In 1972, Gerald B. Greenberg won an Academy Award for editing The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971). His work in that film exemplifies a traditional editing technique for clarifying the human “identity” behind every Point-of-View (POV) shot or sequence: cutting to a facial close up shot and revealing an active “eyeline” or active “gaze” just before cutting to the POV. For example, in the film’s extended car-versus-elevated-train chase scene, Greenberg reveals brief shots of driver Popeye Doyle’s eyes and shifting gaze before showing his POV from behind the wheel.

In the decades that followed, however, this technique for “cueing” POV shots transformed in ways that are worthy of close study. Two significant changes in cinematic production seem to have unmoored this type of traditional editing technique for setting up POV shots, forcing editors to adopt new approaches. First, a shift toward the use of stabilized camera systems (specifically, Steadicam rigs starting in 1975 and drone systems in the last decade) has provided material with beautifully smooth but rather “inhuman” camera movement through space. Second, a parallel trend toward shooting action sequences with a “documentary approach” to camerawork has often resulted in productions where the editing team faces a lack of shots that can serve as “cues”. Consider, for example, the purposeful use of “documentary style” cinematography in the work of Paul Greengrass. His film Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass 2002) adopts a documentary cinematography look that is quite appropriate to the depiction of a protest march escalating into violence, recalling news coverage of the real events the film is based on. He follows this with The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass 2004), an action movie embracing the camera shake and lack of coverage characteristic of documentary production.

In 2015, Gerald B. Greenberg edited his final film: a remake of Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991), the Hollywood blockbuster that had expanded on previous Steadicam technique and, by emphasizing Steadicam cinematography in several showcased set pieces, established stabilized POV material as central to Hollywood action sequences. Did Greenberg continue to use the editing techniques he developed in the pre-Steadicam era? Or did he address new ideas developed over four decades of editing? In this paper I will present a case study on Greenberg’s final edit and relate his practice to emerging contemporary theory on POV shots and the concept of “identity”.

Part One: The Practice, 1971

Gerald B. Greenberg is credited as editor on 44 films, including The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent 1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton 1979), The Untouchables (Brian De Palma 1987), and American History X (Tony Kaye 1998). Best known for his work on action films, in his long career he cut comedy (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Jeremiah S. Chechik 1989), drama (Awakenings, Penny Marshall 1990), and even music video (Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video, broadcast on MTV in 1984). From his apprenticeship with Dede Allen (which included cutting shootout scenes in Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn 1967) through his collaboration and shared Oscar nomination with Walter Murch for Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979), to his late-career collaborations with action cinematographer Ericson Core, Greenberg was an editor’s editor.

On 10 April 1972, at the age of 35, Greenberg won the Best Film Editing Academy Award for his work on The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971). In that film we see—if we look very closely at the craftwork—the cutting edge of cinematic editing practice during the early 1970s. Building on the chase editing techniques demonstrated in Bullitt (Peter Yates 1968), Greenberg worked to achieve director William Friedkin’s ambition: to create a sequence that would surpass the dramatic extended chases of Bullitt. The result, Friedkin claimed, was a sequence that “not only fulfilled the needs of the story, but that also defined the character of the man who was going to be doing the chasing—Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), an obsessive, self-righteous, driven man”.[i] As Friedkin wrote, in the Director’s Guild of America’s Action magazine:

At this point, I should say that I thought the chase sequence in Bullitt was perhaps the best I had ever seen. When someone creates a sequence of such power, I don’t feel it’s diminished if someone else comes along and is challenged to do better. The chase in Bullitt works perfectly well in its own framework, and so, I feel, does the one in French Connection. When a director puts a scene like that on film, it really stands forever as a kind of yardstick to shoot for, one that will never really be topped, that will always provide a challenge for other filmmakers.[ii]

Greenberg’s success, however, is notable as a controlled virtuoso performance rather than as a radical, if heartfelt, burst of wild creativity. Greenberg, always a paid craftsman at the service of a director or a film studio, never embraced the more intense experimentalism of his New York contemporary Ralph Rosenblum or the risk taking of an emerging set of international editors treating montage as an art form, rather than a last stage of refinement in a studio production model. (Later in his career, Greenberg would be brought in to “save” films that a studio perceived as at-risk in the hands of less-experienced film directors.)

Greenberg’s editing of the famous French Connection chase scene, then, should be thought of in the way classical music fans understand recordings by pianist Vladimir Horowitz: he is not the composer, but an interpreter, bringing a perfected version of a set of ideas that others have worked with, but never at such a refined level. This is an overstatement, but Friedkin supports this appraisal of Greenberg’s invisible craft:

I can’t say too much about the importance of editing. When I looked at the first rough cut of the chase, it was terrible. It didn’t play. It was formless, in spite of the fact that I had a very careful shooting plan that I followed in detail. It became a matter of removing a shot here or adding a shot there, or changing the sequence of shots, or dropping one frame, or adding one or two frames. And here’s where I had enormous help from Jerry Greenberg, the editor. As I look back on it now, the shooting was easy. The cutting and the mixing were enormously difficult.[iii]

What, exactly, had the Friedkin / Greenberg team done? It is essential to recognize that Greenberg could only cut together the shots provided to him by Friedkin’s filming, and while he structured, paced, and refined the chase, Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman made systematic choices on camera placement and the focal lengths of the lenses used. Friedkin:

The entire chase was shot with an Arriflex camera, as was most of the picture. There was a front bumper mount, which usually had a 30- or 50-millimeter lens set close to the ground for point-of-view shots. Within the car, there were two mounts. One was for an angle that would include Hackman driving and shoot over his shoulder with focus given to the exterior. The other was for straight-ahead points-of-view out the front window, exclusive of Hackman. Whenever we made shots of Hackman at the wheel, all three mounted cameras were usually filming. When Hackman was not driving, I did not use the over-shoulder camera. For all of the exterior stunts, I had three cameras going constantly.[iv]

In this initial description of his system, Friedkin is only telling us part of the story, but importantly he has described three camera angles we see in the film.

FRONT BUMPER CAMERA ANGLE: from the front bumper of the car, a view that acts as the driver’s POV. This is not through the windshield, and we do not see the hood of the car as the driver would in real life, but we accept it as communicating the experience of what it is like to drive forward on the New York street. There are two important technical considerations: first, that most cinematographers shooting on 35mm film (as Friedkin did) think of using a 50mm lens as approximating our normal human vision of the world (with the 30mm lens providing a wider view); and second, that placing the lens close to the ground gives an enhanced sense of speed and motion. A few years after this, Claude Lelouch would use this low-front-bumper technique to give a sense of intense high-speed racing through Paris in his nine-minute short Rendezvous (1976).

OVER-THE-SHOULDER CAMERA ANGLE: This is not, for the purpose of our discussion, a POV shot. In theory, we do not “identify” with the driver, but experience this view in the same way we experience any general camera view. This minor, but significant, distinction becomes essential to our understanding of the mechanics of “POV” shots when we consider how little difference there is between this shot and the next—which is thought of as the driver’s point-of-view. This is from almost the identical camera position, simply using a slightly wider focal length and revealing the driver’s shoulder.

THROUGH-THE-WINDSHIELD CAMERA ANGLE: This view acts as the driver’s POV. This is filmed from very close to the same camera position as the “over the shoulder” angle, but due to the use of a longer focal length, we simply see out the windshield without the inclusion of the driver’s shoulder. We are not in the back seat of the car now … we are seeing through the driver’s eyes. We can, the filmmakers hope, identify with the driver.

Watching the film, however, reveals that Friedkin’s claim that we see Popeye Doyle’s driving movements via the “over the shoulder” shot is incomplete. There are a range of views from the position of a camera operator in the car’s front right seat, giving us a more complete indication of our main character turning the steering wheel and reacting to the events of the chase. We can think of these as the PASSENGER-SEAT CAMERA ANGLES. Most importantly for our discussion, we also have shots of Doyle’s face and eyes, some made from a camera mounted on the car’s front hood and some in closer, from a camera inside the windshield, shot when the car was not moving. These CLOSE-UP SHOTS are essential to the film’s POV tactics.

During most of the chase, Doyle’s car is driving beneath an elevated train. The structure above him is reflected in the car’s windshield in the majority of the hood-mounted camera shots, giving an active sense of motion. Reflected shapes slide up the windshield, yet Doyle’s face is readable through the windshield glass. At a moment of higher intensity, however, a tighter close-up is used. Friedkin describes it:

To achieve the effect of Hackman’s car narrowly missing the woman with the baby, I had the car with the three mounted cameras drive toward the woman, who was a stunt person. As she stepped off the curb, the car swerved away from her several yards before coming really close. But it was traveling approximately 50 miles per hour. I used these angles, together with a shot that was made separately from a stationary camera on the ground, zooming fast into the girl’s face as she sees Doyle’s car and screams. This was cut with a close-up of Doyle as he first sees her, and these two shots were linked to the exterior shots of the car swerving into the safety island with the trash cans.[v]

Watching the film reveals the close-up of Popeye Doyle that Friedkin mentions, but it is worth noting that there is one more mechanism at work here: in some of these “Doyle’s face” shots we see not only a matched eyeline—Doyle looking in a direction that matches the POV shot—but often see his eyes move. The chase proceeds. We cut to Doyle; his eyes move. Then we cut to a POV shot revealing what he sees. This use of an eye-movement visual cue and other cues is essential to understanding the POV usage not only in this famous chase, but throughout the film. It is a very direct editing strategy. It works, and it proceeds in alignment with film theory. A close viewing of the film makes the technique obvious, but there is much to be gained by questioning it: why does this work, how does it work, and what are the limits of this editing mechanism?

Part Two: The Theory, 1975

Between 1973 and 1976 Christian Metz wrote Le Signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinema, but before the complete book was published in 1977 an English translation of the first section (“The Imaginary Signifier”) was published in Screen in 1975. One might wish to imagine film editors like Greenberg lining up impatiently at a newsstand while stacks of the film journal were unloaded, but sadly, communication between theory and practice in film editing (despite shining moments in essays by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and François Truffaut) was mostly nonexistent in the world an editor like Greenberg inhabited.

If we cannot see a direct influence on filmmakers, we can, however, look to Metz to understand an emerging shift in academic thinking on how a viewer “identifies” during a film viewing experience—whether we care about that as a practical matter driving editing decisions or as a more philosophical problem. Whether we hope to devise an editing strategy to amplify a viewer’s emotional identification or to build a theoretical system for understanding film language itself, reading Metz kickstarts the process.

By simply making the assertion that there is an inherent identification function in the institution of cinema, in the apparatus of cinema, and (in a complex and problematic way) in the viewer of cinema, Metz opened new ground in editing room theory. Quite quickly, however, Metz’ conception of a mechanism allowing cinematic identification became a sort of easy target: if we identify with characters put forward by the dominant culture, is “identification” not prone to creating sympathy for mainstreamed racism, sexism, and homophobia, etc.?

Metz’ secondary concern—how one might connect with the “people” in a film—was read often, but his primary interest in the inherent strangeness that humans can “identify” with projected shadows at all, was lost in his complex explanations of “looks” and “codes” and “sub-codes.” Yet his primary concern provides the essential theory that relates to POV shots, and the essential background we need to consider if we wish to understand the conceptual framework of human identity implied in a point-of-view camera angle.

Picture Metz’ essay as the car that Popeye Doyle commandeers during the chase: it gets smashed, then smashed again, yet somehow carries us to the end of our path. What, then, did Metz actually say?

The ego’s position in the cinema does not derive from a miraculous resemblance between the cinema and the natural characteristics of all perception; on the contrary, it is foreseen and marked in advance by the institution (the equipment, the disposition of the auditorium, the mental system that internalises the two), and also by more general characteristics of the psychic apparatus (such as projection, the mirror structure, etc.), which although they are less strictly dependent on a period of social history and a technology, do not therefore express the sovereignty of a ‘human vocation’, but inversely are themselves shaped by certain specific features of man as an animal.[vi]

For Metz, these “specific features of man” included mental development shaped by a Lacanian “Mirror Stage” in which there is an “illusion of perceptual mastery”, and, he claims, cinema offers a parallel illusion.[vii] This assertion, like the side door of Doyle’s car, has become quite damaged over time. While Lacanian / Psychoanalytic film analysis carries on, few theorists today, if any, would enthusiastically argue for some sort of Mirror Stage development as the key to cinematic “identification” with a character, a camera, or an omniscient perceiver within a film.[viii]

Yet if we decide that Metz has the specific mechanism for identification wrong, we should still credit him with his insistence that identification happens through a complex mechanism, not a simple momentary confusion that a film shot is somehow, suddenly, real. While one of cinemas (doubtful) “origin stories” tells us that panicked viewers fled the theatre when the train neared in L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1896), we can imagine a difference between a jump-scare gimmick and a deeper moment where identification—seemingly being behind the wheel in the car chase, for example—makes the experience more than a shallow surprise. Surely our reaction in the cinematic instant we realize Popeye Doyle is driving directly at the woman with a baby carriage parallels our own complex and actual experiences of having an animal run in front of a car we are driving?

Metz’ specific discussion of point-of-view shots is convoluted. He is not wrong, but his discussion of how POV shots are perceived is quite different than we might expect if a film editor attempted the same explanation. He claims:

In a fiction film, the characters look at one another. It can happen (and this is already another ‘notch’ in the chain of identifications) that a character looks at another who is momentarily out-of-frame, or else is looked at by him. If we have gone one notch further, this is because everything out-of-frame brings us closer to the spectator, since it is the peculiarity of the latter to be out-of-frame (the out-of-frame character thus has a point in common with him: he is looking at the screen). In certain cases the out-of-frame character’s look is ‘reinforced’ by recourse to another variant of the subjective image, generally christened the ‘character’s point of view’: the framing of the scene corresponds precisely to the angle from which the out-of-frame character looks at the screen. (The two figures are dissociable moreover; we often know that the scene is being looked at by someone other than ourselves, by a character, but it is the logic of the plot, or an element of the dialogue, or a previous image that tells us so, not the position of the camera, which may be far from the presumed emplacement of the out-of-frame onlooker.)[ix]

Metz comprehends cinematic space differently than a film director like Friedkin would. Instead, he builds a mental scenario: the screen is a mirror, but I am not reflected in it. This complex conceptualisation of space leads to his strange explanation of the POV shot: he imagines off-screen characters in a virtual space. This virtual space overlaps the theatre in which we (actually) watch the film.

It is not an idea that a film editor would find valuable in any pragmatic sense. What makes it valuable is that it escapes from the ground level of POV theory: a POV happens when a character looks through a keyhole, a telescope, a gun sight, or the bottom of a glass. Metz’ theory begins to fly up into the air: a POV is part of a complex mental conception of cinematic space. If he is, unfortunately, intent on overlaying Lacan’s Mirror Stage as a metaphor for this space, he at least allows us to abandon the idea that a POV means locating a camera in place of a character’s eyes. Now, we’re locating a camera in place of a character’s mind.

And it is true that as he identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera, too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing (= framing) determines the vanishing point. During the projection this camera is absent, but it has a representative consisting of another apparatus, called precisely a ‘projector’. An apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the back of his head, that is precisely where phantasy locates the ‘focus’ of all vision.[x]

Metz’ reference to a “vanishing point” is connected to the analysis of his contemporary (and fellow Lacanian / Psychoanalytic film theory enthusiast) Jean-Louis Baudry. In reading Baudry, we see more clearly Metz’ leap forward in thinking. By 1970 Baudry questions existing ideas on cinematic space and the human perception of it, yet it is a critique of ideology, not an attempt to reconsider the deepest mechanisms of human perception.

In Baudry’s Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, first published in 1970, we find a discussion of conventional cinematic space as ideologically regressive—mired in Renaissance perspective.[xi]

Of course the use of lenses of different focal lengths can alter the perspective of an image. But this much, at least, is clear in the history of cinema: it is the perspective construction of the Renaissance which originally served as model. The use of different lenses, when not dictated by technical considerations aimed at restoring the habitual perspective (such as shooting in limited or extended spaces which one wishes to expand or contract) does not destroy [traditional] perspective but rather makes it play a normative role. Departure from the norm, by means of a wide-angle or telephoto lens, is clearly marked in comparison with so-called “normal” perspective. We will see in any case that the resulting ideological effect is still defined in relation to the ideology inherent in perspective.[xii]

While Baudry intends this as critique—after all, how can a practice stuck in a centuries-old visual system produce revolutionary art?—his explanation of the production of cinema sounds strikingly similar to the process of Friedkin planning shots, Roizman choosing focal lengths, and Greenberg cutting together the resulting images.

Equally distant from “objective reality” and the finished product, the camera occupies an intermediate position in the work process which leads from raw material to finished product. Though mutually dependent from other points of view, découpage [shot breakdown before shooting] and montage [editing, or final assembly] must be distinguished because of the essential difference in the signifying raw material on which each operates: language (scenario) or image.[xiii]

Where Baudry moves theory forward—thus allowing Metz to take flight—is in his desire to shift the perceiving intelligence from “the eye of the subject” to a “transcendental subject.” At an early stop on this journey, he considers the implications of traditional perspective:

The conception of space which conditions the construction of perspective in the Renaissance differs from that of the Greeks. For the latter, space is discontinuous and heterogeneous (for Aristotle, but also for Democritus, for whom space is the location of an infinity of indivisible atoms), whereas with Nicholas of Cusa will be born a conception of space formed by the relation between elements which are equally near and distant from the “source of all life.” In addition, the pictorial construction of the Greeks corresponded to the organization of their stage, based on a multiplicity of points of view, whereas the painting of the Renaissance will elaborate a centered space. (“Painting is nothing but the intersection of the visual pyramid following a given distance, a fixed center, and a certain lighting.”-Alberti.) The center of this space coincides with the eye which Jean Pellerin Viator will so justly call the “subject.”[xiv]

Baudry here surfaces a part of the discussion that should be key in any consideration of cinematic identification: what happens when the camera moves?

Meaning and consciousness, to be sure: at this point we must return to the camera. Its mechanical nature not only permits the shooting of differential images as rapidly as desired but also destines it to change position, to move. Film history shows that as a result of the combined inertia of painting, theater, and photography, it took a certain time to notice the inherent mobility of the cinematic mechanism. The ability to reconstitute movement is after all only a partial, elementary aspect of a more general capability. To seize movement is to become movement, to follow a trajectory is to become trajectory, to choose a direction is to have the possibility of choosing one, to determine a meaning is to give oneself a meaning. In this way the eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective (which in fact only represents a larger effort to produce an ordering, regulated transcendence) becomes absorbed in, “elevated” to a vaster function, proportional to the movement which it can perform. . . . And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement-conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film-the world will not only be constituted by this eye but for it. The movability of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the “transcendental subject.”[xv]

Baudry continues quickly past this transcendental subject, ending in the same place Metz would: cinematic identification happens not in a subject’s eye, not in a subject’s mind or soul, but in some difficult-to-imagine moment where cinema acts as the “mother” in Lacan’s Mirror Stage, holding up the baby to see itself reflected, revealing the viewer and the viewer in relationship to the world in a mystical, illusionary play.

