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AbstractsInternational Conference of the Junior Fellow Program »Theory and History of Cinematographic Objects« Marcus Becker (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin): Roman Water. On the Cinematography of Aqueducts(Presentation in German)Ancient worlds created by cinematic scenography result from pictorial tradition. Many studies on Antiquity in Cinema use to limit themselves to evaluating the archaeological "correctness" of certain scenographic elements, whereas this contribution – in contrast – aims to track such an historical genesis for the depiction of aqueducts in cinema. The central question is in how far the constitution of roman aqueducts as cinematographic objects within genuinely modern image spaces of the movies corresponds with solutions of visual and spatial argumentations that were developed before the cinema, for example in early modern painting or garden and urban architecture. Already then pictorial conceptions originated from narrative scenarios such as the topoi of decay or restoration of aqueducts. These pictorial traditions safeguarded the way from landscape painting with its picturesquely ruined lines of arches in the Roman Campagna to the aqueducts in the movies. Much more enlightening though are the differences within the visual strategies. Between the 16th and the 18th century the so-called mostra effectively celebrated the restoration of an aqueduct by the Roman Popes creating a magnificent facade at its end. The argumentation here was visualized through architecture, iconographic program, and inscription in the actual urban space. These techniques could not be reproduced for the same subject in the audio-visual space of the movies not only because symbolical systems had heavily changed by then, but also – even more important – as conditions for operations of the cinematographic image are completely different (e.g. the very limited temporal accessibility of cinematic images for the viewers) – the difference of eras seems to be medially irreconcilable. It can be shown, however, that certain spatio-temporal strategies, that create the cinematic ancient aqueduct of the modern era, were already used by the scenery of 18th-century landscape gardens.
Jimena Canales, Lindsey Lodhie & Joana Pimenta (Harvard University): Desired MachinesIn 1895 when the Lumière brothers unveiled their cinematographic camera, many scientists were elated. Scientists hoped that the machine would fulfill a desire that had driven research for nearly half a century: that of capturing the world in its own image. But their elation was surprisingly short-lived, and many researchers quickly distanced themselves from the new medium. The cinematographic camera was soon split into two machines, one for recording and one for projecting, enabling it to further escape from the laboratory. The philosopher Henri Bergson joined scientists, such as Etienne-Jules Marey, who found problems with the new cinematographic order. Those who had worked to make the dream come true found that their efforts had been subverted. Desired Machines focuses on the desire to build a cinematographic camera, with the purpose of elucidating how dreams and reality mix in the development of science and technology. It is about desired machines, their often unexpected results, and about how the interplay between what "is" (the technical), what "ought" (the ethical), and what "could" be (the fantastical) drives scientific research.
Francesco Casetti (Yale University): On the Screen: Event or Object?
Thomas Elsaesser (Yale University): Fairgrounds, Carousels and Ferrara FrescoesLinearity, Circularity and Intermittence are the most basic modalities of the cinematic experience. My talk will trace a few disparate genealogies that all revolve around objects and devices familiar from the cinema and from childhood, of which their centrifugal and centripetal energies will always remind us.
On Objects in Series: Clocks and MAD MENObjects and series have traditionally been perceived as differing profoundly in their relation to time: series were involved with the succession of time, if not the linear flow of time, and objects were seen as more or less stable in time or resistant to the flow of time. Yet serial formatting as the main practice of television seems to have transformed this difference. Serial objects do not last in time and operate in seasons of successive synchronicities – as does television. According to Stanley Cavell, television, mainly through the very operation of serialization, transforms the flow of time, and hence uncertainty, into a stable lasting presence. Moreover television deprives the object of what Günther Anders calls its »full« presence, replacing the latter with mere formal synchronicity. But formal synchronicity itself is a relation, which has to be produced by specific tools or agent objects. In everyday life, the most common and compact of these are the clock and television; the serial format being another, more complex and highly efficient type.
Sabine Hake (University of Texas, Austin): On the Lives of ObjectsThe historical film depends to a large degree on the filmic representation of objects of everyday life that are either associated with a particular past or, in the case of films about recent events, identified as being no longer part of the present. However, the objects chosen to interpret – rather than merely represent – the distance between present and past should never be treated as self-evident in their function within the mise-en-scène or be regarded as secondary to the production of narrative meanings or historical insights. On the contrary, reading a historical film such as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (2006) through what I call the lives of objects allows us to better understand the unique status of objects as visualizations of both the social and cultural discourses associated with them and the forms of attachment and strategies of incorporation articulated through them. In this particular case, the objects chosen for a historical reconstruction of the GDR circa 1984 are shown to be profoundly dependent on contemporary forms of engagement: the sensory pleasures through which spectators respond to these audiovisual semblances and evaluate their cultural and aesthetic significance; the political memories and historical knowledges that guide their recognition and appreciation of period styles; and the reading strategies that integrate them into ideological formations and interpretative frameworks. It is with regard to these larger questions that my presentation analyzes the culture-politics interface marked as East German through the kind of objects that define its historicity and align it with a decidedly West German theory of cultural production.
Ulrike Hanstein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): Rear projections: Images of the scene and scenes of the image(Presentation in German)Marilyn Monroe, Tommy Rettig and Robert Mitchum on a raft in front of a Canadian mountain landscape, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in a car in front of a serpentine road near Nice, Maureen O'Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller on elephants in front of the rainforest – these scenes showcase an operation of classic studio recording technology: rear projection.
