent or horrifying—very much unlike spirit photography—you may discuss amongst yourselves….) The ghosts in the machine, it seems, are very much still among us.

The Synchronicity of Cinema, Phonography, and Writing

Will Burdette — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:09:10 +0000

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

A Visual History of Audio Recording, Part Two from Will Burdette on Vimeo.

The audio-video convergence finally happened in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer," but Thomas Edison had worked on motion picture prototypes (the Kinetoscope and the Kinetograph) forty years prior. And, the convergence was far from complete, total, or perfect. The same year "The Jazz Singer" was released, Edison released another clumsy attempt at combining sound and pictures. According to Peter Copeland in the book Sound Recordings, The Edison-Bell picturegram was "easy to damage and was not a huge success."

The merging of audio recording and moving images represents both a period of convergence and a period of divergence. While phonography, writing, and cinema came together in the production of movies, they also fractured into distinct industries and skill sets. The kinetoscope and the phonograph came out of Edison's Menlo Park lab, but after their invention, motion pictures and audio recording (as well as writing) would increasingly professionalize, specialize, and fracture. In an article version of "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter," Friedrich Kittler writes:

The historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriter separated the data flows of optics, acoustics, and writing and rendered them autonomous. The fact of this differentiation is not altered by the recent ability of electric or electronic media to bring them back together and combine them. (113-4)

Even though computer users can now remix audio and video on their laptops—and even though audio recording and movies grew out the same place—optics, acoustics, and writing remain distinct.

It is important to see this prolonged synching of audio and video as both a convergence and a divergence. The convergence speaks to our desire to combine technologies to create environments in which we can access all of our senses and immerse ourselves. But the divergence suggests that optical, acoustic, and written modalities have developed into different industries for good reasons. Different parts of our bodies and brains are activated by different modalities. Different training and skill sets are required for producing visual, aural, and written texts. Different professions have different levels of access to knowledge and skills associated with each modality. And, of course, in terms of universal design, we all have different levels of access to the texts produced with these different modalities. And our levels of access are not fixed. We gain and lose abilities through things like employment, education, and age. As we keep in mind the fact that audio recording has a connection to writing, and to the realm of the visual, we might also consider the value that comes from separating modalities.

Works Cited

Copeland, Peter. Sound Recordings. London: British Library, 1991. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter." October 41 (Summer 1987): 101-118. Google. Web. 25 July 2011. .

This is the third in a series of blog posts that will explore visual aspects of audio recording technologies. If you enjoyed it, you might read the first post, and second post, too.

The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

noelradley — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0000

"Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today? TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways. One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

"Wall of Respect" 1967 Via University of Chicago

The mural Wall of Respect was the beginning of Afri-COBRA activitism. The collaboration was meant to promote African-American heroes and artists while avoiding the physical clash that characterized racial rioting in 1960s Chicago. This begins the film's organization of artistic form (mind) apart from public protest (body). Artists created the positive imagery to change minds and insisted they were transforming their own minds. "We were confrontational in the sense that we were confronting ourselves and our people. We weren't confronting anybody else," said Afri-COBRA artist Napolean Jones Henderson. "We were challenging ourselves to see ourselves as we are."

The film continues a visual divide between politics and aesthetics. Historical marches, speeches, and sit-ins from 1950s America (in grainy black-and-white) appear less vibrant, if only in a visual sense. Against footage from the civil rights movement, Afri-COBRA paintings glow with rich "cool aid" colors and celebratory imagery. Afri-COBRA was a continuation and not a critique of civil rights, but the sets of images do register distinctly: domestic American civic imagery versus Africanist imagery, 1950s versus 1960s, documentary film versus imaginative new iconographies, African-Americans struggling to be seen at all versus African-Americans proactively setting out how they will be seen, often with non-Western forms or motifs.