Metz says:

What I have said about identification so far amounts to the statement that the spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but also (the two things inevitably go together) present there and even ‘all-present’ as perceiver. At every moment I am in the film by my look’s caress.[xvi]

He then uses an odd word about this presence: hovering. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball”, the subject—our awareness—floats along, seeing everything.ì

Part Three: The Rig, 1972-2002

Let us, for a moment, abandon the Mirror that Metz and Baudry wish to sell us, and pause in this moment where the camera and our awareness simply hovers. It is, after all, an easy thing to imagine and a common dream. Yet the reality of film cameras has always been the opposite: a camera is a heavy, shaky box that is difficult to move smoothly. Much of film technology’s history can been seen as working to counter this problem: the tripod, the fluid head, the dolly, dolly tracks, cranes, the shoulder mount, and the Steadicam. In “‘DANCING, FLYING CAMERA JOCKEYS’: Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985”, Katie Bird traces the development of early Steadicam practice and, more importantly, how this practice connects to the characteristics of human movement rather than mechanical action.

In 1972, out of a desire to produce a handheld shot that looked as stable as a dolly shot, Philadelphia-based camera operator and commercial producer Garrett Brown set to work on a series of experimental designs for an apparatus that could mimic the way that humans see and move around in space. . . . In 1974 Brown returned to Philadelphia to make a 35mm “Brown Stabilizer” prototype and updated demo reel to promote the device to potential large-scale manufacturers. In the demo reel, Brown wore the rig and produced a series of “30 impossible shots”: rambling around the Pennsylvania hills near his barn workshop and a sequence with Brown chasing his girlfriend, Ellen, up and down the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum. . . . The art museum stair footage would go on to captivate manufacturers and directors alike, and it directly inspired John Avildsen and Sylvester Stallone’s now infamous sequence ascending the very same Philadelphia stairs in Rocky.[xvii]

Claiming that a camera operator in a Steadicam rig is, essentially, a “hovering” consciousness (to paraphrase, and perhaps distort, the theory of Baudry and Metz) may at first seem to be a bit of a stretch. Consider, however, documentary practice before and after the mainstreaming of Steadicam stabilization in high-budget documentary filmmaking.

Consider two moments before:

• A handheld 35mm Eyemo camera walks along with troops in John Huston’s documentary on The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston 1945)
• A shoulder-mounted 16mm Auricon camera follows John F. Kennedy from a car through a crush of political supporters to deliver a speech in Robert Drew’s Primary (Robert Drew 1960)

And consider two moments after:

• A drone floats a camera into and out of a wooded area in Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (Michael Madsen 2010)
• A helmet-mounted GoPro camera drifts through a series of snowboard jumps on a training course in Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel (Lucy Walker 2013)

While one can develop a list of documentaries using a Steadicam operator—Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov 2002), Pina (Wim Wenders 2011), Cathedrals of Culture (Karim Aïnouz, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Margreth Olin, Robert Redford, Wim Wenders 2014) —these films remain a small percentage of mainstream documentary releases. There has been more of a conceptual change than a “takeover” by Steadicam operators. The idea of stabilization has expanded documentary practice. But it is the audience acceptance of Steadicam motion and Steadicam identity that has been the most significant change.

What, exactly, is the difference between the handheld camera work of Ricky Leacock in Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton 1954) and Primary (Robert Drew 1960) and the Steadicam operation of Torben Meldgaard in Cathedrals of Culture (Karim Aïnouz, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Margreth Olin, Robert Redford, Wim Wenders 2014) and Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (Michael Madsen 2010)? Katie Bird’s “DANCING, FLYING CAMERA JOCKEYS” delves into complicated explanations of the “embodied” camera, comparing Steadicam practice to dance and puppeteering:

This intuitive recognition is built on a knowledge of personal quirks (ways of moving in space), as well as the weight and placement of load by the operator’s body. In other words, no Steadicam shot performed by different operators would look alike even if filmed under the exact same shooting conditions, flight path, and start and stop marks.[xviii]

A more direct claim is found in a 1992-1993 American Cinematographer article by Brooke Comer: “Steadicam Hits Its Stride”. Comer quotes Steadicam operator Jeff Mart’s simpler take:

Even though Mart believes that Steadicam is one of the most unusual inventions the film world has seen in many years, he’s sure that its use has not even begun to be fully explored. “There’s something very special about its capabilities”, he says. “A Steadicam shot is very close to what you experience as a human being because of the slightly less-than-perfect motion. It rocks a bit, but that’s how a human moves through space in life. We don’t glide like dollies. We move with our heads bobbing slightly, and this imperfect perspective is something that filmmakers are forever after. If used correctly, Steadicam is a priceless addition to film.”[xix]

In 1991, James M. Muro, Steadicam operator, worked with James Cameron on Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron 1991). It was his 22^nd credit in this role. Comer’s article includes a long section quoting Jimmy Muro:

“Terminator 2 epitomizes the total integration Steadicam can have within a film”, he submits. “The Steadicam was totally intertwined in the picture. It was the tool that moved you from scene to scene, and it was cut so nicely that it flowed, it took you for the ride of your life.” He and Cameron were in sync when they planned their Steadicam shots: “We didn’t like it for full-on running, and Jim didn’t want to do fast-tilts. With so much mass, you can’t be on someone’s face and tilt quickly to the floor. But we could do whip pans by getting medium close, whipping the camera to what the character is seeing, then stopping on a dime – which is tough to do.”[xx]

Cameron naturally hired Muro for his next release: Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.  How was Muro’s skilful work integrated into the action of that film?

I have looked at a sequence of 56 shots that make up the most famous chase in the film. In the sequence, after a bank robbery, Bodhi (played by Patrick Swayze) is separated from his gang and pursed by Johnny Utah (played by Keanu Reeves), a former athlete who has joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The footchase travels through a tightly-packed neighbourhood, moving through alleys and backyards, and into and through homes as well. The majority of the shots used are clearly recorded from a Steadicam rig. Does this create viewer identification with Bodhi and Utah? Do we embody the chase experience? Are we in the action even more so than in The French Connection? Roger Ebert thought so:

Bigelow and her crew are also gifted filmmakers. There’s a footchase through the streets, yards, alleys and living rooms of Santa Monica; two skydiving sequences with virtuoso photography, powerful chemistry between the good and evil characters, and an ominous, brooding score by Mark Isham that underlines the mood. The plot of “Point Break,” summarized, invites parody (rookie agent goes undercover as surfer to catch bank robbers). The result is surprisingly effective.[xxi]

There is no question that Bigelow’s chase, built on Muro’s energized camera, is cinematically equal to Friedkin’s intense car action, despite its inherent silliness. Bodhi struggles against a boy on a bike, and Utah is attacked with a vacuum cleaner, but the movement through backyard passageways is full of adrenaline and surprise. We run along with the pair throughout the chase.

Still, the specifics of the sequence, if we consider Baudry’s “decoupage” and “montage” analysis, present a hybrid form clearly planned and edited to take advantage of the excitement and possibilities of the Steadicam but without any commitment to presenting the Steadicam view as an ongoing POV of a single character.

Our view chases the chasers, but sometimes jumps ahead. We have POV experiences (Bodhi runs into a flying towel and our view goes dark when it covers his face; we inhabit Utah’s eyes when a dog is thrown at him) but there is no rigorous practice. The Steadicam view can at any moment represent either Bodhi, Utah, or an omniscient perceiver. Bigelow’s use of cinematic space in action scenes is not vastly changed in character from her work on Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow 1987) or Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow 1990), just amplified. The Steadicam use here is a bit like Bob Dylan switching to the electric guitar: a difference in intensity, rather than a difference in the essential concerns of the artist.

There are two technical questions to consider.

First, are the POV shots in The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971) and Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991) essentially different with regard to the “smoothness” of the motion? Interestingly, the answer is that they are not. A dolly shot is smooth and gliding, but both Bigelow’s Steadicam and Friedkin’s car-mounted cameras give more sway and bounce.

Second, are the POV shots “cued” in Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991)? Consider the last section of the chase:

• From a low angle, we see Johnny Utah go over a tall wall, and land hard, injuring himself. Then, with Utah on the ground behind him, Bodhi’s feet splash in the flood control channel as he runs close toward us. As Utah struggles to his feet, we cut to a reverse shot of Bodhi running away from us.
• Utah falls back down, rolling around and grabbing his knee. He struggles to his feet, pulls out his gun, then falls, but points the gun toward the camera view, approximately toward Bodhi’s position.
• Bodhi runs along to a chain link fence, then leaps onto it and climbs up. At the top of the fence, he looks back toward Utah’s position. He is not looking directly to the camera, but off to screen left. This is potentially a POV cue.
• On the ground, Utah is pointing a gun toward the camera.
• Bodhi, still at the top of the fence, is still looking to screen left, at Utah.
• A tighter view of Utah and his gun.
• Bodhi’s eyes, direct to camera. This is potentially a POV cue.
• In a tight shot, Utah’s gun is in focus, but Utah’s face is not. Interestingly, this shot can be interpreted as a cued POV, revealing what Bodhi is noticing—yet it is not an “exact” POV since the gun is not pointed directly at the camera.
• Bodhi’s eyes again. He begins to turn his head, and we see him climb away. Utah is still on the ground, still pointing the gun. He rolls onto his back, then fires the gun at the sky.

Perhaps Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991), then, is at the midpoint between The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971) and Hardcore Henry (Ilya Naishuller 2015), where the basic production technique involved wearing a headset of two GoPro Hero3 Black cameras—so that every shot in the film would be a POV shot.

Still, the novelty of using only POV shots—and this is only novel if we ignore Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery 1946)—is not the advancement in film language we are intent on understanding here. The documentary Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov 2002) consists of a single 96-minute Steadicam shot. We know it gains all the value a POV shot can offer, but we also know it reveals nothing about the intercutting of POV shots into shots depicting traditional cinematic space. It does not use that technique at all. No POV shots are “cued” if everything is one long POV. Identification may happen, but it is not used to amplify key moments in the film.

Our interest is in understanding what our best editors might decide to do after the dust the Steadicam kicked up settles down, and once the youth movement of GoPro cameras and flying drones matures a bit. In 2018, the Steadicam’s function has evolved into the new lifeform of the DJI Ronin-S, a single-handed stabilizer allowing practically untrained operators to run, climb stairs, or charge through Santa Monica backyards with incredible fluidity. It will compete for holiday sales with the GoPro Hero 7 Black, an action camera with internal stabilization so good it is labelled HyperSmooth. Both of these systems will sit alongside aerial drones that work amazingly well, but which create an inhuman floating motion.

Metz understood our perception to “hover,” but it is unlikely he meant that a camera should. Our test case for the future of editing, then, needs very close study. Documentary camera motion (as Friedkin, who made several documentaries, was well aware) is often “shaky” in a way that is perceived as authentic, human, and without artifice. As Steadicam technique has become a celebrated mode of production in fiction film—consider Emmanuel Lubezki’s work in Tree of Life (Terrence Malick 2011), Birdman (Alejandro G. Iñárritu 2014), The Revenant (Alejandro G. Iñárritu 2015)—we should be careful about its acceptance leading to our considering all stabilization as the same. We may be at an inflection point, where “embodied” stabilization and “robotic” stabilization (for example, drone cameras) need to be recognized as two separate modes. This becomes understandable when we focus on the issue of identification.

 Part Four: The Cut, 2015

Rob Cohen directed The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen 2001), an immensely popular action film that earned over $200 million at the box office. His follow up, xXx (Rob Cohen 2002), made even more. Cohen discussed that film’s cinematographic and editing style in The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (Wendy Apple 2004), explaining that he considered his approach “cubist” for its use of multiple camera angles and repetition to reveal and emphasize key moments of action. One can see an influence from popular sports media: the slow-motion instant replay techniques used in X-Games broadcasts.

Ericson Core was the Director of Photography on The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen 2001). When he expanded his work to film directing, he served as his own cinematographer on Invincible (Ericson Core 2006) and then Point Break (Ericson Core 2015), his big-budget remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s film. On both of these films, he worked with Gerald B. Greenberg.

A close watch of Greenberg’s edit of Point Break (Ericson Core 2015) reveals a shock: there are few POV shots present, and most of these are informational views, rather than views in the action sequences. As well, there are cases where the traditional technique seems called for but is purposefully avoided. At about one hour and eleven minutes into the film, for example, our characters Bodhi (played by Edgar Ramírez) and Utah (Luke Bracey) race away from a mountain landslide on motorcycles. When the dust settles, they pause in a confrontation on two mountainous peaks, with one character near the camera and the other at a distance. The near character, Bodhi, is at screen right, and Utah, at a distance, coasts his motorcycle a bit further into the frame, facing the same direction as Bodhi (toward screen left).

This standoff is a perfect opportunity for a POV shot. The moment is exactly parallel to the confrontation between the men in the original film, where, as we have seen, POVs cued appropriately were used to heighten the emotional moment. To mark the changing relationship between the men, we might see—and identify with—Bodhi’s view of Utah now that he knows his “friend” is an FBI agent. Or we might see Utah’s view of Bodhi now that he knows Bodhi will endanger lives to achieve his goals.

We do not see either of these possibilities. Bodhi, near us, begins to turn his head. This could be a perfect cue for a POV, but it is not used. We cut to a standard over-the-shoulder view.

If we think of Baudry’s discussion of “découpage [shot breakdown before shooting] and montage [editing, or final assembly]”, there are two obvious possibilities. First, editor Greenberg, a champion of cued POV shots, is no longer interested in the technique. Second, director Core, trained by Rob Cohen’s externally-based shot selection, did not choose to gather the POV shots Greenberg might have wanted. There is a third, less obvious scenario: since the beautiful cinematography of the film is shot on top-of-the-line digital cinema cameras (an Arri Alexa XT plus and a Red Epic Dragon, according to IMDb) any use of the GoPro cameras produced in 2015 would have meant a jarring drop in visual quality. This restriction limits the available angles in difficult locations.

While there may be a few GoPro camera shots placed somewhere in the film, the primary “action cam” strategy depended on the use of a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. The weight of this unit is far lighter than a Red or Alexa but still quite significant compared to a tiny GoPro. The camera can (almost) match the look of the full-quality cinema cameras, and it is possible to wear it on a helmet mount. Since this can result in exhaustion, strain, or injury, however, it is often only used for the most critical shots. If a POV isn’t considered critical, it is simply not recorded, lost in the difficult mountainside tripod setups for the primary cameras.

What, then, of testing Gerald “Jerry” Greenberg’s editing choices at the end of his decades-long career? We think of a film editor as the person who will cut out all that is unnecessary and then make music with what remains. Yet, when an editor is not given the material needed, there are elements of film language that simply become impossible, inexpressible. In The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971), the use of cued POVs was key to Friedkin’s shooting strategy and central to the film’s expression. In Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991), Bigelow provided her editor (Howard E. Smith) with POV shots to add effect or emphasis, humour and surprise. In Point Break (Ericson Core 2015) we discover that technological advances are often paired with setbacks, as when early sound film techniques meant camera movement had to be rethought.

In documentary production it is expected that low budgets and limited access and the need to work in “real” space rather than imagined, repeatable, “cinematic space” will leave us missing shots and working with imperfect and problematic material. It is difficult to imagine a documentarian seeking out shots that will cue a POV, for example.

So what, then, is to be done with all the footage from helmet cams and the cameras held by our subjects? Is achieving “identification” by POV simply a dream?

Part Five: Documentary Identification, 2018

Baudry claims, “The movability of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the “transcendental subject”.[xxii] In the “Stairway to Heaven” (Errol Morris 2001) episode of First Person, the documentary series directed by Errol Morris, the camera moves, and, indeed, a transcendental subject is made manifest. But it is not as simple as that. We see, in an interview shot, Temple Grandin. “I think in pictures,” she says. “Pictures is my first language, and, you know, English is my second language.”[xxiii] As the camera begins to move through a livestock chute, at the level of a cow’s eye, she tells us:

I can be a cow walking through that system. I can be a person walking up and down the catwalk. I can be in a helicopter over the system. It’s just that simple; it’s just like having a video tape of it in your head.[xxiv]

Morris “flies” his camera along. It takes the identity of a cow. It takes the identity of Temple Grandin. It takes the identity of a dreamer. It takes the identify of a conceptualizer. It is a brilliant conflation of several identities at once, a perfect visual for his story on Grandin, “an autistic expert on the humane slaughter of cattle.” It is not cued. It is assumed. The style of the shot, when it is presented, the context, our understanding that the projected pictures on a wall or screen are structured by a language and intended to communicate to us—all of this replaces traditional cueing shots. What matters, if we are to have empathy, is that we read a view as connected to an identity, not simply as an artefact from a surveillance camera. It is this distinction, in fiction or nonfiction, that presents us with a chance to think and feel along with another human identity.

[i] William Friedkin, “Anatomy of a Chase – The French Connection,” DGA Quarterly (Fall 2006): n.p. http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/0603-Fall-2006/Feature-Anatomy-of-a-Chase.aspx. Original publication: Director’s Guild of America, “Anatomy of a Chase – The French Connection.” Action Magazine (March-April 1972).

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982), 53.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Metz, “Identification, Mirror,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 42-57.

[ix] Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 55.

[x] Ibid., 49.

[xi] Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film

Quarterly 28, No. 2 (Winter, 1974-1975): 39-47.

[xii] Ibid., 41.

[xiii] Ibid., 40.

[xiv] Ibid., 41.

[xv] Ibid., 43.

[xvi] Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 54.

[xvii] Katie Bird, “‘Dancing, Flying Camera Jockeys’: Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985,” The Velvet Light Trap 80 (2017): 48-65.

[xviii] Ibid., 51-52.

[xix] Brooke Comer, “Steadicam Hits Its Stride,” American Cinematographer 74, No. 2 (1993): 77.

[xx] Brooke Comer, “Steadicam Hits Its Stride,” American Cinematographer 73, No. 9 (1992): 82.

[xxi] Roger Ebert, “Point Break Movie Review & Film Summary (1991),” Roger Ebert, July 12,

1991. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/point-break-1991.

[xxii] Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 43.

[xxiii] Temple Grandin, Interview by Errol Morris, First Person, October 26, 2001, accessed October 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QCWeMHU6y0.

[xxiv] Ibid.

Notes on Contributor

Ted Fisher is a film director specializing in arts and culture documentaries. His short films have screened at over 30 festivals around the world. He produced 32 episodes of the ìFrugal Travelerî series for The New York Times, winning the Webby Award in the Travel Category for Online Film and Video in both 2008 and 2009. He earned an M.F.A. in Photography in 2003 from Claremont Graduate University. In 2017 he returned to school, attending the Filmmaking M.F.A. program at the University of Edinburgh. Filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3299032/

Bibliography 

Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28, No. 2 (Winter, 1974-1975): 39-47.

Bird, Katie. “”Dancing, Flying Camera Jockeys”: Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and

Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985.” The Velvet Light Trap 80 (2017): 48-65.

Comer, Brooke. “Steadicam Hits Its Stride.” American Cinematographer 73, No. 9 (1992): 82.

