Noël Carroll
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300091953
- eISBN:
- 9780300133073
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300091953.003.0014
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter is about Siegfried Kracauer's book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which was published in 1960. It is important to stress this from the outset because, during the ...
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This chapter is about Siegfried Kracauer's book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which was published in 1960. It is important to stress this from the outset because, during the course of his career, Kracauer made a number of contributions to the topic of film theory, not all of which are strictly compatible with the theses of Theory of Film. Exploring the relations and the tensions between Kracauer's earlier writings and Theory of Film is a worthy task for intellectual historians, but, in contrast, the author's purpose is to examine the argument of Theory of Film. That book alone provides more than enough material to engage a brief introductory essay such as this one.Less
This chapter is about Siegfried Kracauer's book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which was published in 1960. It is important to stress this from the outset because, during the course of his career, Kracauer made a number of contributions to the topic of film theory, not all of which are strictly compatible with the theses of Theory of Film. Exploring the relations and the tensions between Kracauer's earlier writings and Theory of Film is a worthy task for intellectual historians, but, in contrast, the author's purpose is to examine the argument of Theory of Film. That book alone provides more than enough material to engage a brief introductory essay such as this one.
Michael W. Jennings
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691135106
- eISBN:
- 9781400846788
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691135106.003.0011
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first ...
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This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.Less
This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.
Sabine Hake
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691135106
- eISBN:
- 9781400846788
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691135106.003.0014
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter provides a careful reconstruction of major themes and points of critical tension amongst Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolf Arnheim, the three greatest theorists of film during ...
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This chapter provides a careful reconstruction of major themes and points of critical tension amongst Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolf Arnheim, the three greatest theorists of film during the Weimar period. Their contributions are more accurately located in the space between criticism and theory, and can only be understood through the entire historical constellation: the various institutional contexts, aesthetic categories, social practices, and cultural traditions that constituted film as a discursive object; the competing functions of film as mass-produced commodity, art form, and propaganda tool that informed critical practices; and the changing positions of film in relation to other art forms, mass media, and modes of perception and experience.Less
This chapter provides a careful reconstruction of major themes and points of critical tension amongst Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolf Arnheim, the three greatest theorists of film during the Weimar period. Their contributions are more accurately located in the space between criticism and theory, and can only be understood through the entire historical constellation: the various institutional contexts, aesthetic categories, social practices, and cultural traditions that constituted film as a discursive object; the competing functions of film as mass-produced commodity, art form, and propaganda tool that informed critical practices; and the changing positions of film in relation to other art forms, mass media, and modes of perception and experience.
Noël Carroll
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300091953
- eISBN:
- 9780300133073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300091953.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This collection of essays discusses topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, the author examines a wide range of ...
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This collection of essays discusses topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, the author examines a wide range of topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. The author also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects.Less
This collection of essays discusses topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, the author examines a wide range of topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. The author also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects.
Jennifer Fay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190696771
- eISBN:
- 9780190696818
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190696771.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Environmental Politics
`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory ...
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`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.Less
`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.
Felicity Colman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169738
- eISBN:
- 9780231850605
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169738.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers. It references the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, ...
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This book addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers. It references the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The book takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar. It argues that film theory, like all grammars, forms part of the system of rules that govern a language, and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. It describes how film theories create authorial trends, identify the technology of cinema as a creative force and produce films as aesthetic markers. It argues that film theories therefore contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. The book then explores these connections through film theorisations that address processes related to the diagrammatisation (the systems, methodologies, concepts, histories) of cinematic matters.Less
This book addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers. It references the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The book takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar. It argues that film theory, like all grammars, forms part of the system of rules that govern a language, and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. It describes how film theories create authorial trends, identify the technology of cinema as a creative force and produce films as aesthetic markers. It argues that film theories therefore contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. The book then explores these connections through film theorisations that address processes related to the diagrammatisation (the systems, methodologies, concepts, histories) of cinematic matters.
Jennifer Fay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190696771
- eISBN:
- 9780190696818
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190696771.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Environmental Politics
The Anthropocene is the epoch during which humanity began to replace the earth as something given for a disaster humanity created, an artificial planet and an anthropogenic climate. Cinema is a ...