Screenshot of JET Cover Via Googlebooks

Afri-COBRA art often plays up its own rejection of literal revolution, such as the bullet motif. The 1971 JET cover features one of Jet Jarrell's fashion pieces, a bullet belt. (The mixed media painting "Revolutionary" incorporates real bullets.) In the Jet cover, the model wears the bullets and uses a butcher knife, menancing signals that she has the means defend herself physically. But that's only the first step in the representation here. The idealized 1960s domestic setting, the assured posture of the female figure and her knowing stare communicate that force won't be necessary. Change is inevitable, it says to JET readers, and is happening from within. You don't have to believe in the mind/body split to buy Afri-COBRA project, for the art movement was never truly disembodied. The rhetoric of mind, rather, was about Afri-COBRA members creating life on their terms, avoiding socially proscribed behaviors and ways-of-seeing.

Multimedia Children’s Literature and The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Michael Widner — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:19:50 +0000

Cover image of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Children’s literature is, practically by definition, a multimedia endeavor. The beloved works of Dr. Seuss, Elsa Holmelund Minarik, Roald Dahl, Frank Baum, and countless others have a drawing at least every few pages, if not on every page. But as the audience grows older and gains reading proficiency, the pictures slowly disappear, an indication that all but the simplest of stories can be told in words alone. The multimodal aspects of children’s literature are, then, little more than a helpful scaffold to engage children while building the skills necessary for reading.

But Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (winner of the 2008 Caldecott Medal) is a book of an entirely different order. Selznick describes it as “a novel in words and pictures.” Unlike most children’s novels, in which the art simply illustrates a scene already described in words, the pencil drawings in Selznick’s novel help tell the story.

Image Credit: Screenshots from Amazon.com preview of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The novel opens with a preface that invites the audience to close their eyes and imagine themselves in a darkened movie theater, just before the curtains separate and the projector clatters to life. Set in 1930s Paris, the book invokes silent films. The drawings throughout are cross-hatched pencil and the page borders themselves look like the cards of text that added written dialogue to early movies. It opens with an extended sequence of pictures that, from a small, distant shot of the moon, grow to fill the page while moving in ever more closely until we see, in glimpses, the principal characters. It thus makes its allegiance to cinema clear early. Yet though the form relies heavily on multiple media in a way unlike most children’s literature, the novel draws on more than just drawings and words.

A combination of detective story, historical fiction, and coming-of-age narrative, the plot revolves around recently orphaned Hugo Cabret, his repair of an automaton of mysterious provenance, and a grumpy old man who runs a toy shop in a train station.

Maillardet's automaton, which inspired Selznick

The machine, like Maillardet's above, is in the figure of a seated person, holding a pen over a desk. Hugo, who has been living in a train station since his father died in a museum fire, becomes obsessed with the idea that his father has hidden a secret message in the automaton, which it will write out once he can repair it; he believes that message, further, will save his life. Having learned the art of horology (what a great word to find in children's fiction) from his father, Hugo is especially skilled at working with gears, springs, and the other mechanisms by which the automaton functions. Once he finally repairs it (he gets parts by stealing small mechanical toys from the toy booth), the machine, rather than writing a message, draws a picture: a scene from his father’s favorite movie, A Trip to the Moon.

The drawing bears a signature: G. Méliès. Part One, in which the mystery is the automaton and Hugo’s own history (which the narrator slowly reveals to us) ends with the discovery of this output; Part Two follows up by trying to discover why the old toy maker knows about the automaton and reacts so emotionally when he finds that Hugo carries a notebook with drawings of it. As we learn, Papa Georges, as his god-daughter calls him, is Georges Méliès, one of the early innovators of cinema, the automaton's inventor, a magician, and, by those who remember him, believed dead. Through Hugo’s efforts, the French Film Academy uncovers many of his films, all of which had been thought lost, and reintroduces Méliès and his fantasy-filled, revolutionary movies to the world, thereby giving him back his purpose, without which he was, in Hugo’s mind, like a broken machine. Fittingly, movie stills and sketches from the real works by Méliès also intersperse the pages, layering yet another visual medium onto the narrative.