Comer, Brooke. “Steadicam Hits Its Stride.” American Cinematographer 74, No. 2 (1993): 77.

Ebert, Roger. “Point Break Movie Review & Film Summary (1991).” Roger Ebert, July 12, 1991. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/point-break-1991.

Foundas, Scott. “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing.” Variety, October 14, 2004.https://variety.com/2004/film/reviews/the-cutting-edge-the-magic-of-movie-editing-1200530187/.

 Friedkin, William. “Anatomy of a Chase – The French Connection.” DGA Quarterly, Fall 2006.http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/0603-Fall-2006/Feature-Anatomy-of-a-Chase.aspx. Original publication: Director’s Guild of America, “Anatomy of a Chase – The French Connection.” Action Magazine (March-April 1972).

Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Translated by Celi Britton. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982.

Filmography:

American History X. 1998. Directed by Tony Kaye.

Apocalypse Now. 1979. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Awakenings. 1990. Directed by Penny Marshall.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). 2014. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Directed by Arthur Penn.

Bloody Sunday. 2002. Directed by Paul Greengrass.

Blue Steel. 1990. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Bullitt. 1968. Directed by Peter Yates.

Cathedrals of Culture. 2014. Directed by Karim Aïnouz, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Margreth Olin, Robert Redford, Wim Wenders.

First Person (episode: Stairway to Heaven). 2001. Directed by Errol Morris.

Hardcore Henry. 2015. Directed by Ilya Naishuller.

Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. 2010. Directed by Michael Madsen.

Invincible. 2006. Directed by Ericson Core.

Jazz Dance. 1954. Directed by Roger Tilton.

Kramer vs. Kramer. 1979. Directed by Robert Benton.

Lady in the Lake. 1946. Directed by Robert Montgomery.

L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat. 1896. Directed by Auguste Lumière, Louis Lumière.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. 1989. Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik.

Near Dark. 1987. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Pina. 2011. Directed by Wim Wenders.

Point Break. 2015. Directed by Ericson Core.

Point Break. 1991. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Primary. 1960. Directed by Robert Drew.

Rendezvous. 1976. Directed by Claude Lelouch.

Russian Ark. 2002. Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 1991. Directed by James Cameron.

The Battle of San Pietro. 1945. Directed by John Huston.

The Bourne Supremacy. 2004. Directed by Paul Greengrass.

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing. 2004. Directed by Wendy Apple.

The Crash Reel. 2013. Directed by Lucy Walker.

The Fast and the Furious. 2001. Directed by Rob Cohen.

 The French Connection. 1971. Directed by William Friedkin.

The Revenant. 2015. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. 1974. Directed by Joseph Sargent.

The Tree of Life. 2011. Directed by Terrence Malick.

The Untouchables. 1987. Directed by Brian De Palma.

Making sense of the Transformers series (Michael Bay, 2007-2017) might seem a senseless task. The action sequences in these films present impossible and incomprehensible spaces, often hovering at the limits of our ability to make sense. Bay has stated that he does not “get hung up on continuity”, arguing rather that the “intensity of the action on screen doesn’t allow [the audience] to keep track of all these details”.[i] Thus, instead of spatially orienting the spectator in a scene, these films aim for a maximum of action and affect, a cacophony of movement and metal where space once was. The notion of continuity itself, and its purpose for the spectator, comes into question.

This article will stage the debate between the idea that Bay’s techniques are a form of “intensified continuity” – a term David Bordwell coins while analysing shortening average shot length of Hollywood films after 1960 – and the possibility that jettisoning the rules of continuity portends a favour of excessive affect.[ii] This latter position is developed by Steven Shaviro, who analyses “post-cinematic” films such as Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009). The crux of this terminological dispute is the status of continuity and the role it plays in the spectator’s engagement with a film – what kinds of sense and understanding do these films offer despite the speed of shots and broken trajectories of movement? Do we need cognitive traction on space to engage with the narrative, or are these films completely ignoring the basic tenets of classical Hollywood editing conventions, whereby the narrative becomes superfluous?

A clearly defined spatial sense forms an understanding of characters and identities that inhabit these spaces. With classical continuity editing, space is formed alongside the actions of characters on screen. Space is dictated by the whims and wiles of players in the drama, their attentions and vectors of intention; as André Bazin describes, a man awaiting his executioners directs his fear onto the door of his cell, and the subsequent close-up onto its handle is “justified psychologically by the victim’s concentration on the symbol of his extreme distress”.[iii] When the space of the film is haphazard and noisy, what does this mean for character psychology, the identities they attempt to forge in these messy spaces? My article will analyse this spatial noisiness in Bay’s films, figuring noise as a certain inaccessibility, a block to our normal ways of thinking and perceiving. When the editing is orthogonal to the psychology of characters there is an overload of information, whereby what is meant to be meaningful is not demarcated clearly by the film. This is what I am calling noise, and I will use its genealogy in both aesthetics and scientific discourses to argue for new ways of approaching the seemingly senseless nature of Bay’s films.

Against the proposition that Bay’s films index a general “dumbing-down” in society, it is important to emphasise that, as Michel Serres states, noise is “a sign of the increase in complexity”.[iv] Cecile Malaspina, in her recent work on noise as a problem of knowledge in the face of increasing complexity, expands on this by tracing the ambiguities of the concept of noise in information theory and cybernetics. Eschewing the urge to place noise on the negative side of a Manichean dichotomy, Malaspina focuses instead on the “constitutive role of noise in the formation of knowledge”, arguing that “noise can become possible information”.[v] Thus, instead of seeing the lack of spatial continuity in the Transformers films as a mistake or an aberration from good filmmaking, this article will read the noisiness of Transformers as a kind of information. If noise is a form of possible information, then perhaps Bay’s noisy films are indicative of future identities and modes of social reproduction. Encountering the groundlessness of noise and finding signal is the way “reason emancipates itself with acts of self-grounding”, contributing to a violent form of learning that this article will interrogate.[vi]

What is that Noise?

Noise is typically, in the analogue arts, denoted by the intrusion of the medium itself into the content of the work, it is the material basis of the form that makes itself heard or visible. With photography and cinema this entails a disruption of the indexicality of the image, as the content (that which was there in front of the apparatus) is haunted by the malfunctions of the machinic medium. Demarcating noise is thus a case of working out what was there and what the apparatus has added to this index. This is complicated when the digital conversion of light into 1s and 0s produces a form of pure information, a nonindexical ontology of images where noise cannot be so easily marked. This leaves an interesting position for noise in the digital paradigm.

Noise as an aesthetic technique has a long history in analogue arts, from Luigi Russolo to Stan Brakhage. As Juan A. Suarez evocates in the realm of structural film of the 1960s, there is often a fascination with “the dust, scratches, and lesions that the passage of time leaves on the strip”.[vii] He posits this as a direct opposition to mainstream film practices that sought to eliminate these forms of noise. Indeed, experimental filmmakers from Peter Gidal to Bill Morrison and Peter Tscherkassky have built their works around the intrusive side-effects of the film strip, the noise of the medium becoming the content. Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), for example, applies these aesthetic techniques to the already-existing film The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982) in order to bring out latent psychological trauma by confusing content and form, the threat to the characters on screen becoming an attack of the film strip itself. As Michele Pierson writes, the film “turns all the aggression that the cinema is capable of against its source material, but not without having to acknowledge this aggression as its own.”[viii] There is thus an inevitable grappling with the medium of film itself and its ramifications for the content being screened. These practices have also influenced art house cinemas from David Lynch to Gaspar Noé, who both utilize actual sonic noise for its disquieting effects, but also draw attention to mediation. Noise is thus engaged with for its modernist distancing effects and meta-cinematic properties.

Noise thus embodies a more fundamental aspect of communication in socio-cultural practice writ large. This is explored by Michel Serres in his 1980 work The Parasite, which plays on the multiple definitions of parasite in French: a biological intruder, a spatial demarcation (para-site), and static noise. Serres commits to a “rigorously fuzzy” evaluation of this term, emphasising noise as that which adheres in every interaction, the background which is always invisible.[ix] Importantly for my later analysis of the Transformers series, Serres emphasises the perspectival nature of noise, where “noise and message exchange roles according to the position of the observer and the action of the actor”.[x] Despite holding true to the messiness of communication, the pitfall of Serres’ approach to noise is precisely its lack of precision, making it an unwieldy concept. In Serres’ text Genesis, noise becomes a full-blown metaphysical principle, “the ground of our perception”.[xi] This is mirrored in Greg Hainge’s philosophy of noise whereby, like the universal orchestra depicted by string theory,[xii] noise is thus everywhere: “since all matter naturally vibrates in an elastic medium – a vacuum not being a natural earthly phenomenon –, all matter produces sound, its vibrations propagating vibrations in the medium surrounding it, creating sound waves”.[xiii] Noise is everything.

This approach can be hugely useful for conceptually solidifying analyses of invisible aspects of discourse, and indeed reality, as it was vital as a modernist art practice in bringing to the fore mediation. However, the evocative use of noisy and fuzzy conceptualization, and the often-haphazard way the concept is said to bridge the aesthetic and scientific domains, can lose its discursive efficacy in a similar sense to how Eugenie Brinkema depicts and criticises the turn to affect in the humanities. Brinkema evocates this theoretical obfuscation thus:

“Affect,” as turned to, is said to: disrupt, interrupt, reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for: the body, sensation, movement, flesh and skin and nerves, the visceral, stressing pains, feral frenzies, always rubbing against: what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name, what remains resistant, far away (haunting, and ever so beautiful); indefinable, it is said to be what cannot be written, what thaws the critical cold, messing all systems and subjects up.[xiv]

This is not to imply, of course, that analyses of noise ignore form, or that they use their concept with little concern for its epistemological boundaries. However, it is imperative that noise not become too mysterious as a concept; whilst admitting and embracing aspects of the conceptual noisiness that it implies, it is important not to allow noise to simply become a synonym for transgression. Noise can also often become a merely pseudo-scientific concept, but it is the tension between its scientific and aesthetic manifestations that creates the epistemological motor of the concept’s efficacy. Instead of using noise to ignore disciplinary boundaries and to homogenize concepts from an inevitably limited perspective, noise as a paradigm can create contradictions between ideas and fields that need to be engaged with. Along these lines, Malaspina posits that “to accept metaphorical warping […] must not mean to accept the intrusion of concepts coming from other fields of knowledge uncritically or without precision”.[xv] Noise can be resonant across the different fields that are incorporated, but the dissonances that arise through this messy metaphor and its analogical application must be appreciated. The paradigm of noise can be a mediating concept in the relations that pertain between practices, as long as it is not presumedo be a master key for conceptual clarity. Noise as evoked in aesthetic practices can be read alongside its formation as a concept in information theory in order to explore the resonances between these disciplines, and it is precisely the advent of digitality in cinema that makes this possible.

As opposed to noise as the flaws of the material, manifested by the analogue medium itself and revealing hidden aspects of discourse and indeed metaphysical reality, digital mediation does not add noise to the signal in the same way; it is “totally free of any imperfections”.[xvi] As the digital image becomes pure information, it is the epistemological problem of noise that will be my conceptual foothold for understanding the digitality of the Transformers series. If, as Dai Vaughan suggests, the indexical photograph is defined by a relation to its object which is a “necessary rather than a contingent one”, then the digital image is an introduction of further contingency into the image, it is the difficulty of separating the real and the fake.[xvii] Maintaining an epistemological framework for approaching this ontological ungroundedness of the digital is of utmost importance, even more true when we understand the notion of information as a phenomenon that pervades contemporary life. This leads us to the political imperative of studying these images, which, as Tiziana Terranova posits, become “types of bioweapons that must be developed and deployed on the basis of a knowledge of the overall informational ecology”.[xviii] Thus, understanding digital cinema as information requires placing it in the context of the so-called information age in which we live.

Cinema provides a set of images that interact with other images that flood the contemporary citizen from myriad screens and interfaces. As William Brown posits, with this “neverending information flow” we are required to “never be offline, always to be on call, always to be ready for work/action, even if we can never truly overcome the Sisyphean tasks beset us”.[xix] An information fatigue, coupled with the labour it necessitates, is a state where demarcating the line between the informative and the noisy is even more vital. Indeed, how we define information in the first place becomes of critical political importance, as its often naïve association with certainty leads to incoherent parroting of “facts”, “data” and “statistics” that ignore the constructed nature of these realities, and indeed the dogmatic image of thought which filters information through contingent mechanisms of demarcating information from noise. As Malaspina argues:

It is thus necessary to remain vigilant of the conflation of information and data especially in light of today’s culture of socially networked personal confessions, paired with the means for statistical data mining and hyper surveillance, which become all the more sinister when information is treated as a given, when data are treated as facts, and when information effectively eclipses uncertainty. We have the carelessness of rhetorical persuasion to thank for, if the era of ‘post-truth’ can fall back on the brandishing of statistics.[xx]

These political logics of information and the digital find a new dimension in modern culture through images, cinematic and otherwise. Using notions of noise developed by information theory in relation to the growing presence of the digital will allow new epistemological means of understanding the information stored in these proliferating images.

The birth of information as a concept can be traced to mathematician Claude Shannon. During the Second World War, Shannon was a cryptanalyst, and utilized research on code breakers to further his work on the “analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence”.[xxi] He discovered that “a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system” and this work thus fed into a broader creation of a mathematical theory of information.[xxii] Shannon’s insight was to divorce information from meaning, defining information, according to Warren Weaver in his introductory essay published alongside Shannon’s, as “a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message”.[xxiii] With this notion of information comes the possibility of noise in a system: something added to the message in the process of its mediation through channels. Noise here is the opposite of information – when trying to decode and decipher information, it is the extraneous noise that needs to be eliminated. However, this process of deciding information from noise, signal from distortion, is far from simple, and meets conceptual difficulties when the definition of information – as freedom of choice – is examined more closely.

This is indeed what Cecile Malaspina has done in her recent book on the topic, An Epistemology of Noise. Malaspina analyses how, for Shannon and Weaver, information is a measure of uncertainty, as higher levels of uncertainty in a system means a larger freedom of choice for the one selecting the message. Noise is actually an adding of further uncertainty in a message which paradoxically produces more freedom of choice in a noisy system. Weaver explains it thus:

If noise is introduced, then the received message contains certain distortions, certain errors, certain extraneous material, that would certainly lead one to say that the received message exhibits, because of the effects of the noise, an increased uncertainty. But if the uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though the noise were beneficial![xxiv]

The problem of deciding noise from information is complicated when both are measurements of uncertainty in a system. Malaspina declares that the result of this is that Shannon “prepared the ground for a philosophy of noise that evades the Manichean opposition between information and noise”.[xxv] Weaver attempts to escape this conceptual bind through a concept of intentionality, whereby “some of this information is spurious and undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the received signal we must subtract out this spurious portion.”[xxvi] However, Malaspina argues that intention “pertains only to semantic communication, where some form of consciousness can be presumed. But information theoretical concepts of information and noise have proven their relevance in fields that far outstrip problems of intentional communication.”[xxvii] For Malaspina, this means that deciding and dividing information from noise takes on new resonances, arguing that “the distinction between information and noise is a problem of ground or foundation of knowledge”.[xxviii] This fundamental challenge to knowledge and epistemology that noise presents will be vital in understanding the Transformers series, which revels in the excessive and the noisy.

Identity in Noise

The first film of the Transformers series was released in 2007, followed by Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Dark of the Moon (2011), Age of Extinction (2014), The Last Knight (2017) and most recently a spin-off prequel Bumblebee (Travis Knight, 2018). Unusually, all these films, except the most recent, have been directed by the same person, Michael Bay. The films are based on action figures created by Hasbro in the 1980s, and they are the 13th-highest-grossing film series, totalling $4.3 billion. Despite a plethora of online video essays and criticism, there is little sustained academic engagement with the franchise, with Steven Shaviro and William Brown most notably touching on the films briefly in their discussions of digital cinema, as well essays on the series in the special issue of Senses of Cinema titled “The Cinema of Michael Bay: Technology, Transformation, and Spectacle in the ‘Post-Cinematic’ Era”. For Shaviro, Transformers is typical for its channelling of post-cinematic affect, eschewing narrative and continuity in favour of the onslaught of technological speed. For Brown, Transformers seemingly contains avant-garde cinematic techniques, and he argues that the film’s use of strategies of movement and abstraction of colour make them examples of thought-inducing cinema. I will analyse both Shaviro’s and Brown’s perspectives on the films, before taking their arguments further to propose a way of approaching the series through the framework of information and noise. First, however, it is vital to understand how Bay’s films do break continuity rules, and how the impossible spaces of his scenes operate.

An early action sequence in the first Transformers finds the protagonist chasing his car to an old junkyard. The scene begins with an establishing shot of Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) family house, the camera in motion as it cranes diagonally down to the right whilst tilting up fractionally. The movement continues into a shot of Sam’s new car, the motion reversed as the camera peers into the driver’s seat revealing no-one behind the wheel. The noise of the car wakes Sam up, and a ceiling shot reveals him in bed as the camera moves again in the opposite direction to the last shot. A frenetic hand-held camera tracks Sam through his house as he makes it to the balcony to observe his car driving away, cutting to follow him getting to the top of the stairs, before cutting again to Sam exiting the door of the house to retrieve his bike. We watch Sam chase the car down the street, and the 180-degree rule of editing is adhered to. Sam is on the phone to the police and is travelling to the left across the screen, whilst a cut to the car he is pursuing shows the vehicle travelling frame right. As Sam rides his bike onto the road there are cuts between medium shots of him riding whilst on the phone, and a close-up on the back wheels of the bike travelling away from the camera. Despite the relatively hide speed of cuts in this sequence, the space of the action is understandable; they are travelling down the suburban road at a medium speed.

There is then a cut to the junkyard, and this is where the editing starts to ramp up. The car enters the frame from screen right, the back wheels beginning to spin. A cut takes us to the other side of the car, its direction flipped as the car revs up further, this shot lasting around 1 second. The car begins to move towards a closed gate as there is another cut, the direction of the car now away from the camera which is positioned behind the vehicle. The car hits the gate after an edit that places the camera on the floor looking up from the right of the vehicle. The gate opens away from the camera, but there is an immediate cut to a position on the other side of the gate as it is now opening towards us, the car moving right across the screen in a full shot partly obscured by the wire of the gate. Completing this 9-second sequence of the car that began with the establishing shot of the junkyard, the camera is then positioned at a high angle as the car moves diagonally upwards to the left of the screen, narrowly missing an oncoming freight train; it is the sixth shot in this short sequence. A jarring shift to a camera attached to the back of Sam’s bike then follows him as he enters the gate, the following shots ignoring the 180-degree rule of action as he approaches the train from the right, before reversing this as he moves from the left to wait for the train to pass, a high-angled shot showing Sam crossing the tracks and moving from frame right to frame left. The pace of the shots does in fact slow down at this point as the car turns into a robot in the distance, the camera closing into Sam’s face of awe as he reacts to the situation. In the action that follows, the space of the junkyard becomes less cognitively navigable and the speed of cuts increases. The dogs on guard in the junkyard chase Sam to a dome-like structure before seemingly disappearing as the car rescues Sam, who is then arrested, completing the scene.

