January 2013 – Page 2 – medieninitiative

Steven Shaviro, “Angel of Fire: Post-Continuity in Tony Scott’s Domino (2005)” — #SCMS13

Here is the abstract for Steven Shaviro’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinematic Affect: Theorizing Digital Movies Now” at the 2013 SCMS conference (Session H — Thursday, March 7, 2013, 3:00 – 4:45 pm):

Angel of Fire: Post-Continuity in Tony Scott’s Domino (2005)

Steven Shaviro

The late Tony Scott was a mainstream Hollywood director: a maker of big-budget, crowd-pleasing action films featuring major stars. But he was also one of the filmmakers who most thoroughly explored the new formal and expressive possibilities offered by recent digital technologies. His movies are filled with dazzling displays of virtuosity in cinematography and editing, even as they tell stories that largely follow well-established genre norms. Scott’s films utilize all the traditional mechanisms of narrative organization and audience identification with characters, but they also engage in an aggressively digressive “cinema of attractions.” This odd combination of effects and affects has caused Tony Scott to be celebrated and cherished by some cineastes, and reviled by many more. In my talk, I will explore Tony Scott’s “disjunctive synthesis” of old and new — a synthesis that is not only seen on the level of diegetic form (narrative structure vs. attractions), but also on that of the technological means of cinematic production (century-old hand-cranked cameras vs. heavy digital processing) and on that of the ways that technology is represented within the films (a love for older technologies such as trains vs. a radical immersion in video and Internet-based technologies). I will argue that Scott’s adoption of a “post-continuity” style (going beyond the limits of what David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity”) works to embody and express the explosive tensions of what I have elsewhere called “post-cinematic affect.” This style does two things. On one hand, it expresses the only possible form of subjectivity in a world in which, as Deleuze puts it, “the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché.” On the other, it renders, in audiovisual forms, the impalpable circulation of money, affects, and other forms of value in the post-spectacular society of 21st-century America. My talk will center on Domino (2005), Scott’s most audiovisually extravagant and audacious (and commercially least successful) film.

Bibliography:

Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3. (Spring, 2002), pp. 16–28.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2 (1989). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. University of Minnesota Press.

Knapp, Larry. “Tony Scott and ‘Domino’: Say Hello (and Goodbye) to the Post-classical”. Jump Cut 50, 2008. Available online at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/DominoKnapp/index.html

Stork, Matthias. “Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott’s Cinema of Chaos”, SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012.

Vishnevetsky, Ignatiy. “Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter”. August 22, 2012, http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/smearing-the-senses-tony-scott-action-painter

Shane Denson, “Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect” — #SCMS13

[UPDATE March 7, 2013: Full text of the talk now posted here.]

Here is the abstract for Shane Denson’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinematic Affect: Theorizing Digital Movies Now” at the 2013 SCMS conference (Session H — Thursday, March 7, 2013, 3:00 – 4:45 pm):

Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect

Shane Denson

Post-millennial films are full of strangely irrational cameras – physical and virtual imaging apparatuses that seem not to know their place with respect to diegetic and nondiegetic realities, and that therefore fail to situate viewers in a coherently designated spectating-position. While analyses ranging from David Bordwell’s diagnosis of “intensified continuity” to Matthias Stork’s recent condemnation of “chaos cinema” have tended to emphasize matters of editing and formal construction as the site of a break with classical film style, it is equally important to focus on the camera as a site of material, phenomenological relation between viewers and contemporary images. Thus, I aim to update Vivian Sobchack’s film-theoretical application of Don Ihde’s groundbreaking phenomenology of mediating apparatuses to reflect the recent shift to what Steven Shaviro has identified as a regime of “post-cinematic affect.” By setting a phenomenological focus on contemporary cameras in relation both to Shaviro’s work and to Mark B. N. Hansen’s recent work on “21^st century media,” I will show that many of the images in today’s films are effectively “discorrelated” from the embodied interests, perspectives, and phenomenological capacities of human agents – pointing to the rise of a fundamentally post-perceptual media regime, in which “contents” serve algorithmic functions in a broader financialization of human activities and relations.