A still from A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès

Hugo often thinks of his own mind as a machine of gears and springs. He sees the world as one large machine in which everything and everyone has a function. He has nightmares about broken clocks. He carries gears in his pockets. Machinery ticks through the novel, texturing the illustrations and the imagery, explaining Hugo’s mind, and linking the different parts of the novel. At the conclusion, we discover that, rather than an author, the book was produced by a fantastically complicated automaton that drew all the pictures and wrote all the words, a machine constructed by (who else?) the now adult Hugo Cabret, who has taken the name Professor Alcofrisbas, a recurrent character in Méliès’s films. Machines become, in other words, another medium through which the novel tells its story.

In weaving allusions to machines throughout the work and then concluding with the fantasy of a novel-producing machine, The Invention of Hugo Cabret requires us to consider not only words and pictures, but also the physical machinery of book production and the author as a machine. Recalling the drawing automaton Hugo repairs, the fantastic novel-writing machine inserts itself unavoidably into our visual imagination. Drawings, movies, and clockwork machines are all integral elements of the novel, taking it far beyond picture books. The cinematic aspects join the machinery of creation to create a work that is uniquely beautiful, densely textured, and experimental: traits rarely seen in literature for any age group.

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4. Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg. When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere.

I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”

What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo.

The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:

However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network

The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).

Image Credit: The Social Network

The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy.

This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.

As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film.

While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have.

Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster.

(Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.)

Save the Words (through Images)

emcg — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 03:55:42 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of Save the Words

H/T to Elaine and Very Short List

To kick off my return to Viz. this semester, I’m excited to share two artifacts at the intersection of verbal and visual cultures. After the jump: a design savvy website that functions as a Linguistic Extinction List of sorts. Also, a short film that invites viewers to consider the neuroscience of language.

Oxford UP's web site Save the Words uses graphic design to re-invest obsolete or antiquated words with modern charm, even (perhaps) a certain glamour and intrigue. Employing colorful typography worthy of a Cosmo cover, the site gives words like jobler and squiriferous a graphic make-over, while the experience of navigating a virtual Wall of Words engages the roving eye of a 21st-century internet user. Once smitten by a particular graphic representation, visitors may pledge to use their adopted word daily.

Image Credit: Everynone

H/T to Elaine

Produced in conjunction with WNYC’s Radiolab, a weekly science podcast/radioshow, the short film “Words” is a curious celebration of words via their absence. After the opening frame, the textual presence is minimal. Instead, the viewer encounters a sequence of images and sonic information, and is asked to supply the words that make sense of these relationships. In addition to being just plain lovely, the video works as an interactive experiment: once you become clued into the logic of the film, you watch a second (or third or fifth) time to observe your brain’s language use--its ability to make verbal associations--in action. On another level, while the video assumes a kind of universal narrative that speakers of American English recreate to decode its "visual wordplay," I'm curious about the stories that individuals construct to make sense of these images: clearly, a clip of an amateur theater production or a coach outlining a football strategy signifies more than just the noun play.

I initially envisioned "Words" as a possible introductory activity for my Literature and Biology class, but ultimately decided to begin with some evolution rap instead. Do Viz. readers have any thoughts about the kinds of conversations that either of these artifacts might prompt in a rhetoric or literature classroom? I have a hunch that, given its explicit invitation to explore the intersection of word and image, "Words" might pair nicely with some of the questions raised by Paul Messaris in "What's Visual about 'Visual Rhetoric'?," which Tim Turner profiled for Viz. last year. This review essay asks whether there is something unique about the status of the visual in argument. For instance, the effectiveness of "Words" hinges on the narrative impulse that's particular to viewers of image sequences; according to Messaris, "Because of perceptual habits cultivated by the dominant role of movies and other visual narratives in our visual culture, all viewers are primed to see sequences of images as bits of stories, even when those images are also connected in more symbolic or conceptual ways."

Remember Me: Iconic Photography and Representations of 9/11

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:24:36 +0000

2010 film Remember Me" width="548" height="292">

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

When my friend Lauren pointed out to me the following TED video on “photos that changed the world,” I thought that it would be good material for viz. What I hadn’t realized was where Jonathan Klein’s claims would take my thinking.

In his talk, Klein talks about the potential political effects of what he refers to as “iconic” images: “We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something, in other words, to act.”

