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.)
I am pleased to announce that this year’s Campus-Cultur Prize has been awarded to the Film & TV Reading Group and the student members of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research!
The award recognizes students’ active participation, initiative, and creativity in curricular and extracurricular contexts. The prize is awarded annually by CampusCultur, an association dedicated to promoting the cultural life of the humanities and social sciences at the Leibniz University of Hannover.
The Film & TV Reading Group offers interested students from all disciplines the opportunity to engage with key texts on film, television, and media theory. In conjunction with the film series, lectures, and other activities of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research, it offers students and instructors a space in which to discuss relevant media phenomena and media-theoretical issues.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who helped make this possible, particularly to the student members of the reading group and media initiative!
As announced recently, our screening of Fritz Lang’s M will take place this Thursday, Dec. 13, at 6 pm in room 615 of the Conti-Hochhaus. There will be Glühwein and, following the screening, a presentation and discussion with Urs Büttner. See here for more info.
On December 13, we will be screening Fritz Lang’s M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931), the third film in our series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity.” (See here for a flyer with more details about our film series, and here for a short video introduction that frames it conceptually.)
Following the screening, Urs Büttner (co-editor, with Christoph Bareither, of Fritz Lang: “M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder”. Texte und Kontexte) will discuss the film with us and help us to understand it in its historical context and in the context of the cinema’s negotiations of modernity. (Vortrag — wie auch die Filmvorführung — in deutscher Sprache.)
And because it’s getting to be that time of year again, we will have Glühwein for all!
As always, the screening (6:00pm on Thursday, Dec. 13, in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) is free and open to all, so spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us. More info here and here.
On November 29, 2012, we will be screening Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the second film in our series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity.” (See here for a flyer with more details about our film series, and here for a short video introduction that frames it conceptually.)
In his discussion of Man with a Movie Camera, Roger Ebert begins with the following observation:
In 1929, the year it was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2 seconds. “Man With a Movie Camera” had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of Michael Bay‘s “Armageddon” was — also 2.3 seconds.
If, as I have argued, Michael Bay’s post-cinematic filmmaking captures something of the nonhuman processing of contemporary life by algorithmic means, then Dziga Vertov’s captured something of the machinic materiality of the modern age — a similarly nonhuman view emphasized in the Kinoks movement (from “kino-oki” or kino-eyes) to which Vertov belonged. From the Wikipedia article on “Kinoks”:
The Kinoks rejected “staged” cinema with its stars, plots, props and studio shooting. They insisted that the cinema of the future be the cinema of fact: newsreels recording the real world, “life caught unawares.” Vertov proclaimed the primacy of camera (“Kino-Eye”) over the human eye. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected infinitely to grasp the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective picture.
But perhaps coherence is in the eye (or kino-eye) of the beholder. As Ebert remarks,
There is a temptation to review the film simply by listing what you will see in it. Machinery, crowds, boats, buildings, production line workers, streets, beaches, crowds, hundreds of individual faces, planes, trains, automobiles, and so on.
In many ways, the film resembles what the object-oriented ontologists, following Ian Bogost, call the “Latour litany“: a rhetorical device, consisting in a list of apparently unrelated things, which peppers the writings of Bruno Latour and is employed extensively in OOO to emphasize the plurality of things or objects populating the world and to encourage a break with our normal tendencies to view them anthropocentrically. Bogost recommends the device in his Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, and perhaps it’s fair to see Vertov’s general project of the Kino-Eye, and its specific expression in Man with a Movie Camera, as precisely an alien-phenomenological undertaking, designed to help us feel “what it’s like to be a thing” in the modern age.
As for the connection with Michael Bay-style “chaos cinema” and the post-cinematic discorrelation of digital images from the human subject, a recent project, the “Global Participatory Remake” of Man with a Movie Camera, brings the two types of alien phenomenologies — the contemporary algorithmic/database-driven and Vertov’s filmic kino-eye — together in an exciting way. At the same time, this project might be seen to raise some rather unsettling questions. What is the relation of contemporary “participatory culture” to the ideals of socialism, when the empowerment experienced by the participants is grounded in the same informatic infrastructure that turns our own entertainment into “immaterial labor” exploitable by corporations wielding algorithms incommensurable with our human concerns, values, perspectives? While the “Global Remake” is hardly guilty, I think, of such exploitation, it enjoins us materially to attend to media-historical and political changes, and to recall that while Vertov’s project was undertaken in the cause of the Revolution, we still have to assess what the revolutionary potential might be — if any, either historical or contemporary — of an alien phenomenology…
As always, the screening (6:00pm on Thursday, Nov. 29, in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) 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. More info here and here.