The speed and movement of these sequences is nearly constant. This chase scene can in a sense be justified in its chaotic techniques through the psychological perspective of the character, although of course there is a disproportionate amount of these films spent in action sequences of this kind. What is even more telling is the use of such kinetic editing techniques with less psychologically motivated narrative framing. The sequence that follows – after a brief excursion into the military reaction to the ongoing situation with the transformers – presents this clearly. An establishing shot of the police station where Sam is being held is a low angle shot with slightly canted framing. The camera moves frame right across the building, a flare of light from the sun creating a further sense of motion. There is a cut to Sam being interrogated, and as with the beginning of the last sequence, the motion of the camera is reversed as we move to the left before reaching an over-the-shoulder shot of Sam. It seems that it does not matter what the content of the frame is for Bay, but that the continuation of motion is the sole concern.

As we have seen in this chase scene in the first Transformers, a coherent sense of space is confused by the breaking of classical continuity rules. Matthias Stork has shown the difference between these forms of, what he calls, “chaos cinema” and earlier action films such as Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998) that, even in high speed car chases, make the space in the frame cognitively navigable.[xxix] Stork points to the use of sound in chaos cinema as that which allows sense to be made, but generally bemoans what he evaluates as the slipping standards of the action film genre. Stork does however analyse the use of chaotic cinematic techniques in films such as The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) to argue for its possible positive uses. Kathryn Bigelow in this film uses chaos cinema in a psychologically motivated way, “to suggest the hyper-intensity of the characters’ combat experience and the professional warrior’s live-wire awareness of the lethal world that surrounds him”.[xxx] Stork argues that Bigelow “immerses viewers in the protagonists’ perspectives”.[xxxi] What Stork does not explore are the effects and corollaries of these spatially noisy films when it is not motivated by perspective.

Space in a film is clearly connected to character psychology, and the close-ups and cutaways of classical Hollywood are almost always employed to aid the development of on-screen identities. As Douglas Pye opines, “movies not only present a dramatic world but equally create and interpret it.”[xxxii] Spatial awareness is a factor in what Pye analyses as “point of view”, whereby the location of characters and place of the camera are important techniques for immersing the spectator in the fictional world. The editing of space was thus always a question of perspective, forging and putting into tension the points of view of filmic characters.

If the first half of Transformers can be said to have been the furthest Bay delved into character development, the following films shake off these concerns, and an analysis of how space is created in these films is vital for the understanding of these non-characters of the later Transformers films. William Brown argues that “characters in digital cinema no longer stand out as unique agents against the space that surrounds them, but instead become inseparable from that space”, and we can see this at work in Age of Extinction, the first of the franchise after Shia LaBeouf left the role as protagonist, replaced by Mark Wahlberg.[xxxiii]

Along with the idea of noisy space comes the creation of noisy identities, or rather characters who cannot take control of a situation which is always too much; it is their inability to properly react to noise that defines their identities. As Brown posits, “the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster does not really involve characters that willingly perform actions in pursuit of particular goals”.[xxxiv] Instead, there are only reactive characters, as can be seen by the series of events that befall Wahlberg’s protagonist, Cade Yeager. From the awakening of Optimus Prime, crashing through Cade’s house with him barely able to contain the situation, to the intrusion of government backed K.S.I. Industries soon after, where he, again, has to watch while exterior forces – including Optimus who makes an appearance just in time to save Cade’s daughter – run the show. When Cade does try to take matters into his own hands, infiltrating the K.S.I. Industries’ headquarters to gather information, he is captured and again the transformers come to the rescue.

Wahlberg’s character, defined mostly in relation to his daughter through the trope of the protective father, is purely reactive. Whereas films build character action and intention through psychologically motivated editing of space, the high speed of shots and resulting whir of frenetic movement leaves no space for character identity. Cade’s perspective is rarely grasped through editing, he can only react to changes and not develop his own agency or causal efficacy in the action sequences of the film.

This is true for all the characters in the Transformers series, as evidenced by the way other identities in the films are forged. Throughout the series, big-name actors are used, playing one-dimensional characters often riding on clichés and stereotypes. An example of this includes John Malkovich’s character in Dark of the Moon as an excessively ridiculous over-bearing boss-type. This is even more true of the transformers themselves, and the recourse to racial stereotypes that the films display. This ranges from robots that mimic caricatured “black” speech patterns, a samurai transformer, and a “Vietnam vet” robot voiced by John Goodman – a seeming reference to his character in The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998). Due to the nature of the CGI effects that form the transformers, they are often hard to tell apart. Imbuing these robots with racist caricatures is a way of trying to distinguish them without the character development that would result from psychologically motivated editing. Thus, along with the senselessness of space in these films comes a lack of characters. If Michael Bay does not get hung up on continuity, he also does not get hung up on character development.

If continuity is available for directors to present the perspectives of their characters, when no such point of view is available in the onslaught of noise, the question becomes if this is indeed a form of heightened continuity or something else altogether. We can argue that, although the films in the Transformers series are often confusing as narratives, there is in the end some semblance of story being developed. Intensified continuity thus contains within it the continued development of narrative elements, and indeed the possibility of, as Bruce Isaacs analyses, a reading of Bay’s series as inscribing a form of experiential and phenomenological continuity despite its breaking of obvious continuity rules.[xxxv] The notion of intensification thus acknowledges the intrusion of excessive spectacular techniques into continuity. In this regard, Stork argues that chaos cinema “seems to mark a return to the medium’s primitive origins, highlighting film’s potential for novelty and sheer spectacle”. This allusion to Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions brings with it the difficult relationship between spectacle and narrative. Drawing from the extensive literature of spectacle and narrative in cinema, William Brown concludes that “there is no absolute distinction between them”, and that narrative was always important even for early cinema.[xxxvi] Connecting continuity to this notion of narrative thus leaves little place for a “post-continuity” within narrative film – there must be some continuity for there to be any story at all. For Shaviro, the overriding focus changes with post-continuity, where “a preoccupation with immediate effects trumps any concern for broader continuity – whether on the immediate shot-by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative.”[xxxvii] But this leads to a conceptually muddy means of analysis, that of weighing up if a film seems to be placing more emphasis on spectacular and excessive editing for affective purposes, or on techniques that further the plot.

Since, as we have seen, continuity is necessary for a sense of on-screen identity and psychology, then character creation can be one parameter for working out this distinction. In this sense, post-continuity could define a form of “post-agency” or “post-character”. Post-continuity indexes the difficulty of demarcating signal from noise that classical continuity intended to make clear but invisible, and the inability for characters to cope with an overload of information thus becomes their sole defining identity trait. This means that aspects of post-continuity have been present throughout the history of cinema, especially what Gilles Deleuze terms the “time-image,” which includes characters who lose agency: they stop being “doers” and become “pure seers”.[xxxviii] The reactive nature of characters in the Transformers series means they lack a fundamental agency. In the noise of Bay’s spatial incoherence, we thus find a different kind of signal. If the heroes of these films cannot react, this itself is something we must navigate as a symptom; agency is a problem, and the films dramatize a lack of agency through noisy spatiality. The overload of technology, both in the films with the constant invasions of alien robots, but also of the CGI-laden films themselves, are a ground that swallows the figures of the film. But we must ask what this means for a notion of spectator agency.

Information in Chaos

It is the place of the spectator in the Transformers series that can explicate the effect of the impossible spaces and characters of the films, asking how to make sense both affectively but also cognitively whilst engaging with the screen, and how this can be subsumable in the boundaries of reason. Shaviro takes the notion of post-continuity to suggest a surpassing of reason whereby it is merely an affective level at which these films work, and “editing no longer signifies”. For Brown, however, this amounts to a 21^st-century sublime: “once the body is pushed to its cognitive limits, so too is reason left struggling to keep up. And yet it is only by having reason challenged that thought can move beyond its ‘automatic’ functioning and we actually come to think.”[xxxix] Thus, the importance of this intensified form of continuity is the ability for reason to re-ground itself; this section will expand on Brown’s assertion of these films as thought-inducing by applying the framework of information and noise, emphasising the ability to reappraise this boundary as the founding act of reason.

Whilst the characters in the Transformers series always only react to situations outside of their control – a corollary of a psychologically unmotivated sense of space formed through editing – it is here that the spectator finds a higher faculty at work. Noise is not a block on reason but an increased disorder which means a higher freedom of choice in the message; the films present us with too much to make sense, but it is precisely this that allows different kinds of sense to be deciphered in the noise – this is the way the films force us to think. Whilst we have analysed a lack of character agency, a lack of identity beyond stereotypes and star vehicles, it is thus a notion of spectator agency that will allow us to understand the kinds of thinking that these films produce. Added noise means more uncertainty; although this threatens to make the films “senseless” – in terms of space but also narrative and character as we have seen – it also paradoxically means greater possible information.

Through this understanding of new forms of spectator agency we can escape the simplistic assertion that films such as the Transformers series are merely “bad”, or as Stork opines on chaos cinema in general, “lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment”, where instead of engaging the audience “it bludgeons you until you give up”.[xl] Shaviro takes issue with the evaluative approach that Stork adopts, arguing that “it is inadequate simply to say that the new action films are merely vapid and sensationalistic”.[xli] The place of the spectator here is more interesting than a merely passive receptacle for mayhem; as Bruce Reid posits: “We the audience practically become co-creators of the film, which is so poorly constructed that organizing the disparate elements is left up to us.”[xlii] It seems that with noisy and chaotic space, we have to find the information, or as Aylish Wood argues in relation to digital imaging and innovations in screen culture, there is an emergence of new forms of agency: “The competing elements of interfaces offer a different mode of experience and perception, one in which agency can be gained through the process of making sense of the fragmented images.”[xliii] Instead of allowing Bay’s films to bludgeon us with affect, there thus becomes space for a different sense to be made.

This kind of sense that we can glean from Transformers thus moves beyond the purely affective register. For Shaviro, the excessiveness of post-continuity editing is an affective mapping of the future, a kind of aesthetic training, which entails accepting fate in relation to the runaway feedback loops of technological encroachment: “Intensifying the horrors of contemporary capitalism does not lead them to explode, but it does offer us a kind of satisfaction and relief, by telling us that we have finally hit bottom, finally realized the worst.”[xliv] This is darkly and ironically mirrored by Bay’s own announcement on the DVD extras of Armageddon (1998) that “I had to train everyone to see the world like I see the world.”[xlv] However, the framework of noise entails an epistemological function of information, where training can be understood as a form of learning. Noise as an epistemological paradigm is based on reason’s capability for self-grounding; an important aspect of the process of learning is the ability to forge a distinction between information and noise. The first step therefore in this labour of reason is to disrupt what is held commonly as an assumed demarcation between information and noise; the noisy space in the Transformers is a kind of possible information that we can decipher by re-grounding reason. We do not just feel the future, but these futural messages make us think differently.

The Transformers series presents its spaces and characters as much on the surface as possible, from the speed of its adrenaline-fuelled editing, to its caricatured one-dimensional characters. This also holds for the films’ ideological positions, that, without the invisible editing of classical Hollywood, must also remain on the surface, as opposed to being subsumed within the common-sense psychological motivations of the perspectives created partly through spatial orientation. In this way, it becomes possible to ignore Bay’s incessant championing of military forces, objectification of female characters, and insufferable flag-waving nationalism. In the noise of these problematic aspects, different signals can be found, and reason can be re-grounded.

This thus becomes a question of how we can cope with an overload of noise. For Shaviro, the mayhem of post-continuity films is felt as a cognitive catastrophe, a future shock that we can mostly feel. These films become prophecies for a progression into an inhuman capitalist world, affectively and cognitively mapping “the contours of the prison we find ourselves in”.[xlvi] Bay’s future is clearly seen in Transformers as it basks in the commercial extravagance of society, enacting even further technological development by envisioning this progression as an alien force; technology is divorced from a notion of human agency, and the alienness of the transformers dramatizes a world where technology is thinking about itself, with its own interests often orthogonal to ours. However, this thought can be pushed further as the process of cognitive mapping is a re-grounding of reason that needs to be explicated. These films do not just help us feel around in the dark cell of late capitalism, but this epistemic trauma is itself a vital aspect of learning. Malaspina elaborates on the parallels between learning and mental states of noise involved in anxiety-related conditions, stating that “noise is, like disorder, an inconceivable freedom of choice”. Whilst the information age demands a damaging passive form of openness to excessive stimuli, watching Transformers can be an intentional encounter with an anxiety-inducing freedom of choice in a message teaming with the increased uncertainty of noise.

What I am arguing for is not merely an “open-minded” approach to these films, or a meagre bromide on the importance of reading them against the grain. It is a form of willed openness to trauma that these films require, such that, as Malaspina opines, “in order to maintain one’s health one has to risk one’s health.”[xlvii] Making sense of Transformers is indeed a senseless task, an activity in dissolving one’s boundaries of self and sense, embracing a vertiginous freedom of choice precisely as a catalyst for reason’s self-grounding. The affective rush of the films cannot be an end in itself, but a progression into emancipating reason, redrawing the lines between information and noise. Coping with Transformers becomes an exercise in finding signal in noisy excess, a flexing of reason as a politically radical act, affirming agency over the reactive identities of the films’ characters. Transformers certainly contributes to a maddening overload of noise for the spectator, but it is precisely this epistemological state of noise that can keep us sane.

Notes

[i] Quoted in Frederick Tilby Jones, “Beyond Continuity  –  3. Post Continuity Cinema: Technology and Television,” Medium.com (August, 2013) < https://medium.com/hope-lies-at-24-frames-per-second/beyond-continuity-3-post-continuity-cinema-technology-and-television-b907064235dc > [Accessed October 31, 2018].

[ii] David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 16–28.

[iii] André Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” in What Is Cinema? (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 228.

[iv] Michel Serres, The Parasite [1980], trans. Lawrence R Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 67.

[v] Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 9, 50.

[vi] Malaspina, 217.

[vii] Juan A. Suarez, “Structural Film: Noise,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Redrobe and Jean Ma (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008), 69.

[viii] Michele Pierson, “Special Effects in Martin Arnold’s and Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinema of Mind,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 28, no. 2–3 (2006): 29.

[ix] Serres, The Parasite, 57.

[x] Serres, 66.

[xi] Michel Serres, Genesis [1982], trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 7.

[xii] “With the discovery of superstring theory, musical metaphors take on a startling reality, for the theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the cosmos.” Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999), 366.

[xiii] Greg Hainge, Noise Matters (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.

[xiv] Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (London: Duke University Press, 2014), xii.

[xv] Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise, 96.

[xvi] Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology – from Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 204.

[xvii] Dai Vaughan, For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 182.

[xviii] Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 141.

[xix] William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 92–93.

[xx] Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise, 142.

[xxi] Quoted in James Gleick, Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 215.

[xxii] Quoted in Gleick, 216.

[xxiii] Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 9.

[xxiv] Shannon and Weaver, 19.

[xxv] Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise, 18.

[xxvi] Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 19.

[xxvii] Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise, 63.

[xxviii] Malaspina, 26.

[xxix] Matthias Stork, “Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking” (Video Essay, 2011), < https://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-Essay-Chaos-Cinema-the-Decline-and-Fall-of-Action-Filmmaking-132832/ > [Accessed October 30, 2018].

[xxx] Stork.

[xxxi] Stork.

[xxxii] Douglas Pye, “Movies and Point of View,” Movie 36 (2000): 3.

[xxxiii] Brown, Supercinema, 2.

[xxxiv] Brown, 92.

[xxxv] Bruce Isaacs, “The Mechanics of Continuity in Michael Bay’s Transformers Franchise,” Senses of Cinema 75 (June 2015).

[xxxvi] Brown, Supercinema, 86.

[xxxvii] Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 123.

[xxxviii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Gala (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 41.

[xxxix] Brown, Supercinema, 138.

[xl] Stork, “Chaos Cinema.”

[xli] Steven Shaviro, “Post-Continuity: An Introduction,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME books, 2016), 53.

[xlii] Reid, “Defending the Indefensible.”

[xliii] Aylish Wood, Digital Encounters (London: Routledge, 2007), 79.

[xliv] Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 44.

[xlv] Quoted in Bruce Reid, “Defending the Indefensible: The Abstract, Annoying Action of Michael Bay,” Film Quarterly, July 6, 2000.

[xlvi] Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 137.

[xlvii] Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise, 185.

Notes on Contributor

Laurence Kent is an LAHP-funded PhD candidate in the Film Studies department of King’s College London. Under the supervision of Professor Sarah Cooper, he is currently researching the metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophy.

Bibliography

Bazin, André. “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation.” In What Is Cinema?, 215–49. Montreal: Caboose, 2009.

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

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. London: Duke University Press, 2014.

Brown, William. Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert              Caleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Enticknap, Leo. Moving Image Technology – from Zoetrope to Digital. London: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Gleick, James. Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. London: Fourth Estate, 2012.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999.

Hainge, Greg. Noise Matters. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Isaacs, Bruce. “The Mechanics of Continuity in Michael Bay’s Transformers Franchise.” Senses of Cinema 75 (June 2015).

Jones, Frederick Tilby. “Beyond Continuity — 3. Post Continuity Cinema: Technology and Television,” Medium.com, August 2013. Accessed 31 October, 2018. < https://medium.com/hope-lies-at-24-frames-per-second/beyond-continuity-3-post-continuity-cinema-technology-and-television-b907064235dc >

Malaspina, Cecile. An Epistemology of Noise. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Pierson, Michele. “Special Effects in Martin Arnold’s and Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinema of Mind.” Discourse 28, no. 2–3 (2006): 28-50.

Pye, Douglas. “Movies and Point of View.” Movie 36 (2000): 2–34.

Reid, Bruce. “Defending the Indefensible: The Abstract, Annoying Action of Michael Bay.” Film Quarterly, July 6, 2000.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite [1980]. Translated by Lawrence R Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

———. Genesis [1982]. Translated by Genevieve James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.

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

———. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

———. “Post-Continuity: An Introduction.” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 51–64. Falmer: REFRAME books, 2016.

Stork, Matthias. “Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking.” Video Essay, 2011. Accessed 30 October, 2018. < https://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-Essay-Chaos-Cinema-the-Decline-and-Fall-of-Action-Filmmaking-132832/ >.

Suarez, Juan A. “Structural Film: Noise.” In Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Edited by Karen Redrobe and Jean Ma, 62–89. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Wood, Aylish. Digital Encounters. London: Routledge, 2007.