H/T: Lauren Gantz

While I did question how an iconic picture like “V-J day in Times Square,” also included in his talk, has changed the world, this argument seems to hold up better when he points out how photographs of Earth have helped encourage the environmental movement. As someone who has spent the last year writing about the power of images, I am willing to agree with this point. However, this discussion reminded me of a viewing experience that I meant to discuss on viz. after spring break, but had forgotten to recount: the new Robert Pattinson movie Remember Me.

Remember Me tells the story of a young man named Tyler, whose relationship with his father has suffered in the wake of his brother’s suicide, and a girl named Ally, whose mother died in a robbery when she was young. The two end up in a romantic relationship while struggling to reconcile themselves both to their fathers and to their tragic pasts. However, just as the audience begins to anticipate a happy ending, the moment of reconciliation is interrupted by tragedy: namely, the events of September 11, 2001.

The movie does set up this difficulty from the beginning: the movie opens with viewers taken back ten years before the story’s major events to actually see the young Ally with her mother, and shows her being shot in front of her young daughter by the thieves who take her purse. Also, it’s not long into either the film or its trailer that Tyler frames our experience with the following insight: “Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it; I tend to agree with the first part.” The movie’s overall message seems to be that life is unpredictable and that one must be able to recover from disaster to live life—however, as this lesson culminates Tyler’s death, it unsettles the audience by associating the characters’ private tragedies with a national one.

Perhaps one reason why I didn’t write about this movie initially was because I did cry at the end as I realized what was coming. The movie makes the 2001 setting clear in the beginning, but only once you see the date written on a blackboard towards the end does the audience begin to anticipate what might happen. Tyler’s death becomes clear as the camera moves to his profile in his father’s office to a wider shot of the World Trade Center.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Predictably, there was much controversy about this movie’s ending. As summed up in a post by Bryan Reesman, “many critics and some audience members have found the use of the World Trade Center attacks to be offensive and exploitative, while many people … found the ending moving as the central themes of the films are coping with grief, making amends with those close to you, moving forward with life and learning to embrace the simple joys and to live in the moment.” Even other responses were possible: my ten year old sister was unaffected by the ending that I found so moving. I actually was in more shock that she could be so blithe, and found it hard to explain my reaction to her. The best I could come up with was a situational context: while I experienced 9/11 as a girl attending college in Virginia two hours south of DC, she was only two years old when it happened.

Newsweek’s coverage of the controversy explains why this disjointed reaction might be the movie’s intent: “Now we have the biggest star in the tween world building a memorial dedicated to September 11. When it's taught in classrooms, September 11 is presented as a historical atrocity. The key word: historical. … Remember Me exposes a new generation to what happened in American nearly—can you believe it?—a decade ago. The title isn't a request. It's a command.” In other words, Remember Me attempts to make that tragedy a part of a shared American past for the growing generations who did not powerfully experience it.

It also carefully does so to avoid exploiting the events: note the picture that opens this post. The skyline behind the words “Remember Me” is clearly New York; an aware audience can be aware that the words cover the place where the Twin Towers once stood. The image thus suggests without explicitly making clear its content. Similarly, the movie avoids actually showing the attacks beyond a shot of Tyler’s dad, played by Pierce Brosnan, coming out of his car and seeing ash falling around him. As someone interested in visual rhetoric, it’s a careful choice not to show this event onscreen.

Jonathan Klein points out in his video why this might be: “Some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them.” Clearly, the producers and writer of Remember Me seem to agree with this sentiment; my friend Shelley Manis in her dissertation, "More than Memory": Haunted Performance in Post-9/11 Popular American Culture, discusses how popular media works like Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, the musical Wicked, and the television show Lost deal with representing the tragedy and the mourning and melancholia that followed in its wake. For example, Wicked begins with a song declaring that “No One Mourns the Wicked,” who in this case is the Wicked Witch Elphaba, treated unjustly as a terrorist by the Ozians and not by the audience. Listening to her defend her dissertation yesterday helped me understand how to think about Remember Me. This movie serves to help its audience reevaluate the event outside of heated political debate and teaches them to learn to mourn those events over again. While the viewing experience was painful, my tears provided some measure of catharsis unavailable to me at another point. I wonder now whether my first reaction that the movie was inappropriate relates to a restricting political debate about what kinds of reactions to 9/11 are “appropriate,” and that we should encourage artists to take up the question of 9/11 in popular media more than ever today.

