The Department is a leading centre for research on all aspects of cinema, from its earliest days to the present, and branching into related screen-based technologies, including television, online media, and artists’ film and video. Join us at one of our research seminars presented by speakers who specialise in film. Please join us at the usual time and place (Wednesdays from 5 – 6.30 pm in S-1.04)
Jan 31: Kirsty Dootson (UCL). Chair: Catherine Wheatley
Cotton, Silver, Gelatine: The Racialised Materialities of Film Stock
This paper considers how three of the crucial raw ingredients for manufacturing film stock—cotton, silver, and gelatine—forged film as a racialised material. Focusing on Anglo-America contexts of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, when US manufacturer Eastman Kodak dominated the global film stock market, I consider how film was not merely an instrument of racial representation, but through its physical components became a racialized material itself. I focus in particular on how the materiality of film was routinely analogised as a kind of skin and ask how this skin was racialised and gendered through the substances that composed its make-up. As I reveal, these materials were not inert or stable, but underwent radical aesthetic and physical transformations in the process of becoming motion picture stock, forging multiple understandings of film’s racialized nature across different stages of its production and consumption, from abattoir and plantation to factory and laboratory.
Feb 28: Joshua Neves (Concordia). Chair: Jeff Scheible
Metabolic Mediations: Documenting the Long Opioid Crisis
We keep the wrong things private and it’s destroying us, says photographer and activist Nan Goldin in the final moments of the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras). Indeed Goldin’s own documentary preoccupations – what she describes as a kind of record keeping that counters the violence of collective memory – ground the film’s ethical and political address. This includes a narrative arc that combines the artist’s personal histories and trauma with the private and public horrors of the opioid epidemic, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic before it, as well as public actions against the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is just the most high-profile example among dozens of documentary and docudramatic mediations of the big pharma-led crisis, including artworks, feature docs, scripted series, and actuality footage streamed and shared across platforms. What these project’s share is an insistence on capturing the unheeded aspects of late industrialism and of fostering a kind of memory care based in personal and popular record-making. Placing these concerns in dialogue with debates about data, evidentiary aesthetics, and the ‘metabolic rift,’ this talk considers the present opioid crisis in the context of a longer history of chemical empire.
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University. He is co-author (with Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) of Technopharmacology (Minnesota University Press / Meson Press, 2022), author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020), and co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017). His work is published in Media Theory, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Discourse, Culture Machine, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Sarai, The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, among others.
Mar 6: Brian Jacobson (Cal Tech). Chair: Elena Gorfinkel
Film Ecologies of Fear and Fuel
During the late 1940s, French filmmakers faced a pressing media ecological problem: what to do about their aging studio infrastructure? For critics such as André Bazin, one might simply look elsewhere. After all, as the Italians had demonstrated, non-studio contingency had real upside. But for those invested in the world-making control of studio infrastructure, the manufactured pro-filmic environment could not be so easily abandoned. Cinema, they insisted, was only as good as the designers whose world-making, reality-defining power rested upon the environmental control system that was the studio. Such arguments have long been overshadowed by both Bazinian realism and the “New Wave,” with its repudiation of 1950s studio “quality” and preference for filming on location. I recover them here to demonstrate the heuristic potential of a mode of reading that connects esoteric film industry concerns about architecture and infrastructure with broader national and colonial prerogatives. This paper pursues that reading by first tracing this media ecology out from France’s midcentury pro-filmic environments to the conditions of post-45 reconstruction and an emerging state energy policy focused on colonial petroleum power. It then tracks back in to French cinema’s capacity to reckon, amidst its own shifting ecological conditions, with its nation’s new world of oil. I read that reckoning through Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur (1953), a film that uniquely united the world-making ambitions of French cinema and the French petroleum industry, a story that necessarily spins back out, finally, to the broader problem of France’s place in the petroleum-powered system of ecologies that Félix Guattari termed “Integrated World Capitalism.”
Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015) and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments(University of California Press, 2020), winner of the SCMS award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Cinema Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited “Media Climates,” the Winter 2022 issue of Representations. His next book, The Cinema of Extractions, is under contract with Columbia University Press. He is also working on The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975.
Mar 20: Panpan Yang (SOAS). Chair: Chris Berry
On the Move: Animation in/as Contemporary Art
This talk proposes a form of trans-spatial thinking to examine contemporary Chinese animation: to trace, document, and explain how the meaning of a work of Chinese animation subtly changes when it moves in and out of the world of the film industry, the sphere of contemporary art, and other spaces. The recognition of animation as contemporary art also raises questions for acquisition, preservation, and exhibition.