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The Anthropocene is the epoch during which humanity began to replace the earth as something given for a disaster humanity created, an artificial planet and an anthropogenic climate. Cinema is a technology roughly as old as the Anthropocene (by some accounts), and its history demonstrates an attraction to artificial worlds and weather and to a larger culture of environmental design. Siegfried Kracauer’s meditation on the film studio has affinities to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Sputnik. Both are meditations on artificial worlds and the human desire to produce its own environment and to become self-conditioned. Having turned the earth into a laboratory of the Anthropocene, humanity is faced with a less welcoming planet and thus in need of new political theories of hospitality and strategies of accommodation. Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and theory of hospitality need to be revised in light of the Anthropocene, and cinema can help us with this task.Less
The Anthropocene is the epoch during which humanity began to replace the earth as something given for a disaster humanity created, an artificial planet and an anthropogenic climate. Cinema is a technology roughly as old as the Anthropocene (by some accounts), and its history demonstrates an attraction to artificial worlds and weather and to a larger culture of environmental design. Siegfried Kracauer’s meditation on the film studio has affinities to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Sputnik. Both are meditations on artificial worlds and the human desire to produce its own environment and to become self-conditioned. Having turned the earth into a laboratory of the Anthropocene, humanity is faced with a less welcoming planet and thus in need of new political theories of hospitality and strategies of accommodation. Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and theory of hospitality need to be revised in light of the Anthropocene, and cinema can help us with this task.
D. N. Rodowick
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226513058
- eISBN:
- 9780226513225
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226513225.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in ...
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The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in the contemporary image environment, and in each case, Farocki asks viewers to reconsider how images provoke both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. Examples are drawn from three of Farocki’s best known works, Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and the four-part video installation, Serious Games. The account then turns to the late writing of T. W. Adorno to argue that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine in essays like “Transparencies on Film.” The claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage.Less
The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in the contemporary image environment, and in each case, Farocki asks viewers to reconsider how images provoke both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. Examples are drawn from three of Farocki’s best known works, Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and the four-part video installation, Serious Games. The account then turns to the late writing of T. W. Adorno to argue that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine in essays like “Transparencies on Film.” The claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage.
Lill-Ann Körber
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748694174
- eISBN:
- 9781474408561
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0011
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni ...
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This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.Less
This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- July 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198768913
- eISBN:
- 9780191822186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of ...
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This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.Less
This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.
Vike Martina Plock
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474427418
- eISBN:
- 9781474434607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427418.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It ...
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The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.Less
The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.
Jennifer Fay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190696771
- eISBN:
- 9780190696818
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190696771.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Environmental Politics
Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic ...
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Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.Less
Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.
Jennifer Fay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190696771
- eISBN:
- 9780190696818
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190696771.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Environmental Politics
Cinema is a record of the Anthropocene, and not just because it has recorded the changing planet. Celluloid is already embedded in the geological record. Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time ...
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Cinema is a record of the Anthropocene, and not just because it has recorded the changing planet. Celluloid is already embedded in the geological record. Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of how nitrate films were buried in the Yukon permafrost and unearthed decades later. Considered hazardous material, the nitrate film reels are also our cultural heritage. We can read the film as a lamentation that humanity and its culture are impermanent and its archives in jeopardy. But when we consider that so many films have been dumped, burned, and buried, we may be struck with the melancholic possibility that humanity and its culture will never disappear from the earth. In time, the human artifacts on the planet and the traces of humanity’s artificial life worlds will be the nature upon which future life forms create their worlds and rituals of hospitality.Less
Cinema is a record of the Anthropocene, and not just because it has recorded the changing planet. Celluloid is already embedded in the geological record. Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of how nitrate films were buried in the Yukon permafrost and unearthed decades later. Considered hazardous material, the nitrate film reels are also our cultural heritage. We can read the film as a lamentation that humanity and its culture are impermanent and its archives in jeopardy. But when we consider that so many films have been dumped, burned, and buried, we may be struck with the melancholic possibility that humanity and its culture will never disappear from the earth. In time, the human artifacts on the planet and the traces of humanity’s artificial life worlds will be the nature upon which future life forms create their worlds and rituals of hospitality.