Truck Farm! From King Corn to CSA

fc — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:20:15 +0000

Image Credit: Josh Viertel for the Atlantic

Last week, I came across an article on Civil Eats by Curt Ellis (on the left in the photo above) about the mobile farm he and Ian Cheney (on the right) spent last summer cultivating in the back of Cheney's 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck. All three of these characters (Ellis, Cheney and the old gray Dodge) will be familiar to anyone who saw their 2007 documentary feature King Corn. In that film, the men grew a single acre of corn in a small Iowa town that had coincidentally been home to former generations of Cheneys and Ellises. This time around, they are operating what is probably the world's smallest CSA on the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn. More on trucks, farms and films after the jump.

While this little farm may not be able to grow much food (though you'd be surprised how much produce can come out of a small plot of dirt), it has garned lots of attention. Besides the attention it draws while driving through traffic, the Truck Farm has been covered by Josh Viertel at the Atlantic, Jessica Ilyse Smith from Living on Earth, Barbara Fenig at Huffington Post and (as I mentioned above) by Ellis himself at Civil Eats and Culinate, and that attention may be the Truck Farm's most important crop. Cheney puts it this way in their interview with Jessica Ilyse Smith: "not that Truck Farm is going to feed the world, but it sure is an example of how we need to start thinking outside of the box about how we can feed the world in a different way." At the end of his own article, Ellis says that "the patchwork farms and gardens sprouting up like weeds in the sidewalk cracks around New York these days may be a ways off from feeding us all, but I think they’re bringing our food system something it sorely needs: a dose of fun."

The Truck Farm documentary is nothing if not a bit of fun. Ellis and Cheney are currently working on the documentary project through their Wicked Delicate production company. As of February 2010, they have one trailer and two teaser episodes posted online. Here is the second episode:

While episode one splits its time between well-worn shots of urban decay and a tongue-in-cheek montage of the Truck Farm's construction featuring songs about a "sci-fi something" (soil) to "fill the void" (of the truck bed), this episode focuses on the rationale behind the Truck Farm: America's need to devise inventive ways to grow food and overcome the current failings of our AgriBusiness food system. Ellis tells Living on Earth that such ingenuity can play an important role in eliminating food deserts and make fresh, healthy food available to everyone, "I think that's where urban agriculture comes in. We've got all these rooftops around New York City and we've got all these empty parking spaces in New York City. We should be growing food there however we can."

This sentiment is shared by Annie Novak, one of the organizers of Rooftop Farms, a 6000-square-foot roof garden (also in Brooklyn). Novak plants one-square-foot demonstration beds at Rooftop Farms to encourage anyone and everyone to get in on growing. Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats reports, "Novak wants even beginners, or New Yorkers without much growing room to get in on the act. One row on her farm even showcases what can be done in a small plot. 'The square foot bed is an example of the amount of space a renter might have,' she said. 'We’re using that space to show that you don’t have to be confined to one tomato plant.'" Below is a picture of Rooftop Farms.

Image Credit: CivilEats.com

Cheney and Ellis (and the Old Gray Dodge) succeed in making the point that we can find new and creative ways to build a food system aimed at nourishing people. Their film King Corn, while noticeably less austere than Food Inc., follows the rather depressing circulaiton of corn and money through our current "food" system and ends on a note of disgust. The type of corn they grow is not suitable for human consumption and is only used in ethanol, artificial sweeteners, cow-killing livestock feed and other industrial corn-based products. After growing their one acre of corn, the pair of part-time farmers wonder whether they should even harvest the grain. They do eventually run the combine through their field and drive the corn-- in the back of the 1986 Dodge Ram--to the grain elevator. Cheney looks like he's going to be sick as they move the inedible corn from the bed of his grandfather's truck into the mountain of surplus grain stacked beside the already-full silo.

