Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

The phenomenological interrogation of light as material weight in the visual perception of architectural space

In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked. This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media platforms such as Tumblr and Wattpad, this collection develops a critical understanding of the integral role collaboration plays in contemporary media and culture. It draws attention to diverse kinds of creative collaboration afforded via the intermediation of digital platforms and networked publics. It considers how these are incorporated into emergent market paradigms and investigates the complicated forms of subjectivity that develop as a consequence. But it also acknowledges historical continuities, not least in terms of the continued exploitation of ‘support personnel’ and of resulting artistic conflicts but also of alternative models that resist the precarious nature of contemporary cultural work. Finally, this volume attempts to situate creative collaboration in broader social and economic contexts, where the experience and outcomes of such work have proved more problematic than the rich potential of their promise would lead us to expect. The Editors: James Graham is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University, London. Alessandro Gandini is Lecturer in Digital Media Management and Innovation in the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College, London.

Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’;
a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and
contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent
literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable
generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and
filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic and televisual genres
and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters
new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a
critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working
definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the
history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the
essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental
nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect,
allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation,
irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s
reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and
perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet
avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and
photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s
historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s
project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on
Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye (1967) to Histoire(s) du cinema
(1988-1998) – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical
discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4
investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun
Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images
and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging
available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary,
cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how (from
Montaigne to Farocki) knowledge and history (whether in the form of text or image) is
archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate
citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their
respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the
capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well
as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical
correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a
consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual
practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism,
the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and
archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts.

Compilation and critique : the essay as a literary, cinematographic and videographic form

In the early years of the twentieth century, the unique new medium of motion pictures was the focus of significant theorization and experimentation at the fringes of the American advertising industry. Alongside the growth of the nickelodeon, and the multiple shifts in the American cinema’s business model in the ‘transitional era,’ various individuals at the margins of the advertising industry attempted, and most often failed, to integrate direct consumer-goods advertising regularly into motion picture theaters. Via techniques as diverse as the glass slide, the commercial trailer, and the advertising wall-clock, cinema patrons of the 1910s witnessed various attempts by merchants and manufacturers to intrude upon their attention in the cinema space. Through research in the trade presses of the cinema, advertising, and various consumer goods industries, along with archival ephemera from the advertising companies themselves, this dissertation explores these various on and off-screen tactics for direct advertising attempted in silent cinemas, and their eventual minimization in the American cinema experience. Despite the appeal of the new, popular visual medium of cinema to advertisers, concerns over ticket-prices, advertising circulation, audience irritation, and the potential for theatrical ‘suicide-byadvertising,’ resulted, over a mere fifteen years, in the near abandonment of the cinema as an advertising medium. As a transitional medium between the 19 th century forms of print and billboarding, and 20 th century broadcasting, the silent cinema was an important element in the development of modern advertising theories. INDEX WORDS: Advertising, Silent cinema, Transitional era, Film exhibition, Film spectatorship, American cinema, Magic lantern, Trailer, Animation

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=communication_diss

Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising

Suggesting both linear progression and configurable modularity, the complex cinematic narratives of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) and Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) produce distinctive articulations of time and space. They also thematize the architectural processes involved in their own narrative construction, by featuring characters who are programmers, designers, and architects, and deploying a range of spatial metaphors (including lines, layers, and circles) via scenography, dialogue, and mise-en-scene. Exploring the spatiotemporality of these films, we investigate the role that graphic metaphors play within them and argue that these metaphors are oriented around two competing logics: speed and memory.

‘Modular Spacetime in the “Intelligent” Blockbuster: Inception and Source Code’

Parallax is the change visible when an object is seen from two different points of view. In The Parallax View (2006), Slavoj Zizek uses parallax as a metaphor for the gap that opens up whenever there co-exist two irreconcilable perspectives. The book looks at examples of parallax in philosophy, science, and politics. Despite the multiplicity of parallaxes on view, there is one object onto which Zizek does not project his metaphor: cinema. This article extends the metaphor of parallax to include Zizek’s favourite extra-curricular obsession. Inspired by Zizek’s prior writings on Psycho, the article juxtaposes Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake, focusing specifically on how the two films play out the cinematographic parallax gap between black-and-white and colour. Onto this stylistic parallax gap, the article superimposes the theoretical parallax gap between Zizek’s psychoanalytic approach to film and the approach of Zizek’s academic antithesis, post-theorist David Bordwell. By exploring one version of Psycho from a Zizekian perspective and the other from a Bordwellian perspective, the artice suggests that Zizek and Bordwell’s seemingly irreconcilable perspectives can productively interact to provide a binocular view of Hitchcock’s film.

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A Parallax View of Psycho

The technique of time-lapse, which has been applied to all manner of subjects from the cellular to the celestial, has an ambiguous relationship with the human body. Whereas slow motion typically accentuates the force and aesthetics of physical movement, time-lapse tends to decorporealize human figures, projecting bodies forward through time while turning them into phantasmal projections in space. This article examines a number of experimental films that explore the body’s precarious state within time-lapse. Here, the body is figured variously as a medium through which environmental forces are made visible, as a liminal figure that leaves traces of its presence in the landscape or as a kind of ghost suspended outside of its native temporality. These works destabilize the body both as the subject and as the object of representation, making ambiguous its place in relation to different temporal scales.

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Time-lapse and the projected body

In interviews and writings throughout his career, Andrei Tarkovsky repeatedly returned to the theme of cinematic colour. He referred to it in order to repudiate it: colour film was ‘monstrous’ and ‘false’, an artistic ‘blind alley’. Despite his objections, Tarkovsky also repeatedly struggled with the Soviet bureaucracy to secure the use of Eastman Kodak colour negatives. Having secured the use of colour, he then minimised its impact in his films through a combination of desaturated production design and laboratory techniques, and counterbalanced its presence with repeated transitions between colour and black-and-white sequences. This essay explores the contradictions in Tarkovsky’s response to colour. It roots his work in the stagnation-era political economy of the Soviet Union, before moving on to an exploration of the ways in which his chromatic ambivalence manifested itself in the aesthetics of his films. The essay concludes by suggesting a final contradiction, namely that Tarkovsky’s chromatic conservatism anticipated the colour aesthetics of digital cinema.

Richard Misek

Papers

‘Modular Spacetime in the “Intelligent” Blockbuster: Inception and Source Code’

A Parallax View of Psycho

Time-lapse and the projected body

Last of the Kodak”: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Struggle With Colour’

European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood by Thomas Elsaesser