Filmography

Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998)

The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)

Bumblebee (Travis Knight, 2018)

The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982)

Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009)

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)

Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998)

Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay, 2009)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011)

Transformers: Age of Extinction (Michael Bay, 2014)

Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017)

In the cinema, Scotland has often been used as a space of transformation. According to Duncan Petrie:

Viewed from the centre, Scotland is a distant periphery far removed from the modern, urban and cosmopolitan social world inhabited by the kind of people involved in the creation of such images. Consequently, Scotland tends to be represented as a picturesque, wild and often empty landscape, a topography that in turn suggests certain themes, narrative situations and character trajectories. Central to this is idea of remoteness—physical, social, moral—from metropolitan rules, conventions and certainties. Scotland is consequently a space in which a range of fantasies, desires and anxieties can be explored and expressed; alternatively an exotic backdrop for adventure and romance, or a sinister oppressive locale beyond the pale of civilization. (2000, 32)

While sometimes these spaces are coded as feminine, as Petrie notes of films set in the Jacobite past (2000, 67), Scottish national identity has traditionally been constructed as masculine. As David McCrone argues:

(…) those identities diagnosed as archetypically Scottish by friend and foe alike—the Kailyard, Tartanry and Clydesidism—have little place for women. There is no analogous ‘lass o’pairts’; the image of Tartanry is a male-military image (and kilts were not a female form of dress); and the Clydeside icon was a skilled, male worker who was man enough to care for his womenfolk. Even the opponents of these identities took them over as their own images of social life. (2001, 142)

Likewise, representations of Scotland in cinema have generally constructed Scottish identity as masculine. Films from the early-to-mid twentieth century, such as Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli 1954), Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick 1949), or Floodtide (Frederick Wilson 1949), made use of the stereotypical tropes of tartanry, Kailyard, and Clydesidism. Productions from the 1980s onward that played with “Scotch myths” and constructions of Scottishness, such as Local Hero (Bill Forsyth 1983) or Orphans (Peter Mullan 1998), often still assumed an underlying masculinity or male dominance. Moreover, those films from the new century in which ethnic and racial identities were considered also fell into line with traditionally gendered genre expectations: male leads for the “masculine” gangster films such as Strictly Sinatra (Peter Capaldi 2001) or American Cousins (Don Coutts 2003) and female ones for the “feminine” romances such as Ae Fond Kiss … (Ken Loach 2004) or Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar 2006).

With very few exceptions such as Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc 1996), The Winter Guest (Alan Rickman 1996), and experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait’s Blue Black Permanent (1992), Scottish films of the 1990s like Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1995) or Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones 1995) may have explored the question of gender, but only in terms of questioning traditional and alternative Scottish masculinities. According to Jane Sillars and Myra Macdonald, the crisis of masculinity that marked the decade served as a metaphor for Scotland as a stateless nation, in that both were “haunted by anxieties about identity and a secure ‘place’ in the world” (2008, 187). In the 2000s, however, there would be a shift away from this emphasis on masculine Scottish identities to questions of how race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality complicate our understanding of a Scottish national identity. A politically devolved Scotland could no longer be considered a completely stateless nation, and so the link that Sillars and Macdonald described between masculinity in crisis and questions of Scottish nationhood arguably began to break down. Furthermore, changes in funding opportunities increasingly led Scottish filmmakers into co-production deals with European, particularly Scandinavian, partners, which often resulted in films that were less overtly concerned with themes of nation and national identity (Murray 2012, 405), such as Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), The Last Great Wilderness (David Mackenzie, 2002) and Aberdeen (Han Peter Moland, 2000).

As much as films were indicative of a change in the way Scottish identity was understood, elements of traditional ‘Scotch myths’ representations were still present, especially in mainstream commercial cinema. The most prominent example of this from the early part of the twenty-first century is the Disney/Pixar film Brave (Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews 2012), a computer animated fairy tale set in an ancient Highland kingdom. However, a closer examination of Brave will suggest that stereotypical representations of Scotland were no longer being taken at face value, and even Hollywood was beginning to provide space for a wide range of alternative Scottish identities.

In this article I will consider how Brave and Andrea Arnold’s debut feature Red Road (2006), foreground and explore Scottish female identities and experiences. Both films have female protagonists, are directed or co-directed by women, and were shot using digital technology. But in other ways they also have some significant differences. Red Road is an independent film that can be classified as “art cinema” whereas Brave is a Hollywood film. While Red Road was shot entirely on location in Glasgow, Brave’s Scotland is entirely a CGI-generated fantasy space. Bringing together two films of extremely different styles, genres and production contexts can show that the re-evaluation of Scottish identities and spaces is occurring across cinemas and cultures. Furthermore, despite their differences, what these two films have in common is that they reimagine Scottish identity as female, whether by troubling commonly held assumptions about national identity or by constructing Scotland—both its urban centres and its rural peripheries—as female spaces. For Sillars and Macdonald, such re-imaginings can draw “attention to the porousness of both place and identity in the new globalised economy” (2008, 194). In this way, the films considered here facilitate a more open and fluid approach to the construction of (Scottish) identity that is inclusive of female experiences.

 

Red Road, the Gaze and Urban Spaces

            Red Road is the first feature for director Andrea Arnold, whose previous film Wasp had won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short in 2004. The film can be understood in the context of European cinema or transnational filmmaking given that it was a Scottish-Danish co-production. It was the first production made under the Advance Party scheme, a three-film co-production agreement between the Glasgow-based Sigma Films and the Danish Zentropa Entertainments[i]. Along with having to be shot on digital video in six weeks on a fixed budget, Advance Party films would all be made in Scotland by first-time feature directors and had to feature the same set of characters created by the Danish filmmakers Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen.

Given the film’s Scandinavian ties, some film scholars have argued that Red Road downplays any sense of national identity. According to Jonathan Murray, Red Road privileges the interior and the personal over the national and political. He argues that:

[…] the location that most interests Red Road is not the ‘real place’, but rather, an alternative location intensely private and psychological in nature. It is certainly true that local socio-cultural specificity—most notably, the endemic deprivation that blights many of Glasgow’s dilapidated public housing schemes—plays an important role within Arnold’s movie. But that milieu is not depicted as a self-sufficient end in itself. Instead, it functions as a means to make visible—and thus, understandable—the complex and unspoken individual trauma that lies at Red Road’s (broken) heart. (Murray 2015, 98-99)

It follows that Glasgow and its Red Road estate could be any tower block in any city in the world.

For David Martin-Jones, Red Road’s deliberate avoidance of engagement with the national is what made it successful in an international art cinema market: “In this new, global arena of world cinema (…) it is not self-othering that is needed so much as a greater eradication of the self/nation, a process which creates films that literally anyone can engage with” (2009, 229). Universal appeal has become of greater importance than national concerns. Given this, as well as the Danish involvement in the project, academics have understood Red Road as fitting more into the traditions of European cinema than of Scottish or British. Murray explains its Europeanness:

it [Red Road] attempts to find a visual language capable of representing the most extreme aspects of grief, not to mention the (self-)destructive actions the experience of such pain propels individuals towards. Both in its decision to subjugate narrative coherence and variety of incident to a psychological exploration of female interiority and sexuality and in its determination to inhabit rather than explain an especially intolerable individual experience of loss, Red Road accords generally with the aims of the European art cinema tradition as conventionally defined. (2007, 86)

Because it seems to fit so well into the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of European art cinema, Red Road can be perceived as a more international than a nationally specific film.

However, in its production context and press reception, Red Road still bears a strong Scottish identity. In addition to the involvement of Sigma Films, it uses Scottish actors and was filmed entirely on location in Glasgow and features some of the city’s most iconic buildings[ii].

In print reviews, the film’s Glasgow setting and locations are the ways in which Red Road is most consistently identified as Scottish[iii]. For a film that could be set anywhere, critics seem keen to remind their readers of the actual place Red Road portrays. The perceived authenticity of its setting firmly associates it with Scotland. Film critics also connect Red Road to trends and traditions in Scottish filmmaking, chiefly miserablism[iv], which portrays Scotland as an inescapably bleak place[v], and Clydesidism[vi]. There is a tendency to liken the film to other Scottish filmmakers like Bill Douglas[vii] and Bill Forsyth[viii]. These examples all serve to illustrate how Red Road can be understood in a Scottish context, one that, as we will see, allows us to explore the lives of Scottish women.

Red Road focuses on the character of Jackie (Kate Dickie), a CCTV operator who seems disconnected from the world around her. Nothing—not even a family wedding or an affair with a co-worker—gives her pleasure and her only positive engagement with the world seems to be watching her fellow Glaswegians, who regularly appear on her monitors going about their daily business. One evening, while watching a couple fornicating behind a garage, Jackie is shocked to recognise the man’s face. We learn few details: his name is Clyde and he has recently served time in prison for an unnamed offence. Jackie begins stalking Clyde (Tony Curran), first on CCTV, and then by following him in person. She sneaks into a party at his flat in the notorious Red Road tower blocks, and later turns up at the pub when he is there, going back to his place for sex, after which Jackie accuses Clyde of rape. We then learn that Jackie has framed him because, while he was on drugs, Clyde had killed Jackie’s husband and daughter in a car accident. But Jackie subsequently withdraws her accusation; she meets with Clyde and they talk about their guilt. Jackie is finally able to let go—she agrees with her in-laws to have her family’s ashes spread—and engage with life again.

With its grimy depiction of Glasgow housing estates and their undertones of seedy criminality, Red Road seems to echo other films such as Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay 1999) and Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach 2002) or the long-running television crime series Taggart (STV 1983-2010) that represent Glasgow as a tough, impoverished urban space. One of the key ways in which Red Road diverges from such films, however, is in having a female protagonist, particularly one who actively holds the power of the gaze. Jackie’s life revolves around the act of looking. In the very first scene, Arnold cuts from a bank of monitors to an extreme close-up of Jackie, and then back to a montage of close-ups of the individual monitors. This is a frequently recurring visual pattern throughout the film. Even away from work, Jackie continues to watch the world around her. At her sister-in-law’s wedding, there is a similar shot pattern when the couple comes out of the church. The bride and groom are presented in a shaky, hand-held style whereas the shots of Jackie are more static. This makes it seem as if she is watching a wedding video, detached rather than being actively part of the event. Jackie cannot connect to people in the real world, though she gets pleasure from observing them on her monitors. Jackie smiles when watching the man and his sick dog on CCTV, yet when she runs into him on the street she clearly wants to say something to him, but cannot bring herself to do so. In addition, Jackie seems equally detached from the affair she and a co-worker are having. During their tryst, she stares blankly out the car window; when he asks her if she climaxed, she unconvincingly tells him she did. By contrast, when Jackie watches Clyde and the girl’s outdoor coupling (before she recognises him), she becomes aroused, breathing heavier and suggestively caressing her joystick. Jackie takes vicarious pleasure in those she watches.

The cinematic gaze, too, is a vicarious pleasure, but one reserved for men. Women in the cinema are rendered as objects on display for both the men in the films who look at them, and by the patriarchal cinematic apparatus that watches them watching. According to Laura Mulvey, “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen” (1975, 11-12). While there has been much debate in the decades that have followed the publication of Mulvey’s seminal work of feminist film theory as to just how totalising the gaze is[ix], Red Road subverts the gaze by making it female. Arnold constructs Glasgow as a space in which women do the looking—and possess scopic power.

According to Jessica Lake, Red Road provides an example of sub-veillance: as opposed to sousveillance, in which the surveilled look back at the surveillers, sub-veillance is when the watching is done by the subaltern (2010, 235). For Lake, “Red Road presents ‘sub-veillance’ as a way of inhabiting spaces, rather than merely a practice of looking. It re-presents the practice of sub-veillance as a process of traversing multiple screens and creating new geographies and lines of motion” (2010, 238). It is not just about watching, then, it is about inhabiting and interacting with the observed space.

Thus Jackie goes from being a passive viewer to an active participant. When she first sees Clyde on her monitor, he also figuratively arouses her into taking action against him. But her initial attempts to stalk him with CCTV cameras prove ineffective; she cannot get her revenge from where she watches above, and so she must come down and enter his world. Overall, leaving her perch has a positive effect on Jackie in that she ultimately derives pleasure or benefit from the experience. For one thing, whereas she took no joy in her co-worker, her sexual encounter with Clyde brings her to enthusiastic climax, despite the fact that this was initiated as an act of revenge. For another thing, confronting and then forgiving Clyde brings Jackie closure and allows her to move on from the deaths of her husband and child. Jackie is finally ready to be a part of the world again, and when she meets the man with the (now new) dog on the street once more, she is able to talk to him.

More importantly, however, becoming an active participant causes Jackie to rethink her act of looking. For one thing, it causes her to change her mind about some things she assumed before. When she sees Clyde talking to a teenage girl outside a school, Jackie assumes the worst, but later she learns that this is Clyde’s daughter. When Jackie observes the girl, over CCTV, going to the Red Road flats to talk to her father, she decides to drop the charges against him. Here Jackie sees Clyde as another parent and realises, as someone who did not get to experience her own daughter growing up, how cruel it would be to send him back to prison. For another, it causes her to look at herself. After Clyde’s roommate relates the comments Clyde made about her attractiveness, Jackie looks at her own body. At first, we see her reflection as she looks at her naked body in the bathroom mirror—she is still shown in the act of looking—but then she is framed in the doorway as she twists around to look at her backside. She is simultaneously looking and being looked at—both by herself and by the viewer. She looks at herself literally and metaphorically, why she is doing what she is, but also as a spectator or object.

In the end, as Jackie talks to the man with the dog, the camera zooms out to show the whole street from above, as if on surveillance camera. Jackie here becomes part of the scene on view for a nameless spectator—another possible CCTV operator, but also the film’s viewer. In moving from a passive to an active viewer, Jackie becomes both the watcher and the watched. In doing so, she inhabits this particular space, Glasgow. Jackie’s act of sub-veillance, then, transforms Glasgow into a site of female spectatorship and pleasure.

 

Brave: Reclaiming the Periphery

Far from Red Road’s gritty urban milieu, Brave, with its princess and fairy tales, seems to fit more in the realm of Disney. It is computer animator Pixar’s thirteenth feature film[x] and has a different feel to Pixar’s previous features, most of which feature talking creatures or inanimate objects. It was their first feature with a historical setting, and, more importantly, the first with a female protagonist. It was also Brenda Chapman’s first time directing a feature film for Pixar[xi]. Chapman developed the film, which had been inspired by some of the problems she had encountered raising her own daughter (Diu 2012, 26-29, 31). Midway through production, however, Chapman was fired over creative differences (Braund 2012, 80-84) and replaced by Mark Andrews who had been on Brave’s creative team and had previously directed shorts for Pixar.

The film is set in a Highland kingdom in the distant past[xii]. Tomboyish Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly MacDonald) would rather spend her time outdoors riding her horse or shooting the bow and arrows her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), gave her than suffering the lady-like lessons given by her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson). Merida learns that she must marry a son of one of the three Clan Lords (Robbie Coltrane, Craig Ferguson, and Kevin McKidd) to be determined by a contest of strength. Merida balks—she does not want to give up her freedom for dull courtly duties—but Elinor insists that this is a tradition that must be carried out for the good of the kingdom, so Merida chooses archery for the competition and enters herself. As the lords’ sons are unappealing and ineffectual, Merida wins, angering the lords, who brawl with Fergus. After a row with Elinor in which she slashes the family tapestry and her mother throws her bow on the fire, Merida rides out into the woods, where blue will-o-the-wisps lead her to a witch’s cottage. Merida gets the witch (Julie Walters) to sell her a spell that will change her mother’s mind. But the spell has an entirely different effect; Elinor is transformed into a bear, the animal Fergus despises after having lost his leg in a fight with the monstrous Mordu. After escaping the castle with the help of her rambunctious triplet brothers, Merida and bear-Elinor go looking for the witch, but only find the cryptic message she left that they must repair what had been broken. While in the wilderness, Elinor and Merida bond as Merida teaches her how to fish, but it is clear the longer Elinor remains a bear, the less likely she is to return to human form. They discover that Mordu was under the same spell as Elinor, and hurry back to the castle, where Merida makes a speech that convinces the lords to let their children choose who they marry. Before they can repair the tapestry, Elinor is discovered and pursued out into the woods. Merida, sewing the tapestry as she rides, rushes to save her mother from Fergus; Mordu attacks Merida, Fergus, and the lords, but Elinor defeats him. Merida uses the tapestry to save her mother, and order is finally restored to both the kingdom and the family.

Brave clearly draws on familiar representational tropes in its construction of Scotland. The two female identities offered in the film—dour Elinor and feisty Merida draw on familiar stereotypes of Scottish women found in Tartanry and Kailyard representations[xiii]. Furthermore, the vague historical setting, the castles and landscapes rendered in fine detail, kilted warriors, Celtic carvings and designs, and even Merida’s fiery hair (and matching personality) are all reminiscent of Tartanry. So too the folk tale-like structure of the narrative; it suggests Scotland is a magical place, one that is back in the mists of time. As Cairns Craig has suggested of many examples in Scottish culture, it constructs Scotland out of the forward movement of History:

By the very power of the model of history which they purveyed to the rest of Europe, the Enlightenment philosophers and Scott reduced Scottish history to a series of isolated narratives which could not be integrated into the fundamental dynamic of history: in Scotland, therefore, narrative became part of the world that was framed by art, while the order of progress could only be narrated from somewhere else—it would be ungraspable in a Scottish environment (1996, 39).

The production team’s perception of Scotland reinforces this: according to Mark Andrews, “Scotland is one of my favourite places in the world. The rich history, the weathered stones and trees, the landscapes carved by time—for me, it’s a place unlike any other, one that exudes story and legend and myth and magic” (Chapman and Andrews 2012, 9).

In this respect, the film has much in common with other films such as Highlander and Rob Roy that construct Scotland as a fantasy or historical space, but arguably the film to which Brave can be most directly compared is Brigadoon (1954). As the story goes, the real Scottish locations scouted for the Brigadoon were not “Scottish” enough for Arthur Freed, the producer, so Scotland was recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. For Colin McArthur, this re-creation revealed the constructed nature of Scotch myths (2003:115). Brigadoon can be understood as “the working through of the personal obsession of its director (…) with the question of illusion and reality—this representation is revealed as the dream par excellence” (McArthur 1982, 47). The studio set and dream-like nature of the mise-en-scène shows that the Scotland here represented is deeply rooted in the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, a pervasive ideology which constructs Scotland and the Scots as a people and place as “others” onto which desires, fears, etc. can be projected (McArthur 2003, 12).

Brave goes beyond Brigadoon through its use of computer animation: not only is the Scotland we see in this film not an actual Scottish location, but it has also never existed in any physical space. Pixar took great pains to make aspects of the CGI imagery seem real. New software was created to animate hair and cloth realistically (McIver 2012, 47), and the film was released in 3-D, giving it greater illusion of depth. Chapman, Andrews, and the rest of the creative team also took extensive research trips to Scotland, where detailed sketches were made of landscape, flora, and fauna[xiv]. In addition, the voice cast, most of whom were Scottish actors and comedians, were encouraged to use their native accents and to introduce appropriate idioms into the dialogue (Pendreigh 2012, 7). On the one hand, we could read this pursuit of authenticity cynically, as a way to efface or distract from the constructed nature of the film’s “Scotland”. On the other hand, the publicising of these technical achievements and the lengths that were gone to in order to achieve authenticity suggests that the production is openly acknowledging that their representation of Scotland is merely a construct.