Image Credit: screen capture from King Corn

I get the distinct impression that Cheney's Truck Farm idea was at least partly an attempt to earn some creative redemption for all three of them. King Corn (like Food Inc. and a growing number of projects with and without Michael Pollan) makes a compelling argument that government-subsidized corn is the root cause of several systemic problems in our nation's unsustainable food industry (as well as a major contributor to chronic health problems). The Dodge's reincarnation as a mobile vegetable garden provides an additional, productive argument and a glimmer of hope. The truck's new life implies that the tools and resources currently used by our broken agriculture industry could be repurposed to really feed Americans (instead of feeding the subsidized industry of chemically manipulating and repurposing corn sugars). Call it "beating plowshares into plowshares." On a strictly personal note, I think the truck looks happier in its new life.

Image Credit: KCRW.com

An American Tale

EmilyBloom — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:41:13 +0000

Image Credit: Empire Movies

There has been some controversy—though less than might be expected—about the racial politics of the new Twilight movie, New Moon. I went to see the film the other night and while I was prepared for smoldering gazes, repressed embraces, and some retrograde gender relations, I was not prepared for its representations of race. While several critics have protested the casting of predominately non-Native American actors in Native American roles, far less comment has been made about the portrayal of Native American characters as bare-chested pack animals that morph into wolves when they become angry. The main character in this storyline is Jacob Black who falls in love with Bella Swan and then comes down with puberty-induced werewolfism. He and the other wolves are all members of the Quileute tribe, which long ago signed a territorial treaty with the vampires. Sound familiar?

Image Credit: www.newmoonmovie.org

The storyline reminds me of a 19^th century Irish genre called the “national tale” in which national identity is allegorized as the choice between an English and an Irish mate. The heroine or hero’s choice becomes an allegory for national identity: should the nation embrace its indigenous roots or reach outwards towards Englishness? In New Moon, Bella is seemingly rejected by her urbane vampire beau Edward Cullen and becomes increasingly attracted to Jacob. While the story is simple, or simply formulaic, enough, I wondered how allegorically we are meant to read Bella’s choice between the vampiric cosmopolitans and the animalized locals? To further complicate and more firmly allegorize this love plot, the final scenes of the novel take Bella to Europe, which appears to be the origin point of vampire culture and home to the Volturi vampires. Compared to the blood-sucking European monsters, the American Cullen vampires seem models of restraint and compassion. Wedged between the Volturi and the Quileute, Edward and Bella seem to articulate a particularly American version of the national tale.

Image Credit: Screen Shot IMDB

In Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s blog post, “The Politics of Wizards and Vampires,” she argues that Stephanie Myers’ Twilight books represent a particularly right-wing fantasy world. While Valdes-Rodriguez clearly articulates the religious components of conservativism in the novel, I would add that the story also demonstrates conservative values in its representation of national identity. As an American national tale that rejects both European and Native-American identities, the Edward-Bella romance is also a romance of American exceptionalism.

'Sita Sings the Blues' released on web with CC license

John Jones — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:28:35 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

Killer of Sheep

dsmith — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:24:55 +0000

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

An opening scene shows a young girl in the mask of a dog. Such expressive sadness in the features of the animal hides the perceptive eyes and facial gestures of the child. Her father, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders), exhausted from working shifts at a Los Angeles slaughterhouse, lays linoleum on the kitchen floor. A sensitive man, burdened with domestic duty and physical labor, Stan’s story offers occasion for audiences to reflect on the dislocation of his desire from the circumstances of his life.

Other images show children at play in an urban debris field; a young man casually walks away with a television set; children act out and are disciplined; petty gangsters arrive to tempt Stan to join them in a robbery. But the central narrative focuses on Stan and his relationship to his family and community.