Tomorrow (November 14, 2012), there are two events at the University of Hannover that might be of interest to readers of the blog.
First up, there’s the first meeting this semester of the Film & TV Reading Group (see the flyer here), where we’ll be discussing Walter Benjamin’s famous Artwork essay. We’ll meet from 4 to 6 pm in room 613 (Conti-Hochhaus). The reading group always welcomes new participants, so please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us!
Second, and immediately following the reading group, Frank Kelleter will be giving a talk entitled “Massenkultur, Serienkultur, Populärkultur am Beispiel des Wonderful Wizard of Oz und seiner Variationen” [roughly: Mass Culture, Serial Culture, Popular Culture, with Reference to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its Variations]. The talk, from 6 to 8 pm in room 103 (Conti-Hochhaus), will take place in the context of the seminar “Massenkultur: Unterhaltung, Konsum, Medialität” [Mass Culture: Entertainment, Consumption, Mediality], which is being jointly taught by Ruth Mayer and Michael Gamper. Frank Kelleter is professor of American studies in Göttingen and the speaker for the DFG Research Group “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice” (in which Ruth Mayer and I are collaborating on the project “Serial Figures and Media Change”). He has recently published a chapter entitled “‘Toto, I Think We’re in Oz Again’ (and Again and Again): Remakes and Popular Seriality” in Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake / Remodel, edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSExdX0tds4]
Our film series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” kicks off tomorrow night (November 8, 2012, at 6:00 pm in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. 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.
(Click on the image for a larger view)
As indicated on the flyer above, the Film & TV Reading Group will have its first meeting of the semester on Wednesday, November 14 (4:00 pm in room 613, Conti-Hochaus), where we will discuss Walter Benjamin’s famous “Artwork” essay. The topics for the following meetings have not been determined yet, so if there is anything you would like to discuss, please let me know. Tentatively, the following dates have also been reserved: December 5 and January 16 (also 4:00 – 6:00 pm in room 613). New participants are always welcome!
This semester the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research at the Leibniz Universität Hannover will again be organizing a series of film screenings. We have decided to show public domain versions of the films so that we can make the screenings free and open to all. (Feel free also to bring along snacks and refreshments.)
The topic this semester is “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity”:
From the beginning, movies have presented themselves as the preeminent machines of modernity. On the one hand, they have served as a medium for imagining and envisioning modern landscapes and machinic cities. On the other hand, the movies were involved directly in the making of said modernity. The image of a machine is often a movie’s reflexive image of itself, or of that which it imagines itself to be…
Screenings will take place in the rooms of the English Department / American Studies (room 615, Conti-Hochhaus — all screenings begin at 6:00 pm). The schedule, put together this time by Felix Brinker, Ilka Brasch, and Shane Denson, includes the following four films:
November 8, 2012: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
November 29, 2012: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
December 13, 2012: M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (Fritz Lang, 1931)
January 17, 2013: Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
[UPDATE: See here for a brief video introduction to the topic of our series.]
Tonight was the last night of our film series, “Chaos Cinema?” Here are the notes for my presentation on WALL-E:
WALL-E vs. Chaos (Cinema)
Shane Denson, 19 July 2012
Not long ago, I argued for a reconceptualization of recent cinema in terms of the rise of what I called “discorrelated images”—images that announce a certain amount of autonomy from human perceptual consciousness and that therefore resist being yoked or, to speak in the terms of the speculative realists, “correlated” completely to the subject of classical phenomenology.
My argument, which took Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) as its central case study, was directed against Matthias Stork’s intriguing but ultimately limited conception of “chaos cinema,” which tends to see the frenetic filmmaking of the type that Bay is known for as basically sloppy in its disregard for the rules of classical continuity editing. Following the lead of Steven Shaviro, with his conception of “post-continuity” as an aspect of a broader regime of “post-cinematic affect,” I argued that the breaks with continuity singled out by Stork as the hallmark of chaos cinema are in fact merely symptomatic of a much larger shift in our media culture—signs, in fact, of an uncertain transition that we are still undergoing and that concerns a major overhaul of the place of the human in the cosmos, of our affective interface with material reality, or of our sensorium as a historically conditioned aspect of our embodied contact with the environment.