The conflict between Merida and Elinor, as a mother-daughter conflict, is ‘universal’, designed to appeal to global audiences, but we can see it as having other metaphorical meanings. For example, there is also a conflict of generations at play here. Elinor is the older generation and insists on maintaining tradition. As the younger generation, Merida bucks tradition; her attitude toward gender roles seems more contemporary.

It is also tempting to read politics into this conflict, especially as 2012 also saw the announcement of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. Voiced by an English actress[xv], Elinor, with her belief that breaking tradition could be dangerous, could be seen to express a Unionist point of view. By contrast, Merida’s desire for freedom, as well as her insistence that young people should be able to choose their destinies, seems to support both the need for a referendum and independence itself. Of course, it is highly unlikely that Chapman and Andrews intended any political readings of Brave. They are a coincidence of the film’s release date, a coincidence that the Scottish Nationalist Party nevertheless willingly embraced: former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond even reviewed the film for The Sun and declared Merida ‘a Scottish heroine who does her country proud’ (2012, 30).

Brave constructs Scotland as a place in which these differing opinions can coexist. The point of the story is about resolving the conflict between mother and daughter. Even as a bear, Elinor is still prim and proper, with no idea how to live in the wilderness. Merida has to teach her which berries are safe to eat and how to fish. In doing so, Elinor lightens up; eventually she stops walking upright and leaves her crown behind, and even changes her mind about letting princesses have weapons when Merida uses her arrows to catch fish. Furthermore, she comes to better understand her daughter. When Merida delivers a speech to the quarrelling clan lords, Elinor, hiding at the back of the great hall, mimes to her daughter to tell them that they must break tradition. In doing so, Elinor shows that she has come to accept her daughter’s belief that it is not fair to force her into marriage.

Merida, too, comes to learn from her mother. She has to be diplomatic to prevent fighting between all the lords. In addition, to break the spell, the family tapestry must be sewn—one of the domestic chores Merida despises—back together. In sewing together the torn halves of the tapestry, Merida brings the different sides together. Brave suggests that Scotland is a place composed of both the old and the new. In the end, Merida and Elinor work on a new tapestry together, one that depicts their adventures. With the kingdom changed, they are creating new legends for a new era. For Craig, this form of myth could have a positive use in that it functions to differentiate people (1996, 220). These new myths are:

in the sense of new totalizations, new constructions of our history. (…) The struggle has been to reconstruct a mythic identity that is particular to Scotland and so to redeem us from the banality of a universal economism that would make us indistinguishable from everyone who lives in a modern industrial state (….) the other restores our identity by re-establishing the real bases of our difference (…) the other puts our history back into the universe by claiming for it a particular value and significance (….) we have tried to give ourselves back our own history. (Craig 1996, 220)

In this way, Merida and Elinor are not only creating legends, they are also defining what the kingdom is.

Brave also repurposes Scotch myths to fit a changing perception of Scottishness. According to Duncan Petrie, Scotland’s location in cinema as a marginal space made it “a space in which a range of fantasies, desires and anxieties can be explored and expressed” (2000, 32). In films such as I Know Where I’m Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1945) and Local Hero, outsiders from the metropole travel to Scotland and are transformed by the experience. However, in these films Scots are generally excluded from the transformative powers the nation holds for outsiders. In Brave, however, the characters undergoing transformation, Merida and Elinor, are not outsiders. In this case, both the protagonist and the transformation come from within. The constructed “Scotland” has the same effect on Scottish women as it does for outsiders, male or female. By feminising masculine “Scotch myths”, Brave reclaims this transformative space for Scots.

This reclamation has an effect on the representation of Scottish women. If we compare Merida with Mary MacGregor in the 1995 version of Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones), both women with personalities as fiery as their curly locks, we can see how female Scottish identity has changed. Mary may be a strong female character with an almost contemporary attitude toward marriage, but she is ultimately defined by the parameters of her marital relationship. Merida, on the other hand, will not be defined by anyone but herself. She refuses to conform to tradition, but instead works to change it. Brave, therefore, transforms the role of women in “Scotch myths” at the same time it reclaims them.

In conclusion, both Red Road and Brave reimagine Scotland as a female space by subverting patriarchal “Scotch myths”, the former by co-opting the male dominated cinematic gaze, and the latter by making “traditional” forms of Scottish representation more inclusive. Red Road is part of a trend in indigenous Scottish film production that has developed since the 1980s which proposes plural, hybrid, and fluid Scottish identities. That Brave, a Hollywood film, has applied these new identities to the way it represents a mythic Scotland shows how the greater availability of Scottish film has made these new representations more widely recognisable. The way these two films feminise traditionally masculine representations of Scotland speaks to the continued importance of cultural myth in shaping national identity. For Craig, the function of cultural myth is to assert our difference among increasingly homogenising global identities and to reclaim our own particular history (1996:220). Red Road and Brave write Scottish women back into Scottish history and national identity.

 

Notes

[i] Only two Advance Party films have been released, Red Road and Donkeys (2010).

[ii] The Red Road estate has since been demolished.

[iii] See “TARTAN SPECIALS; RED ROAD***** 18 DIRECTOR ARNOLD’S FILM DEBUT JOINS A LONG LINE OF SCOTTISH SUCCESS STORIES AT THE BOX OFFICE.” Daily Record, October 21, 2006, 54; Cameron-Wilson, James. “Red Road; Big Sister is watching…” Film Review 676 (2006): 103; “CARL FOREMAN AWARD NOMINEES – BEST NEWCOMER.” Variety, 5-11 February 5-11, 2007, B7.

[iv] See Rowat, Alison. (2006) “A tall order rises above the grimfest; Cinema This week’s new releases by Alison Rowat.” The Herald, October 26, 2006, 2; Christopher, James. “Debut director’s icy thriller could take top prize at Cannes.” The Times, May 22, 2006, 11.

[v] For more on miserablism, see Manderson, D. and Yule, E. The Glass Half Full: Moving Beyond Scottish Miserablism. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2014.

[vi] See Fuller, Graham. “Screenings: ‘Red Road.’” Film Comment 4, no. 2 (2007): 71.

[vii] See French, Philip. “Review: The Critics: FILM OF THE WEEK: Down and out it gritty Glasgow: A CCTV operator stalks her prey through streets that have never looked so mean in a complex Scottish thriller which won the Cannes jury prize.” Observer, October 29, 2006, 14.

[viii] See Gilbey, Ryan. “Film: Fear and loathing in Glasgow.” New Statesman, October 30, 2006.

[ix] For example, B. Ruby Rich criticises Mulvey’s conception of the gaze for ignoring the actual experiences of women as cinema spectators (Rich 1990, 278). Mary Ann Doane addresses female spectatorship by conceptualising it as a masquerade which gives female film goers the distance necessary to identify with both male and female gazes present onscreen (Doane 1990, 48-49).

[x] According to Pixar’s own history, they were founded in 1979 as the digital division of Lucasfilm. In 1983 former Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lassiter was brought on board to start making animated shorts. Three years later, this division was bought by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and renamed Pixar. That same year, “Luxo Jr.”, the first 3-D computer animated short to win an Academy Award, was released. In 1991, Pixar signed its first production agreement with The Walt Disney Company, and in 1995 the first feature length computer animated feature film, Toy Story, was released. Disney subsequently bought Pixar in 2006 (https://www.pixar.com/our-story-1).

[xi]  Chapman had previously been one of the directors on Dreamworks’s The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, 1998) (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0152312/?ref_=nv_sr_2).

[xii] The production design has elements suggesting that the film could be set anywhere from the Pictish to the early medieval period. References are also made to Romans and Vikings.

[xiii] Mrs Campbell (Jean Cadell), George Campbell’s (Gordon Jackson) overbearing, strict teetotal mother who disapproves of whisky-stealing in Whisky Galore!, is a classic example of Kailyard’s dour Scottish women. Flame-haired, opinionated, temperamental and a bit lusty, Mary MacGregor (Jessica Lange) in the 1995 version of Rob Roy is a more recent example of the feisty Highland lass.

[xiv] For examples of these sketches see Lerew, J. The Art of Brave. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2012.

[xv] Emma Thompson has had other Scottish roles in film and television work like Tutti Frutti (1987), for example, and her mother, actress Phyllida Law, is Scottish. However, she has also starred as English characters in several high-profile heritage films such as The Remains of the Day (1993) and Howards End (1992). Thompson plays Elinor Dashwood in her own adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995); the spelling of the name is the same as used in Brave.

 

Notes on Contributor

Emily Torricelli is a researcher in trans/national identities and Scottish film. She received a Ph.D. from The University of York in Theatre, Film and Television in 2017 and also holds an M.A. in Film Studies from The University of Iowa and an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from Boston University.

 

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Gilbey, Ryan. “Film: Fear and loathing in Glasgow.” New Statesman, October 30, 2006.

IMDB. “Brenda Chapman (I).” Accessed November 29, 2018. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0152312/?ref_=nv_sr_2.

Lake, Jessica. “Red Road (2006) and emerging narratives of ‘sub-veillance’”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 231-40. doi:10.1080/10304310903294721

Lerew, Jenny. The Art of Brave. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2012.

Manderson, David, and Eleanor Yule. The Glass Half Full: Moving Beyond Scottish Miserablism. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2014.

Martin-Jones, David. Scotland: Global Cinema Genres, Modes and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

McArthur, Colin. Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003.

—. “Scotland and the Cinema: Iniquity of the Fathers”. In Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, edited by Colin McArthur, 40-69. London: BFI, 1982.

—. Whisky Galore! and The Maggie. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003.

McCrone, David. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2001.

McIver, Brian. “KING OF COMEDY; THE MAKING OF THREE-PAGE SPECIAL HOW SCREEN MONARCH WAS TAILOR-MADE FOR BILLY.” Sunday Mail, 22 July 22, 2012.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. doi:10.1093.

Murray, Jonathan. “Blurring Borders: Scottish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century”. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9, no. 3 (2012): 400-418.

—. The New Scottish Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

—. “Scotland”. In The Cinema of Small Nations, edited by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, 76-92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Pendreigh, Brian. “Jings, crivvens and help ma Boab! Scots give Hollywood an earful.” The Daily Telegraph, June 2, 2012.

Petrie, Duncan. Screening Scotland. London: BFI, 2000.

Pixar Animation Studios. “Our Story.” Accessed November 28, 2018. https://www.pixar.com/our-story-1.

Rich, B. Ruby. “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism”. In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 268-87. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Rowat, Alison. (2006) “A tall order rises above the grimfest; Cinema This week’s new releases by Alison Rowat.” The Herald, October 26, 2006.

Salmond, Alexander. “This image of our beautiful nation will travel far… it’s invaluable to Scotland.” The Sun, 27 June 27, 2012.

Sillars, Jane, and Moira Macdonald. “Gender, Spaces, Changes: Emergent Identities in a Scotland in Transition”. In The Media in Scotland, edited by Neil Blain and David Hutchison, 184-98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008.

“TARTAN SPECIALS; RED ROAD ***** 18 DIRECTOR ARNOLD’S FILM DEBUT JOINS A LONG LINE OF SCOTTISH SUCCESS STORIES AT THE BOX OFFICE.” Daily Record, October 27, 2006.

 

Filmography

Aberdeen, 2002. Han Peter Moland.

Ae Fond Kiss …, 2004. Ken Loach.

American Cousins, 2003. Don Coutts.

Blue Black Permanent, 1992. Margaret Tait.

Brave, 2012. Brenda Chapman, Mark Andrews, and Steve Purcell.

Brigadoon, 1954. Vincente Minnelli.

Floodtide, 1949. Frederick Wilson.

Howards End, 1992. James Ivory.

I Know Where I’m Going!, 1945. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Last Great Wilderness, The, 2002. David Mackenzie.

Local Hero, 1983. Bill Forsyth.

“Luxo Jr.”, 1986. John Lasseter.

Morvern Callar, 2002. Lynne Ramsay.

Nina’s Heavenly Delights, 2006. Pratibha Parmar.

Orphans, 1998. Peter Mullan.

Prince of Egypt, The, 1998. Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells.

Ratcatcher, 1999. Lynne Ramsay.

Red Road, 2006. Andrea Arnold.

Remains of the Day, The, 1993. James Ivory.

Rob Roy, 1995. Michael Caton-Jones.

Sense and Sensibility, 1995. Ang Lee.

Stella Does Tricks, 1996. Coky Giedroyc.

Strictly Sinatra, 2001. Peter Capaldi.

Sweet Sixteen, 2002. Ken Loach.

Taggart, 1983-2010. STV.

Toy Story, 1995. John Lasseter.

Trainspotting. 1995. Danny Boyle.

Tutti Frutti, 1987. Tony Smith. BBC Scotland.

Whisky Galore!, 1949. Alexander Mackendrick.

Winter Guest, The, 1996. Alan Rickman.

 

 

Research Statement

The premise of Vincenzo Natali’s 2003 absurdist comedy Nothing is a simple one. The film’s two protagonists – both of them caricatures of the ‘dumbass’ stalled adolescents that frequently populate North American comedy – suddenly find themselves in a world that has become an empty and boundless white space. The infinite white void that the duo now discover outside their house is a strange place of a tofu-like consistency upon which heavy objects bounce like beachballs, and the film uses this set-up to deliver some enjoyable slapstick . While the film at times suffers from a lack of novelty or wit, it does pointedly draw attention to the stupefying mass of items and commodities from everyday life, all of which are glaringly offset by the infinite white environment. We encounter these things because, as the pair of men venture out into the nothingness, they array themselves in ridiculous combat gear comprised of kitchen items and sports accessories. It’s a move that draws attention to the weird excess of the objects themselves as well as to the neuroses of the two ‘man-child’ protagonists. (The trail of items they leave behind them in order to navigate ‘the nothing’ are mundane insignia of childhood; crayons, toy cars, Swiss army knifes, tennis balls.) Even if unintended, a critique of the ever increasing circulation of signs, the centrality of consumption, and the fetishized status of the object within modern society is implicit during these sequences of the film.

Of course, if they had seen The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999) just a few years earlier, the protagonists of Nothing might have suspected that they had somehow entered ‘The Construct’, that computer-generated ‘loading program’ wherein Morpheus and Neo sit chewing the metaphysical fat. Had they seen Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003), they might have suspected, instead, that they had simply died and gone to bleached out, blissful Morgan Freeman Heaven. In fact, the place that they have actually stumbled on is a trope, one that might be called the white void or the whitescape, a visual convention familiar to viewers not just from cinema, but from photography, music video, and the space of the contemporary art gallery.

In ‘Human Trials’, I examine this familiar visual trope as it has developed in cinema. I observe its resonances with the ‘void room’ exhibits of Yves Klein in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the art photography of Richard Avedon, but I could just as easily have examined the music videos of artists such as Talking Heads (‘Once in a Lifetime’, 1981), Madonna (‘Lucky Star’, 1983), and Tyler the Creator (‘Yonkers’, 2011). A short segment from the latter music video can be found in the essay. Of course, I could also have traced the trope back further to Kasimir Malevich’s influential experimental painting ‘Black Square’ (1915), the pinnacle of ‘Suprematism’. Notably, Malevich’s painting employs the colour white as a framing device that facilitates a direct expression not of the world, but of “the world of feeling”, and does so via the non-objective, abstract qualities of an image (in this case, the black square). Needless to say, this runs counter to the more conventional qualities of traditional representational art. Indeed, as should be apparent in the video essay, Malevich’s use of the white void to elicit a non-objective expression of ‘feeling’ resonates with the more affirmative qualities of the ‘white void’ visual as they emerge within certain films in my study.[1]

An emphasis on feeling was also much to the fore in Yves Klein’s first ‘void’ exhibit at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris: official invitations asked guests to grace the exhibit with their “affective presence”.[2] After contributing his own ‘affective presencing’ to the occasion, Albert Camus was moved to record an enigmatic entry in his notebook; “With the Void, Full Powers.”[3] Such was the popularity of Klein’s ‘La Vide’ that it ran a week longer than expected and was subsequently reimagined in later installations by the artist. Klein himself claimed that visitors would often remain in the radiant white space for hours in a heightened emotional state. Twenty years later, the seminal art critic Brian O’Doherty would observe the way in which a room essentially the same as that which Klein created – a “white cube”, as O’Doherty puts it – had become the standard exhibition space in most art galleries.

The white room – the white void, this infinite white space – is a visual we are deeply familiar with, then. What I examine in my video essay is an overview of prominent examples of the ‘white void’ – or ‘whitescape’ (to use David Batchelor’s suggestive term[4]) – as they have occurred in cinema. In its most memorable articulations, I argue, it is used to examine the production of ‘subjectivity’ and to bring the concept of ‘the human’ into stark relief. In many cases, the films also centre on protagonists who – having transgressed against the established social order – are subjected to the judgement of their community.

The video essay is split into four sections.

1. White Wall / Black Hole: The Abstract Machine of Subjectivity

The first section focuses on the concept of ‘the human’ and on the production of ‘the subject’. In this it takes its cue, in part, from Jørgen Leth’s influential film The Perfect Human (1968), and, in part, from the concept of ‘faciality’ in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For the latter, the face – the face of the human, but, beyond that, the face of Jesus Christ (as exemplary of the legislative ‘white-man’ face that underwrites Western metaphysics) – functions as a ‘master signifier’ in the sign-system (signifiance) which has come to dominate human social interaction. This sign-system is the slick ‘white wall’ of representation – described, suggestively, by Stephen O’Connell as a “slippery surface”[5] – whereon signs proliferate and spiral in an infinite reverberation. In conjunction with this sign-system – but also resisting it – there exists another signifying system (subjectification), which is also associated with the face. Here the face is not that of a central master-signifier (such as the face of God), however, but the site of the ‘black hole’ of the subject. In subjectification, the subject pursues the vectors of its own desires. Inevitably, such desires tend to develop in response to the ever increasing signs produced by signifiance, but the subject may also trace their desires elsewhere – take passages, lines of flight – that react against such signs, ‘betraying’ the established social orders consecrated in the sign-system.[6]

In the video essay, then, the imagery of the ‘white void’ should never be understood simply as imparting an absence of signs. It might just as easily be taken as the thick, totalising, and opaque veneer of the dense sign-system (signifiance) in which the human is engulfed, and by which the subject is situated and produced. Later in the video essay, I return to the black holes of subjectification and to the prospect of ‘lines of flight’.

2. Societies of Control

In the second section of the video essay, I reflect on the way in which the human subject – the ‘biopolitical’ subject as Michel Foucault would describe it – is produced and marshalled by the dominant signifying forces of its environment. Here the ‘white void’ visual is examined in relation to mechanisms of control. Such control is typically centred in the reassuring, legislative sign-system of the established social order, and thus the visual of the ‘whitescape’ in much visual culture can be understood to indicate the illusion of freedom – indeed, a sense of infinite freedom – that is integral to the functioning of this sign-system. Yet it is a freedom which, despite its apparent openness, is more insidiously grounded in the subject’s total exposure (before the law, before the social order). In addition to the use of the whitescape as a metaphor here, I also invoke the not-at-all metaphorical but material and physiological powers of the colour white as a technology of control. Indeed, in a Foucauldian analysis of the use of the colour white in spaces such as prisons, hospitals, and universities, Kathleen Connellan has provided an illuminating study of white as just such a ‘control mechanism’.[7] Echoing Connellan’s study, in the video essay, I point to the ways in which THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), in particular, presents a dystopic view of the material powers of the colour white, while at the same time providing a metaphor for the way in which the distinction between the social spaces of freedom and those of imprisonment can be seen to dissolve. (While I don’t draw attention to it in the video essay, it’s worth noting, too, that the entire social structure of the dystopic white world of THX 1138 seems to revolve around the face of Jesus Christ. The latter – now rechristened Omm, and thereby a conflation of spirituality and electricity – exists as a single but ubiquitous image, a master-signifier to whom the bio-engineered citizens of this control society can confess their fears and anxieties.)