This emotionally complex film, however, argues for the ambiguity of Stan’s relation to others—particularly his wife, with whom sexual intimacy is a problem. Attempts to help friends, too, often result in mishap, such as when Stan helps purchase a new engine block, only to have it fall out of the back of his pick-up as he puts it in gear. Stan’s main joy in life seems, in fact, to come through his work at the slaughterhouse, ushering sheep along to their final moments before the processing of their flesh.

Made on a budget of only $10,000 while he was a student at UCLA, Burnett’s film doesn’t try to ameliorate Stan’s situation. Instead, he argues for a vision of reality that refuses to perform to the social and racial expectations of others. He shows us, instead, a strange beauty that, perhaps against the viewer’s will, refuses to correspond to an appropriate system of values. Such tension brings viewers into a film that also denies the urgency of a crafted message, documenting instead the motives of communal actors. The final scene—a baby shower for a young pregnant woman—could have pushed the narrative into sentimentality (Spike Lee, for instance, can’t seem to live without it). Instead, viewers witness an exchange of human forces. Although we are not in the realm of Longinus’ sublime, the neo-realistic narrative nonetheless argues for a human vision that transcends social and economic behavior.

Listed in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and rated by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the top films of all time, Killer of Sheep is an American treasure, despite only recently acquiring the attention it deserves.

Inherit the Wind

Sarah Wagner — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:25:09 +0000

Made in 1960, Inherit the Wind is a closely rendered version of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925, with most of the courtroom arguments being taken straight from the trial transcripts.

(I’ve been surprised by how many people have never seen this movie, and that some don’t know the trial very well. For a summary, check out this entry in wikipedia.) The rhetoric text I’m using this semester, The Elements of Persuasion, has a whole chapter devoted to the actual trial, so showing the movie fit in especially nicely this semeter.

The movie works very well in a 306 class as a way to discuss arguments on several levels. First, there's the basic argument of the trial, which was not just about the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution, but about the reconciliation of scientific and religious views of the world. At the same time, there is the subject of admissible information: the court rules that scientists who would argue the validity of the theory of evolution are not allowed to testify, based on the judge’s ruling that its validity has no bearing on whether or not Scopes (“Cates” in the movie) violated the law.

And then, of course, there is the argument being made by Stanley Kramer, the director of the movie. While many of us might see the legal case alone, the defense and the prosecution arguing the Truth of the Bible versus the Truth of Intelligence (which are indeed major arguments), and while many of us might feel justified in seeing creationism and its proponents as ridiculous, the director is after something else. In this movie there are five central characters: the Teacher, his Fiancée, a Baptist Minister (the Fiancée’s father), and the Defense and Prosecuting attorneys. The Teacher and the Minister stand for intellectualism and religion, or maybe “thinking” and “faith”. The attorneys are those who would defend each. The Fiancée, caught between her father and her husband-to-be, loves Thinking and wants to love and be loved by Faith. Herein lies the real struggle. She loves both, but is told that she can’t love Thinking and be loved by Faith, nor can she stay connected to her Faith and love Thinking.

With the movie’s tight camera work during the trial scenes, the tension between these two all-or-nothing perspectives on the world builds dramatically to two points in particular: one in which Brady, the Fundamentalist Prosecutor, reduces the Fiancée to sobs when he shouts at her to condemn her lover; the other in which the Defense brings Brady to his own demise, left stammering on the stand as his disappointed supporters leave the courtroom. At first glance, it’s a victory of Thinking over Faith. And yet, the sight of the Prosecutor, a good man and a gifted and beloved orator, trying to find his footing by nonsensically reciting the books of the Bible, is heartbreaking.

What has surprised me most about showing this black-and-white movie in class is the students’ engagement with it. The first thing I notice is that they laugh—at the melodramatic scenes as well as at the parts meant to be funny to the 1960 audience. And in a scene near the end, they react with intense shock (imagine a classroom-sized sharp in-breath) to a slap in the face. They seem to connect, unsurprisingly, to the cynical reporter (based on H.L Mencken). I see no nodding heads, I don’t have to wake anyone up. Why? In one class discussion a couple semesters ago, one student couldn’t believe the trial happened nearly 100 years ago because at her Christian high school, this debate was still very much alive. Another student remarked that the movie was especially interesting to him as a biology major.