Concretely, I argued that the “operational aesthetic” expressed or elicited in scenes of Transformers’ transformations demonstrate that there’s more at stake than a simple break with continuity; for these images need not involve any violation of the 180° rule, the 30° rule, or any other convention regulating the editing practices of classical Hollywood film. Clearly, the chase scenes highlighted by Stork do involve such violations, but it seems somewhat arbitrary to single out such phenomena as definitive of a style or even an entire era of cinema, while the transformation scenes are clearly the centerpiece visual spectacles of the Transformers films and must therefore be accorded a central position in the aesthetic appeal of these particular films (if not in the aesthetic appeal of post-millennial popular cinema as a whole).
Taken together, a very different image emerges: we find then not just continuity violations but a more general discorrelation of images from the spatial and temporal parameters of “normal” human subjectivity. The transformation scenes, with their incredibly detailed displays of minutely articulated and perfectly synchronized processes, embody a sort of information overload: they are too much for us to take in at once, too fast for our eyes or even our perceptual imaginations. This fact is of course related to the digital technologies that are responsible for their production; computational processing divorces images in their materiality from the hitherto reigning analogies between eye and camera. More centrally still, these images are severed from the historical correlation between the perceptual subject of vision and the medial apparatuses that cater to (and condition) that subjectivity. The result of discorrelation must indeed seem like “chaos,” because it signals a certain superfluousness of consciousness, a displacement of the constituted subject and of the properly human—a displacement that we feel today in the face of semi-autonomous finance markets and, crucially, the chaos of environmental change and catastrophe as well.
WALL-E, I want to suggest, displays an acute awareness of these displacements. Its very medium, digital animation, is implicated materially in the discorrelation of human perception, as it is in this medium that, following arguments made by Mark Hansen, the image ceases to be an object (of either a perceiving subject or of an apparatic analog medium) and instead becomes fully processual (both with respect to the microtemporal processes of its technical, i.e. computational, generation, and with respect to its microtemporal neural processing, which in bypassing conscious awareness must be regarded as a completely affective form of sensory reception). Digital animation is therefore the pinnacle of what, in an effort to further specify the conditions of contemporary cinema and to move beyond the simplifying label of “chaos” cinema, I would like to call “hyper-informatic cinema.”
This label is meant to highlight two related aspects of contemporary cinema, or of an important tendency in recent film: 1) Hyper-informatic cinema is based on a profusion of informatic (i.e. digital) technologies, both diegetic and non-diegetic—an overabundance of computers in the production of contemporary films (which rely heavily on CGI and digital compositing techniques), and of computational agencies in the films so produced (which feature robots, transformers, and cybernetically enhanced aliens, but also humans seeking to master or simply navigate the computational environments in which we already live today). 2) Such films are hyper-informatic in the sense I referenced above: they exploit scenarios of information overload, either as spectacle or as (at once narrative and affective) dilemma. In these scenarios, there is simply too much information, thrown at us far too fast for us to process it in full. The “intensification” of continuity that Bordwell speaks of can in large measure be traced back to this aspect of hyper-informatic speed, and the breakdowns that Stork labels “chaos” result from the mismatch between computational microtemporalities and the macrotemporality of the consciousnesses they challenge.
But rather than exacerbating the perceptual mismatch of digital discorrelation, WALL-E instead effects a reduction of informational content, without thereby denying its self-awareness of the fascinations of its informatic medium. There is a lack of talk, and a lack of speed, but there is no lack of visual spectacle and of inter-medial comparisons that highlight (and historicize) the film’s own digital substrate: thus, WALL-E is a fan of the film Hello, Dolly!, a relic of a bygone (human) era which he consumes through an assemblage of antiquated technologies, including cassette recorders, iPods, and magnifying glasses. WALL-E marks, indeed embodies, a discorrelation of the image from human perception, but the film need not flaunt it in the style of Michael Bay. Instead, WALL-E would seem to offer a measured response to it, one that places it in close connection to the “chaos” that characterizes not only our cinema at present but our estrangement from an environment marked by post-industrial carelessness, pollution, and e-waste. Reading the hopeful story of ecological recovery in medially self-reflexive terms, perhaps we could say that WALL-E’s quest to clean up the earth is less a battle to restore the human to a position of centrality, autonomy, and mastery over nature, as instead a far more limited, but also far less utopian, struggle to accept discorrelation and to effect a cinematic recalibration: an attunement of sensory capacities and images qua informatic processes.