3. Trial & Judgement

It is intriguing that, in a number of instances, the use of the ‘white void’ or ‘whitescape’ visual in cinema corresponds with scenes of trial, judgement, and condemnation. Perhaps the earliest example stems from one of the most celebrated works in film history, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in which the trial of Joan (Maria Falconetti) is delivered in a space that – as much as possible – reduces all trace and texture of the ‘material’ world. Instead, the film invests in the abstract white décor of the courtroom and prison, and (later, in the exterior shots) the vaporous white sky behind the protagonists’ faces and bodies. In my video essay, I draw attention to the repetition of this particular motif of ‘judgement’ in both THX 1138 and The Man Who Wasn’t There (the Coen brothers, 2001), and hone in on the way that a certain gestural quality within the camera movement (and the human faces that this movement scans) can be understood to migrate intertextually between the three films.

This section also addresses other modes of ‘trial’ and ‘judgement’ that pertain to the use of the white void in visual culture. For instance, the strategy of aesthetic detachment involved in the everyday advertising of the consumer item can be understood to be put under the microscope in Leth’s The Perfect Human. In THX 1138, meanwhile, the concepts of idealism, spirituality, and purity that have been – historically – associated with the colour white in Western thinking can also be seen to be implicated in the West’s positioning of ‘the other’, in particular the other as located in the face of colour. (Deleuze, too, notes the way the abstract machine of ‘faciality’ enshrines the white-man face as its master signifier and how this underwrites the structures inherent in racism.) A final valence of the term ‘trial’ within my study relates to Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2010) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013). Cosmatos’s film involves a ‘human trial’ in the very specific sense of clinical laboratory research, and it is telling that the sequence that depicts this (decidedly ‘new age’) experiment makes a very concentrated use of the ‘white void’ visual. In Under the Skin, meanwhile, humanity is something that is performed – attempted, essayed, ‘tried on’ – by the film’s alien protagonist.

4. Lines of Flight

Taking in both his work with Guattari and his own studies on cinema, we can observe certain points of tension in Deleuze’s philosophy when it comes to his critique of the ‘white wall’ sign-system on the one hand and, on the other, his attitude to elements such as the spiritual dimensions of the colour white and ‘lyrical abstraction’, the nomadic terrain of ‘smooth space’, and the expressive qualities of the face. This can be otherwise articulated as the tension between Deleuze’s critique of configurations of social space as a ‘totalised whole’ and his endorsement of potentially affirmative openings on to a ‘plane of consistency’, a ‘smooth space’, or the ‘any-space-whatever’. In each case, though these are quite contrary conceptions of space, the ‘images’ of such spaces could plausibly be represented or ‘figured’ by a depiction of an abstract whitescape. Yet in each case the import or the meaning would differ profoundly. In the first, a whitescape might depict a specific authoritarian, sign-encoded social formation: spuriously legible, determinable, stable. In the second, a whitescape might depict a temporary shelter, a ‘block of space-time’ that opens up before nomadic singularities rather than stable subjectivities, a transitory processual space of flight, transition, and becoming. Intriguingly, The Passion of Joan of Arc features both iterations of the whitescape simultaneously, whereupon the white can be associated with the judgemental, authoritarian agencies of the trial and at the same time with the lines of flight inherent in Joan’s passion. As such, in this final section of the video essay, I return to the ‘whitescape’ and ‘the face’ not simply as sites of subjectification and submission, but as sites of passion and passage, of affective transitions and processes, of lines of flight.

Ultimately, it is hoped that the video essay – which itself features a substantial amount of commentary – can appeal to the viewer on its own terms, both as a piece of videographical analysis and as a more poetic meditation on the topic at hand. These poetic qualities emerge primarily in the edit, through the use of graphic matches and the opening up of a dialogue between the films in the study.

[1] “[A] blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into the ‘desert’, where nothing is real except feeling … and so feeling became the substance of my life”. Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World – The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003), 68.

[2] See Nuit Banai, Yves Klein (Reaktion Books, 2014), 91.

[3] Quoted in Brian O’Doherty, White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (University of California Press, 1999), .89. According to Banai, Camus actually wrote the phrase on a scrap of paper and handed the fragment to Klein at the event. Yves Klein, 91.

[4] David Batchelor, Chromaphobia (Reaktion Books, 2000).

[5] Stephen O’Connell, “Dandgyism: Every Name In History Is I”, in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Gary Genosko. (Routledge, 2001), 1213-1229.

[6] O’Connell gives an excellent overview of these elements in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Relevant sections within the work of Deleuze and Guattari itself include “587 B.C. – A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 111-148, “Year Zero: Faciality”, ibid., 167-207, and Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature”, in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Columbia University Press, 2007), 36-76.

[7] Kathleen Connellan. “The Psychic Life of White: Power and Space”, Organization Studies 34, no. 10 (2013): 1529-1549.

 

Notes on Contributor

I am a media scholar and journalist. I completed my doctorate in Trinity College Dublin, where I have lectured in a number of subject areas, including on Digital Film Theory and Practice. I have also taught Film and Media Studies in the National University of Ireland Galway. I am a former Visiting Research Fellowship at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway. My research interests include iconography and affect, remix culture, and intertextuality.

 

Film festivals often rely on “precarious cultural work”.[1] Increasingly adopting the neoliberal logic of the creative economy, they entail particular forms of affective labour, combining “the pleasure and excitement experienced during the festival – alongside the lesser-known affective states of despair, disappointment, and anger that need to be managed as a consequence of films being rejected from the festival”. [2] Although recent scholarship has emphasised the precarious material reality of cultural workers, festival organisers often describe their activity as a “labour of love”. “Labour of love” – a somewhat naïve and romanticised shorthand for the less glamourous and resolutely not sponsorship friendly term “precarious” – insists on cultural work as producing not value or economic stability but intangible affects and relationships – friendships.

While the expression “labour of love” certainly participates in rebranding festival organisers’ precarious, unpaid or underpaid, cultural work as engendering positive affects, it also points to the central role played by collaborations and friendships in artistic endeavours. As I argue elsewhere, this emphasis on affects and friendship provides a productive framework for understanding festival studies itself: academic discourses on festivals often refract our own circuits and networks. [3] In the context of this article, however, I am interested in how friendships sustained at and through festivals participate in shaping cinematic cultures.[4] Reflecting upon her contributions to both film studies and the festival phenomenon, B. Ruby Rich resituates the role played by chosen networks of friends in establishing Women’s cinema:

Knowledge can be acquired and exhibited in a variety of ways. To read and then to write: that’s the standard intellectual route. In the years of my own formation, though, there were many other options. Journals and journeys, conferences and conversations, partying and politicking, going to movies and going to bed.[5]

Scholars traditionally describe festival circuits and networks in terms of their “relation to living and non-living actors”.[6] Emblematically, Dina Iordanova describes festival circuits as a “treadmill in motion only for as long as there is the living person to service it, only as long as there is someone to keep it in motion”.[7] In this framework, participants are first and foremost defined by their professional occupation: they are understood as “stakeholders” or “cultural intermediaries” whose competing performances regulate the event and who have “particular interests in seeing the network proliferate”.[8] While this framework posits that collaboration between stakeholders is crucial in organising festivals, it does not fully account for friendships sustained beyond the duration of the event.

In contrast, Rich’s autoethnographic history of Women’s cinema starts not from the festivals she successively curated, organised, or simply attended, but rather from her own encounters with festival-goers turned friends and collaborators. In so doing, Rich echoes Michel Foucault’s definition of friendship as a productive, radical, and “slantwise” network of relationality, one born out of her participation in various festivals and conferences but that exceeds traditional definitions of the circuit. As a network of relationality, friendships “short-circuit [institutions] and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit”. It produces a potential for collaborations beyond one’s participation in an event, “[tracing] diagonal lines (…) [that] allow [relational] virtualities to come to light”.[9]

In this paper, I hope to illustrate what could be gained in taking seriously friendship as a network of relationality. Shifting the emphasis from traditional definitions of festival circuits to the interpersonal networks created and sustained at festivals, I analyse the role played by friendships in fostering artistic collaborations in 1980s-1990s Toronto as expressed through Canadian director John Greyson’s oeuvre. Indeed, Greyson’s work as a film and videomaker, political activist, curator, and festival board member generously refers back to friendships born out of his involvement on the festival/academic circuit.[10] As Susan Lord argues,

While Greyson never divests authorship and its social responsibilities, “John Greyson” is also central to the formation of collectivism since the 1980s. Much of the work is [sic] produced with his name is done within collective processes wherein filiations, collaborations between friends, and artist communities develop a praxis and an imaginary.[11]

In tracing Greyson’s collaborations through (and involvement in) various North American festivals and cinematic organisations, this paper argues that theorising friendships as radical networks of relationality enables us to advance festival studies on two fronts: (1) a reconceptualisation of the relationship between festival stakeholders through their artistic and institutional collaborations and (2) an analysis of interpersonal relationships as “crossing over” festival circuits and producing cinematic cultures.

Greyson’s “gay squib”: Friendships, collaborations, and the emergence of a gay and lesbian film culture

Greyson’s first tapes coincide with the emergence of a gay and lesbian cinematic culture marked by both video activism and an ethos of collaboration between artists, activists, and scholars. As Larry Horne and John Ramirez’s review of an academic conference held within the 1983 UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival makes clear, Greyson’s politics and aesthetics cannot be separated from

the specificities of the video apparatus  – [he] attempted to situate the emergence and input of gay and lesbian artists in video where the codes of production are not yet rigidly conventionalized. Promoting the undertaking of a history of alternative practices, Greyson’s history of video attempted a clarification of the social and cultural contexts for the medium’s development, its relation and intersection with other artistic forms, and its possible place in the social struggle for increased sexual liberation.[12]

In the early 1970s, a few critics and scholars organised gay and lesbian film festivals, largely dedicated to unearthing the gay subtext of European and Hollywood films and influenced by traditional modes of cinephilia.[13] The situation changed rapidly in the early 1980s: the Alternative Cinema conference held at Bard College and the protests against the films Cruising and Windows served as catalysts for the development of a community-based gay and lesbian cinematic culture, highly influenced by the politics and aesthetics of the video format.

In June 1979, “[f]our hundred film and video activists [as well as critics and scholars] met at Bard College in New York State (…), the most important national gathering of progressive media workers since the 1930s.” The conference, organised with the support of Jump Cut, aimed at bridging the gap between film scholars, artists, and activists. It featured workshops as well as an extensive screening programme, akin to a festival. While the conference emphasised the role played by video as a minority-led praxis of resistance, participants soon “recognized that their needs were not being adequately addressed by the structure and organization of the Conference, whose Organizing Committee was dominated by white, male straights from New York.” [14]

In order to defuse the controversy, the organisers included special sessions dedicated to minorities, albeit relegating some gay and lesbian programming to late night sessions.[15] In that context, the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus (which included film and videomakers, critics, and scholars, among whom Thomas Waugh, Jan Oxenberg, and B. Ruby Rich) established a list of demands directed at the organising committee. The group called for an exchange of information between gay and lesbian media workers and scholars, as well as for the creation of “[a]lternative distribution centers which must seek out, distribute, and encourage the production of media made by lesbians and gay men.”[16]

A month later, a coalition of gay filmmakers, critics, scholars, and activists crystallised around two films distributed by United Artists: William Friedkin’s Cruising and Gordon Willis’s Windows. Importantly, United Artists’s parent company Transamerica had, through two of its subsidiaries, financed the campaign of homophobic politician John Briggs.[17] Furthermore, Friedkin had already been criticised by the gay liberation movement for his film The Boys in the Band.[18] In the spring of 1979, a script of Cruising was leaked to Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell, who urged readers to actively protest the film. In New York alone, more than 8,000 people marched against the film.

Taken together, the Alternative Cinema Conference and the protests against Cruising are emblematic of a new political movement symbolised by an alliance between critics, scholars, festival organisers, and film and videomakers. Gay and lesbian artists and activists were increasingly interested in the video format, which was understood as a community-based political medium enabling new modes of self-representation. Unsurprisingly, video festivals, defined in opposition to the elitism of the celluloid, emerged in the decade.[19] These debates are refracted in Greyson’s first tapes, which articulate a discourse on video as a collaborative critique of traditional modes of representation.[20]

A few months later, Greyson joined two organisations that were particularly active in mobilising against Cruising: both the Association for Independent Video and Film [AIVF] and the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers [NALGF] sought to enact the recommendations made by the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus and to create alternative circuits of distribution for video. The NALGF, headed by Richard Schmiechen, Oxenberg, and Greyson, “include[d] producers, directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, video artists, film exhibitors, film organization administrators, critics, and film and video students.”[21] Its mandate revolved around two axes: to lobby against homophobic media and the erasure of LGBT people from Hollywood productions, and to develop independent circuits of distribution for gay and lesbian films and videos.[22]

Members were quite divided on how to achieve these goals. In several meetings, they discussed whether the NALGF should act as a “service organization with a distribution base [akin to Women Make Movies], [a] professional lobbying association for lesbian and gays working both as independents and in the industry, [a] trade association representing and supporting independent gay and lesbian media [modelled after the AIVF]”, or a loose informal network dedicated to connecting filmmakers with emerging LGBT festivals.[23] The NALGF often positioned itself as an interface between filmmakers and festivals. In the early 1980s, the organisation operated as a relay between Peter Lowy’s and Michael Lumpkin’s gay film festivals (in New York and San Francisco, respectively). It not only curated programmes for both events, but also organised a cross-pollination of sorts. These programmes were usually followed by a panel with filmmakers, festival organisers, and critics. [24] The NALGF also provided assistance in organising several ephemeral LGBT festivals, such as Southampton College’s Eggo or New York University’s Abuse, and relayed calls for submission, notably for Waugh’s 1982 Montreal-based festival Sans Popcorn.[25]

The NALGF further benefited from its connections with the AIVF. Capitalising on his role as a coordinator for both the NALGF and the AIVF, Greyson organised in March 1982 the festival/roundtable “Independent Closets: Gay & Lesbian Filmmakers Open Doors,” which featured both film/videomakers and scholars-critics (among which Mark Berger, Oxenberg, Vito Russo, and Waugh).[26] Greyson’s involvement in the NALGF led him to participate in other foundational conferences/festivals. In particular, Greyson presented his videos and gave a talk at the 1983 UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival. This event juxtaposed screenings with panels intermixing scholars (Dennis Altman, Richard Dyer, Martha Fleming, Bill Nichols, Ramirez, Waugh and Andrea Weiss), critics (Russo and Robin Wood), filmmakers (Barbara Hammer, Paul Leaf and Oxenberg), and activists – many of whom Greyson later collaborated with.[27]

The most important conference / festival happened a few years later, in reaction to the sex wars and the AIDS crisis. In 1986, a group of film and videomakers, students, and scholars at Boston’s Collective for Living Cinema decided to constitute a queer reading / screening group. In an effort to further intertwine self-representation and theory, the group tasked Bill Horrigan and Martha Gever with organising a series of screenings, which evolved into the 1989 conference and festival “How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video”, held by the Bad Object-Choices collective at the Anthology Film Archives and sponsored by the journal October. The event featured an eclectic mix of artists/activists (Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Richard Fung, Isaac Julien, Tom Kalin, Stuart Marshall, and Ray Navarro) and scholars/critics (Altman, José Arroyo, Douglas Crimp, Theresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, Gever, Cora Kaplan, Kobena Mercer, Judith Mayne, Rich, and Waugh). [28]

In the aftermath of the How Do I Look? conference/festival, Greyson started working with Pratibha Parmar and Gever on the field-defining anthology Queer Looks, published four years later (1993). It features many of the same filmmakers (Bordowitz, Carlomusto, Crimp, Nick Deocampo, John DiStefano, Fung, Hammer, Navarro, Parmar, Catherine Saalfield, and Jerry Tartaglia), and scholars/critics (Alison Butler, Chin, Gever, Mercer, Rich, Waugh and Patricia White).[29] The book’s introduction simultaneously recalls Greyson’s earlier attempts to foster a gay and lesbian distribution circuit and summarises the importance of collaboration and friendship in establishing a gay and lesbian cinematic culture:

We wanted to make public some of the exchanges occurring between an ever-shifting network of artists, organizers, and activists that spanned several continents. We wanted to witness some of the coalitions and collaborations, efforts at a new type of politic, a new sort of image. We wanted to put down on paper some of the ideas being debated by this larger “we”, this ever-expanding “we”, this collective, communal “we” of lesbian and gay critics, artists and audiences. (…) We were bored dissatisfied with queer critics who endlessly analyzed Hollywood but ignored the independent sector. (…) Distribution for independent queer features is both red-hot at the box office and nonexistent.  Distribution for queer video art has both mushroomed and ceased to exist.[30]

As these examples make clear, festivals and activist groups constituted spaces where scholars, critics, filmmakers, and festival organisers could meet and collaborate, thereby defining an emerging gay and lesbian cinematic culture. Friendships created through the festival/academic circuit were instrumental in establishing both gay and lesbian cinema and Greyson’s career as an activist, videomaker, and book author. Many of the people involved in the NALGF, the UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, or the How do I Look conference/festival became collaborators, featured in both the Queer Look anthology and Greyson’s videos. From Waugh’s contribution as a “full frontal nudity expert”[31] to Fleming’s double role as actor and scholar, Greyson’s collaborators often occupied several institutional positions at once.

The “Toronto scene”: friendships and video/film circuits in Canada.