The movie, especially this semester, is not old. As all of us watch the current political news, we hear discussions about small-town conservative America versus progressive urban America, about intellect versus common sense, and about faith versus logic. People bemoan the divisions in our country, and yet hold fast to the idea that they are right to value their perspective over another. The other side is so ridiculous as to be angering, and their views do not deserve to be reconciled with ours. Still we say, you can’t love faith and logic, small-town America and progressive policies, book learning and common sense.

(I expect many of you know the website American Rhetoric. If not, you should check it out. This site gave me the idea to show Inherit the Wind in my 306 class in the first place. Click this link and you can watch one of the crucial scenes of the trial, and/or read the transcript from the movie.)
americanrhetoric.com

I'm Jack Nicholson and I approve this message

Jillian Sayre — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:27:50 +0000

Today I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's video endorsement of Clinton. It is currently making the rounds on YouTube:

Here's the problem I see with his montage-style endorsement: Nicholson lets his fictional characters do the talking and the most obvious problem here is that Nicholson rarely plays sympathetic characters. When the Joker asks me "Who do you trust?" and Col. Jessop from A Few Good Men tells me how military leadership should work, I don't feel benevolent towards their recommendation. Then there's the appalling moment when we return to Jessop to hear him talk about the sexiness of a woman in power. Is speaking through the mouths of liars, murderers, and psychopaths the best strategy to forward an endorsement?

Are these the cultural icons one wants associated with one's campaign?

At least, to follow up on Tim's post about the Devil and Hillary Clinton, we have no Witches of Eastwick

Images of the Statue of Liberty in science fiction

John Jones — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:07:51 +0000

Gerry Canavan has posted a collection of images of the Statue of Liberty taken from science fiction stories and films.
Fantastic Universe, August-September 1953 from Thundarr the Barbarian This list should be a great conversation starter for any classes discussing the rhetoric of science fiction or Americana. via Boing Boing

Women in Film

Justin Tremel — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:52:52 +0000

I recently read a New Yorker article that mentioned the spell-binding youtube video "Women in Film" seen below. It's quite mesmerizing, have a look.

In the article, author David Denby points out certain common visual elements that the diverse group of female stars all share:

The video "Women in Film," on YouTube, morphs the faces of female stars, from the silent period to the present, in a continuous progression, making it clear that eyes may be freakishly pinned open (Crawford) or flirtatiously half closed (Marilyn Monroe), but they must be liquid and voluminous. And lips must be full, the lower gently crescented and the upper a perfect bow. The women were often filmed with chin raised, looking up at men, so the neck had to be a clean line, the shoulders pliant and yielding. Women's hair in the glamour period was curtain and foliage, the luxurious motif of sexual abandon.

The video seems to me a good compliment to the Dove campaign discussed previously on Viz. In a rhetorical avenue of inquiry that places so much emphasis on images of the female body, it is compelling to see how much significant visual study can be done, even when concentrating on simply the face in monochrome. Our students may not recognize any of the earlier Hollywood stars, but I think they'll find the last thirty seconds of the video quite compelling when the morphs take on the faces that they are very familiar with.

The full text of Denby's article isn't currently available online from the New Yorker, though you can find an abstract. You can, however, access his article in html via Academic Search premier:

FALLEN IDOLS. By: Denby, David. New Yorker, 10/22/2007, Vol. 83 Issue 32, p104-114, 7p; (AN 27150834)

1 film=6 Bob Dylans

Justin Tremel — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:02:55 +0000

Director Tod Haynes has a new movie opening that has been described as a biopic on Bob Dylan. Unlike traditional biopics, however, Dylan is played by six, yes that's right six different actors. This film is intriguing in a number of ways, as explored in a lengthy New York Time Magazine Artilce, but it is especially interesting considering its unique visual aspects:

"Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand....And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan."

This film which construes Dylan as a six-actor-composite and shifts through a coterie of directorial modes and homages from Fellini to Pennebaker will surely be rich ground for studying the visual rhetoric of public persona, celebrity, popular artistry, etc...