Drawing on films such as District 9, Melancholia, WALL-E, or Transformers, the presentation sets out from a phenomenological analysis of contemporary cameras’ “irrationality.” For example, virtual cameras paradoxically conjure “realism” effects not by disappearing to produce the illusion of perceptual immediacy, but by emulating the physical presence of nondiegetic cameras in the scenes of their simulated “filming.” At the same time, real (non-virtual) cameras are today inspired by ubiquitous, aesthetically disinterested cameras that – in smartphones, surveillance cams, satellite imagery, automated vision systems, etc. – increasingly populate and transform our lifeworlds; accordingly, they fail to stand apart from their objects and to distinguish clearly between diegetic/nondiegetic, fictional/factual, or real/virtual realms. Contemporary cameras, in short, are deeply enmeshed in an expanded, indiscriminately articulated plenum of images that exceed capture in the form of photographic or perceptual “objects.” These cameras, and the films that utilize them, as I shall argue in a second step, mediate a nonhuman ontology of computational image production, processing, and circulation – leading to a thoroughgoing discorrelation of contemporary images from human perceptibility. In conclusion, I will relate my findings to recent theorizations of media’s broader shift toward an expanded (no longer visual or even perceptual) field of material affect.

Bibliography:

Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16-28.

Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: The “Future” of 21^st Century Media. Unpublished manuscript, forthcoming 2013/2014.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990.

Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2010.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

English Theatre Group: Our Country’s Good

In the last teaching week of this semester the English Theatre Group will present Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Based on historical events, the play concerns the arrival in 1788 of the first British convict ships in Botany Bay, South Australia. The treatment of the prisoners at the hands of military officers is brutal. However, the Governor of the colony has high ideals about creating a civilized society and about how the convicts should be treated. Believing that “the theatre is an expression of civilization”, he encourages a certain officer to produce a play with the convicts as actors. Our Country’s Good dramatizes the challenges of rehearsing George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in the face of contempt of most of the officers and a lack of unity amongst the convicts.

The play was written in 1988 and first presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

Performances will take place at 7.30pm each evening on

Monday 28 January
Tuesday 29 January
Wednesday 30 January
(no Thursday performance)
Friday 1 February, and
Saturday 2 February

Hildesheimer Straße 39A
30169 Hannover

(U-Bahn Schlägerstraße)

Tickets can be purchased in advance from the sales point in the foyer of the Conti-Hochaus at Königsworther Platz 1 during the advance ticket-selling hours:

weekdays from 10am until 4pm, Monday 14 January through to Friday 25 January.

Christina Meyer on Mass Culture, Yellow Press, and Color Comic Strips

On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 (6-8 pm in room 103, Conti-Hochhaus), my colleague (and co-editor) Christina Meyer will hold a talk on mass culture, the emergence of the yellow press in America, and the role of color comic strips; the presentation will take place in the context of the seminar “Massenkultur: Unterhaltung, Konsum, Medialität” [Mass Culture: Entertainment, Consumption, Mediality], which is being taught jointly by Ruth Mayer and Michael Gamper. Here is a short abstract for the talk:

“Massenkultur und Sensationsjournalismus: Die amerikanische ‘Yellow Press’ im späten 19. Jahrhundert”

Christina Meyer

Im Zentrum des Vortrags steht die amerikanische yellow press des späten 19. Jahrhunderts. Ziel ist es, zum einen, das Aufkommen der Massenpresse seit den 1830er Jahren (penny press) und die Entwicklungen des Zeitungsmarktes bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts nachzuzeichnen. Zum anderen sollen die populären Sonntagsausgaben der zwei führenden New Yorker Massenblättern der 1890er Jahre (das New York Journal und die New York World) durchleuchtet werden. Besonderer Fokus liegt hierbei auf den Comicbeilagen, die ab 1893 regelmäßig und in Farbe gedruckt wurden.

Modern Times (1936): Movies, Machines, Modernity

Our film series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” winds up on January 17, 2013 (6:00 pm in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) with our final screening for the semester: Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The screening is free and open to all, so spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us. Feel free also to bring along snacks and refreshments. And for more info about the film series, see here: M: Movies, Machines, Modernity.

Adorno on TV

On January 16, 2013, the Film & TV Reading Group will meet (at 4 pm in room 613, Conti-Hochhaus) to discuss “Prolog zum Fernsehen” [Prologue to TV] by Theodor W. Adorno (pp. 507 – 517 in Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.2: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II — Eingriffe, Stichworte, Anhang). Felix Brinker will moderate the discussion. As always, all are welcome to join us! (Feel free to contact me for more info — email address can be found on the “About” page.)