Camera // Bolex(Presentation in German)Frame by frame the camera is exposing the film. It is indeed moving the image, fragmenting time and space. Walter Benjamin points out: "It is through this [the camera] that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious". So the camera achieves its peculiar purpose - in the fields of natural sciences, sports, industry, private recollection, entertainment and the arts likewise. Thus it is essential to realize: In spite of individual handlings all visualisation is preconfigured by components of the camera (what camera?). Every appropriation of imagery is conditioned by device details, the peculiarities of various machines.
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London): The Peculiar Ecstasy of the Animated ObjectIn the 1920s and 1930s there was a peculiar flurry of thinking about cinema on the part of critical, Marxist or Anarchistic European intellectuals. Animation was a particular focus of interest because of its relationship to what Walter Benjamin termed 'a different' or 'an other nature' (eine andere Natur). Kracauer, Benjamin and others conceived of the cinematic object, which to a certain extent could be seen as the animated object (even in film) as part of a parallel nature or order of things, constructed and potentially mutable. The object is an object in movement, in change, behaving, or misbehaving. This lecture considers the constitution of those objects, beginning with Kracauer's super-cinematic objects - fabric and leaf, which allow him to theorize the filmic movement of things and the fate of filmic nature. To move the scale, Kracauer's constitution of the mountain in film is also considered. Eisenstein's concept of 'non-indifferent nature', of plasticity and ecstasy of the object - which proposes that animation gives a psychology to the object - is also pertinent. The talk then revisits the constitution of these filmic objects in our epoch, after a panoply of technical developments, such as CGI in the world of cinema and nanotechnology more generally in the world of nature and pertaining to scale. The constructed nature of the object in film (which is all animation now) is set critically alongside recent developments in object-oriented thinking, which posits a world thought from the perspective of the object.
"It once was fire": this thing that once was a bodyWhat cinematic operations occur in order to turn a living body (a person, perhaps a character, most probably a representation) into a dead body (a thing like other things, but also a thing very similar to a human, a non-thing)? The moment of transforming occurs within a distinctively cinematic register, it is a privileged moment. But the effect and affect of transformation also is possessed of cinematic life. The corpse, or dead body, is one of the most lively things in the cinematic repertoire, rendered so through an arsenal of tricks and tropes and techniques of instantiation. How does this thing, this thing that was once a live body and now is not—though it still goes by the same name, is still called a body—relate to other things, to cinematic things, and to networks and speculations (realist and otherwise) outside the cinema? Sometimes absence from the image regime is what matters; the affect of the corpse is more powerful than its presence (as in detective fiction generally), but often its presence serves to bring into focus the temporal, spatial and phenomenological articulations of animate and inanimate cinematic being.
Annette Urban (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): An object-based grammar of film as an inventory of images: John Baldessari and John Stezaker.(Presentation in German)What precisely are the objects of film, and can we set up a type of inventory? This highly topical film studies issue, with its ambiguous fundamentals, is not easy to address. However, some unexpected answers may be found in 1970s and 1980s conceptual photographic art. In a list published by artist John Baldessari, for example, you will find the words attack, animal, birds, building together with camouflage, chaos/order, etc. following each other in a strictly alphabetic but otherwise highly heterogeneous order. An entire repertoire of film objects appears to be hidden therein, because this list is derived by means of a classification system of collected film stills which Baldessari has developed over the years. By cumulating and comparing these images – a working process which Baldessari has in common with British artist John Stezaker, – some pivotal, highly stereotypical, yet at the same time evocative cinematographic objects emerge. A closer look at the work created by these two artists from their archive of film images can provide insight into the way in which cinematic objects are acting on their own. In Baldessari's sequential collages, for example vectorial objects extending over the framework to the next shot, are linked paratactically. Consequently, the efficient elements of the montage become somehow engaged and go round in circle. Furthermore, by marking and covering key parts inside a single image, Baldessari and Stezaker also expose those elements which function as catalysts for the cinematic flux of images and turn things into agents. A pre-conceptual grammar of objects of cinematic language, intertwined with an image archive of selected film scenes re-grouped in a quasinarrative manner, seems an appropriate way of helping us further understand their inherent power of acting.
Kenneth White (Stanford University): On the Matter of SnowIn 1971 Michael Snow completed his classic "camera movement" trilogy with La Région Centrale, perhaps the consummate avant-garde engagement with cinematographic "things and operations." His three-hour, 16 mm "gigantic landscape film" is widely recognized as a major achievement of cinema, and perhaps modern art. I argue that Snow's project must be included in a wider array of scanning mechanisms at work in the Canadian tundra. While Snow was producing La Région Centrale in Sept-Iles, Quebec, just 23 km to the east was Pinetree Line Radar Outpost Moisie C-33, a station in the first early warning system built by the Canadian and United States governments in the early years of the Cold War. Thus we see two radar systems developed for ostensibly different purposes, yet reckoning with similar anxieties of seeing, prediction, sensual experience, and rapport across vast distances. One produced by the institutions of defense, the other by an artist exploring the physiological functions of sensory experience in cinema. Two servomechanisms churn and spin, striving to look beyond their immediate position to the future: one of nuclear war, the other to aesthetic limits. I explore the custom-made apparatus Snow designed in collaboration with the machinist Pierre Abeloos. In support of my readings, I draw upon mid-1940s United States defense industry reports, classified during wartime, that detail the servo systems to which Snow's device is a direct relation. I argue that Snow strives to combine a transcendent physiological experience with an intense rapport with the inscription capabilities of his machine; or, as he described it, "I want ecstasy and analysis." I conclude that the machine, and its second life as an autonomous work of sculpture entitled De La, must be considered within a larger field of Cold War surveillance discourse.
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