Video, a format far less elitist than celluloid films, played a key role in the development of this ethos of collaboration. In this historical context, videos were often marked by the idea of community. In this section, I shift my emphasis from Greyson’s collaborative efforts to define a gay and lesbian cinematic culture to friendships sustained through Toronto’s video collectives, positioned at the intersection of various festival circuits. Through the development of cooperatives, artist-run centres and festivals, videomakers in Toronto were constantly screening or curating each other’s work.[32] Video can be productively thought of as a cultural scene, defined by William Straw as:

designat[ing] particular clusters of social and cultural activity without specifying the nature of the boundaries which circumscribe them. Scenes may be distinguished according to their location (as in Montreal’s St. Laurent scene), the genre of cultural production which gives them coherence (a musical style, for example, as in references to the electroclash scene) or the loosely defined social activity around which they take shape (…) Scene invites us to map the territory of the city in new ways while, at the same time, designating certain kinds of activity whose relationship to territory is not easily asserted.[33]

In Toronto, this video scene emerged partly as a response to State censorship. In the 1980s, the Ontario Censor Board [OCB] actively forced art galleries, theatres, and festivals to cancel screenings of sexually-explicit films and videos. In 1979 for instance, the Arts Gallery of Ontario – one of the most prestigious museum in Toronto – had to call off its screening of Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950), deemed too (homo)sexual.[34] The Toronto Festival of Festivals (renamed TIFF) faced a similar situation with its 1982 programme “Video/Video,” which included tapes from Colin Campbell, Lisa Steele, and Kim Tomczak.[35] Greyson summarises the situation:

[T]he OCB insisted that any public screening must submit to prior censorship and that any venues, distributors, makers, or projectionists proceeding without prior approval would be subject to charges – including every art gallery, public library, community centre, high school, bar, bar mitzvah, you name it. (…) Most arts and community groups thought they were exempt or, at least, that the OCB was kidding. Wrong. The Canadian Images Film Festival was fined. (…) A Space Gallery was raided. Despite intensive organizing and numerous (drawn-out) legal challenges, a decisive chill caused the collective balls of the arts community to retract. Groups and individuals were understandably unwilling to become the next sacrificial lamb. Screenings were cancelled for fear of charges.[36]

Video artists were particularly active in contesting the Ontario Censor Board.[37] They often organised illegal screenings, thus openly defying censorship legislation. In 1981 for instance, the magazine Fuse put together a 12 hour-long screening of documentaries which had not been approved by the OCB.[38] Protests against censorship often took the form of inter-organisation collaborations. The 1985 festival “Six Days of Resistance”, which Greyson helped organising, is here a fascinating example: presented by A Space, the Women’s Cultural Building, the Artists Union and Trinity Square Video, it screened over forty films and videos without prior approval from the OCB.[39] This particular event is at the core of Greyson’s contribution to the anthology Queer Looks. Analysing the relationships between sex panic and State censorship in Toronto, Greyson recalls some of the tactics mobilised by video activists: in order to avoid having the prints seized by the authorities, “organizers would ask any cops present (undercover or not) to identify themselves, and they would then ask them to leave. (…) By law, cops must comply with this request. Since they couldn’t see the tapes or films, they couldn’t therefore lay charges”.[40]

This struggle against censorship partly accounts for the ethos of collaboration at the core of Toronto’s video scene, structured along a loose network of inter-related collective organisations which shared a commitment to “access and activism, participation and dialogue”, often regrouping “documentarists” and “video artists” in the same space (among others: LIFT, Charles Street Video, Trinity Square Video, and Vtape).[41] These artist-run centres, cooperative distributors, and art galleries were conveniently located around Queen Street, thereby facilitating inter-disciplinary cooperation: one could edit, distribute, and screen videos in the same building.[42] Greyson actively participated in these organisations. He notably took part in the 1984 and 1986 New Works Shows (organised by Trinity Square Video and Vtape)[43] and in YYZ’s 1986 Habits.[44] These artist-run centres and video co-ops fostered artistic collaborations and helped materialising Greyson’s call for alternative networks. As Lord argues,

[The] role of video co-ops and artist-run spaces in the shaping of Toronto’s art scene is profoundly important for our understanding of how Greyson’s work of the 1980s takes shape. His credits read like a meeting of Charles Street Video (which he joined upon moving to Toronto in the early 1980s), Trinity Square Video (where he worked with Michael Balser in the AIDS PSAs) (…) or a meeting at Vtape (on which he sat as a member of the board).[45]

Importantly, this cultural scene intersected with various festival circuits. In the 1990s, “over one hundred small and medium sized documentary, queer, experimental, student and community-based media festivals” were organised in the city.[46] In Toronto, festivals dedicated to South Asian queer films (Desh Pardesh) coexisted alongside events devoted to alternative pornography (Pleasure Dome).[47] These organisations did not compete with one another. Rather, they largely shared information and expertise.[48] Toronto’s video scene thus reflected “a crucial permutation on the formulation of a metropolitan cosmopolitanism”[49] that juxtaposed festival circuits and promoted collaborative organising.

Several gay and lesbian film and/or video festivals were organised in the city.[50] Some happened only once, such as the 1986 “Inverted Image” organised by the newspaper Xtra!.[51] Others were multi-disciplinary: for instance, Sky Gilbert’s “Queer Culture Festival” (starting in 1990) featured videos alongside theatre plays and dance.[52] Inside/OUT, Toronto’s most famous LGBT film and video festival, was created in 1991 in an effort to develop a queer circuit defined in opposition to commercial films. According to Joceline Andersen,

The filmmakers who began the group saw it as a platform to showcase queer experimental and transgressive work that with short formats and DIY production values could not find a venue in the art house circuit or the burgeoning film festival phenomenon of the largely narrative New Queer Cinema.[53]

These gay and lesbian organisations were actively fighting against censorship. Canadian custom agents and Canada Post enforced censorship legislation rather zealously. Shipments from and to the Glad Day Bookshop and the Women’s bookstore were prevented in 1991 and 1992, and many film prints were destroyed at the border. This censorship also took the form of a withdrawal of public funding. Grants to A Space, Arts Sake, and Trinity Square Video were cancelled in 1982.[54] In 1992, the Christian association CURE successfully lobbied against funding allotted by the government of Ontario and the City of Toronto to gay cultural events: the Metro council “voted to rescind a $4000 grant to the Inside/OUT lesbian and gay film and video festival”. The theatre company Buddies in Bad Time was similarly accused of “exercising bad judgement by allowing the Queer Culture Festival of Toronto to rent their space to hold two seminars on bondage and ‘female ejaculation’”.[55] Due to a strong mobilisation of the press and artistic communities, funding was eventually re-established.[56]

Gay and lesbian cultural events were often connected with festivals organised in the video circuit. Local videomakers both navigated between and participated in the building of different venues: if the Toronto scene was organised around several structures, they were largely incestuous. Images, a festival started in 1988 by the Northern Vision collective, actively curated programmes dedicated to minorities:

It had also been our desire to be egalitarian in our selection regarding gender, region and race. We wanted to represent those voices which through formal concerns or socio-political agendas are often ignored by national showcases. (…) The Northern Visions selection body attempted to represent various concerns of Blacks, Asians, Native Peoples, gay and lesbian activists and feminists. These concerns have traditionally been ignored by mainstream festivals, yet they truly contribute to what is produced and what we know about Canadian culture.[57]

These incestuous organisations enabled particular forms of friendship and collaboration among filmmakers. Following the models of artist-run centres, they were organised by videomakers themselves. Their organising teams were largely overlapping. Board members of one festivals were often screened in another. In Figure 1, I trace Greyson’s artistic collaborations through his involvement in both Images and Inside/Out.[58] More than half of the festivals’ team members have participated in Greyson’s projects, in one way or another. Greyson’s involvement in these events as curator, board member (Inside/OUT 1994-1996, 1998-1999), jury (Images 1994), lecturer (Inside/OUT 1993), or filmmaker (Inside/OUT: 1991, 1994, 1996, 2000, Images 1990, 1992, 1994) indicate the extent to which festivals served not only as spaces of exhibition, but also as places where one could meet old and new friends. These friendships and collaborations were not limited to Image and Inside/OUT. For instance YYZ’s 1986 Habits show incorporated Greyson’s Moscow Does not Believe in Queers (1986) alongside with Kibbins’ Henry Kissinger Won the Nobel Peace Prize (1986), a tape on which Greyson was a technician.

As this historical example makes clear, festival organising in 1980-1990s Toronto both reflected existing and fostered new artistic collaborations. Cultural work produces friendships that can potentially crossover festival circuits. Greyson’s videos both feature friends and collaborators met on the festival circuit and address some of the issues debated within the Toronto video scene. His oeuvre corresponds to a “project animated by friendship through which an extensive and affective political geography grows (…) a spatial network of solidarity [which] form[s] translocal productions”.[59]

Networks of friendship, circuits, and stakeholders

Filmmaker and AIDS activist Mike Hoolboom describes Greyson’s position within the Toronto scene:

[Greyson] is never “at the beginning”; his ambitions rest neither with the first word nor with hopes for the last. Instead, he finds himself always in the midst of a social web of produced and producing identities (…) It is little surprise that as an artist whose entry point admits him to a conversation already underway, Greyson receives and adapts established modes of address.[60]

In resituating Greyson’s work as a videomaker, curator, festival organiser, and public intellectual, this paper argued that friendship, defined as a network of relationality, provides a theoretical framework for conceptualising both cinematic cultures and crossovers between festival circuits. Greyson’s network of friends and collaborators refracts the evolution of both gay and lesbian cinema and the Toronto video scene. While, in Mike Hoolboom’s words, Greyson is never at the beginning of this history, his words often preface major anthologies on censorship, AIDS, and gay and lesbian cinema – generously introducing friends, reflecting (upon) the collective nature of video/activism.^[61]

Greyson’s career also illustrates what could be gained in taking seriously these networks of friendship: as such, his collaborations transcend professional occupations. Greyson and his friends often occupied several institutional locations at once, constantly shifting between videomaking, organising, curating, and writing. This is not surprising: in this historical context, “the existence of the pure critic/scholar who has not tried curating or film/video making is as rare as the curator who has not directed a film or written film criticism (though both animals do exist, of course).”[62] As a slantwise network of relationality, friendships point to the productive interplays between various forms of participation in festival organising.

This is particularly important, as scholars often analyse festivals in terms of the competing performances of various stakeholders. Actors participating in festivals are traditionally understood through their professional occupation, an hermeneutic model which presupposes that one is either a festival-goer, or a critic, or an organiser, or a policy-maker, or a scholar. While such analyses enable us to describe the cultural economy of festival organising, the reality is – as always – messy: one might be a critic and/or a festival organiser and/or a policy-maker and/or a scholar. One might even move from one of these professional occupations to any other(s). As networks of relationality, collaborations and friendships crossover analytically separated institutional locations, thereby complementing traditional analyses of festival circuits and stakeholders. Instead of separating curators from filmmakers, scholars, and festival organisers, friendships as networks reveal what could be gained in taking seriously the interplay between various forms of institutional location. As a “labour of love”, festival organising entails a form of collaboration that can potentially be productive, a mode of relationality that largely crossovers existing circuits and participates in the shaping of cinematic cultures.

Figure 1.: Greyson’s (main) collaborators and their role in Inside/OUT & Images (until 2000).

 

Name	Participation in:	(main) collaborations with Greyson
Achtman, Michael	Inside/OUT: screening committee (1997)	– Un©ut (1997, screened that year)
Campbell, Colin	Inside/OUT: advisory board* (1994-1995), board of directors (1996)*. Images: board of directors (1991), advisory board (1994-1996)	– The Jungle Boy (1985) – You Taste American (1986) – Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1986) – A Moffie Called Simon (1986) – The ADS epidemic (1987) – Urinal (1988)
Cass, Robin	Inside/OUT: jury (1998), advisory board (1999-2000)*	– Zero Patience (1993) – Lilies (1996)
Day, Dennis	Inside/OUT: trailer (1997)*	– Trailer, Inside/OUT (1997) – Un©ut (1997, screened that year)
Diamond, Sara	Images: guest programmer (1989), advisory board (1994-1999)	– Herr (1998)
D’oliveira, Damon	Inside/OUT: Jury (1999)	– Zero Patience (1993) – Un©ut (1997) – The Laws of Enclosures (1999) – Proteus (2003)
Douglas, Debbie	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, board of director (1996*, 1998)	– Zero Patience (1993) – AIDS Cable Access Project (1980s)
Durand, Doug	Images: Board of Directors (1993-1994)	– The Visitation (1979)
Findlay, David	Images: Director (1995)	– Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985) – A Moffie Called Simon (1986) – Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (New York and Toronto) (1989)
Flanders, Elle	Inside/OUT: director (1997), Images: board of directors (1998-1999)	– Covered (2009) – Toronto declaration (protests against TIFF as part of the BDS campaign)
Foster, Steve	Images: Jury (1997)	– Captifs d’Amour (2010) – The Ballad of Roy and Silo (2010)
Fung, Richard	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, Inside/OUT: coordinator (1997), Inside/OUT: programming (1998, 2000), Images: board of directors (1988-89, 1991), programmer (1992)	– Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985) – Zero Patience (1993) – Rex v. Singh (2009) – Fig Trees (2009) Greyson also collaborated on several of Fung’s films (for instance, as a camera operator on the 1986 Chinese Characters).
Kazimi, Ali	Images: board of directors (1991-1994), programmer (1992)	– Rex v. Singh (2009) – Fig Trees (2009)
Lee, Anita	Images: Board of directors (1996-1997)	– Proteus (2003)
McIntosh, David	Images: Jury (1992)	– A Moffie called Simon (1986) – Urinal (1988)
Moores, Marg	Images: Board of directors (1989, 1991-1996)	– The First Draft (1980)
Paterson, Andrew	Images: Jury (1989)	– Zero Patience (1993) – Fuse (magazine)
Raffé, Alexandra	Inside/OUT: Advisory Board (1994-1995; 1998-2000)*	– Zero Patience (1993)
Rashid, Ian Iqbal	Inside/OUT: organising team (1994-1995)*	– Bolo Bolo! (1990)
Roche, David	Inside/OUT: member of the founding collective (1990)	– You taste American (1986) – The Pink Pimpernel (1989 – Screened in 1991 at Inside/OUT) – Zero Patience (1993)
Steele, Lisa [Vtape: Founder]	Inside/OUT: advisory board (1994-1995)*, Images: Board of Directors (1988), Guest programmer (1992), staff (1999)	– Kipling meets the cowboys (1985) – Collaborator on Centerfold / Fuse – Vtape: Greyson’s distributor
Tomczak, Kim [Vtape: Founder]	Images: Board of Directors / founder / programmer (1988-1994)	– Vtape: Greyson’s distributor – Have collaborated on several exhibitions. Among others: Paris’ 11th Biennale (1980), Powerplant’s 1987 Toronto : A play of History. – Appears with Greyson on several tapes, such as Hoolboom’s 2006 Fascination.
Travassos, Almerinda	Images: Jury (1991)	– Urinal (1988) – The Making of Monsters (1991)
Waugh, Tom	Images: Guest programmer (1989)	– Full Frontal Nudity Expert (among others) – Cameo in several of Greyson’s films and videos, extensive interview in Un©ut (1997)
Yael, b.h.	Images: Board of Directors (1989, 1991-1995), programmer (1992)	– Toronto Declaration

* : Greyson participated, that year, in the organisation of this festival.

 

Notes

[1] Skadi Loist, “Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals,” Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 268–73.

[2] Liz Czach, “Affective Labor and the Work of Film Festival Programming,” in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, ed. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist (Routledge, 2016), 196.

[3] Antoine Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut: Queer/Ing Festival Studies, Curating Queerness” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018).

[4] In this article, I use the term “cinematic cultures” instead of “film cultures” to include both celluloid and video formats.

[5] B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke University Press, 1998), 3.

[6] Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 101.

[7] Dina Iordanova, “The Film Festival Circuit,” in Film Festival Yearbook I : The Festival Circuit, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (St Andrews Film Studies, 2009), 33.

[8] Ragan Rhyne, “Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders,” in Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (St Andrews Film Studies, 2009), 9.

[9] Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (The New Press, 1982), 135–40. [Emphasis: mine]

[10] From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, academic conferences on gay and lesbian issues often included a screening programme akin to a festival. Conversely, LGBT festivals of the period often featured several academic talks. In using the same term to designate both academic and cinematic circuits, I underscore the productive interplay between festival organising and academic knowledge production which participated in shaping the gay and lesbian cinematic cultures of the 1980s. See: Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut.”

[11] Susan Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press-, 2013), 137.

[12] Larry Horne and John Ramirez, “Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 29 (1984).

[13] Antoine Damiens, “The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals and Queer Cinema’s Legs,” Studies in European Cinema 15, no. 1 (2018).

[14] Jump Cut, “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (1980): 34–37.

[15] Peter Biskind et al., “Alternative Cinema Conference Times Seven: Jump Cut Editors’ Individual Perspectives,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 29 (1979): 37–40.

[16] Jump Cut, “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops” It is worth noting that members of the Lesbian and Gay Male Caucus consulted with other minority groups, in effect enacting a politics of solidarity typical of the 1980s.

[17] beverley Philadelphia and wendy stevens, “Why Protest Windows?,” Off Our Backs 10, no. 4 (1980): 9, 13, 20.

[18] The film was perceived as promoting negative depictions of necessarily sad gay men. Furthermore, Friedkin had publicly discussed his preliminary research on Fire Island in a 1975 lecture at the New School, recalling with disdain being confused at the touristic attractions the gay vacation spot offers – namely “200 to 300 guys in daisy-chain [sic], balling each other in the ass [in the Meat Rack].” See: Edward Guthmann, “The Cruising Controversy: William Friedkin vs. the Gay Community,” Cineaste 10, no. 3 (1980): 2–4.

[19] Future research will address the politics of video festivals, a topic which has surprisingly been ignored by festival scholars.

[20] In particular in The First Draft (1980), a tape which “looks at the limitation of constructing alternative media within a dominant culture” through a video aesthetics. See: Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh, The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 503.

[21] National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, “Dear Friends…,” Winter 1981, Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

[22] Steve Forgione, “Organizing on the Left: Some Thoughts on the Lesbian/Gay Struggle,” New Political Science 1, no. 4 (1980): 74–75.

[23] National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers, “Meeting Minutes, June 28th,” n/d, Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

[24] Stefan Pevnik, “Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US,” The Advocate, November 26, 1981.

[25] “Eggo Film Festival 1983 – Southampton College, Fine Arts,” 1983, Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

[26] Foundation for Independent Film and Video, “Agenda,” The Independent 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 24 Also known as “prognosis for gay and lesbian independent film”; see: Thomas Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University MQUP, 2013), 37.

[27] UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival, “UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival,” 1983, Folder Film Festivals — Outfest, The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

[28] Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look? : Queer Film and Video (Bay Press, 1991), 11. In itself, the fact that How Do I Look? is remembered as a conference (and not a festival) exemplifies quite well the erasure of festivals organised in the margins of the contemporary queer circuit. I analyse this issue in: Damiens, “Festivals, Uncut”.

[29] Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, Queer Looks (Routledge, 1993).

[30] Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, “On a Queer Day You Can See Forever,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (Routledge, 1993), xiv–xv.

[31] Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone.”

[32] Nancy Patterson, “Curating Video,” Cinema Canada, March 1987, 14–15.

[33] Will Straw, “Cultural Scenes,” Loisir et société/Society and Leisure 27, no. 2 (2004): 412.

[34] Brenda Cossman, Censorship and the Arts: Law, Controversy, Debate, Facts (Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995), 102.

[35] Jay Scott, “Ending on a Negative Note: Censor Board Accused of ‘Attempting to Destroy Festival,’” The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1982, 11; “Fest of Fests May Get New Deal from Censors,” Cinema Canada 145 (1987): 63.

[36] John Greyson, “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P,” in Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, ed. Lorraine Johnson and John Greyson (Toronto Photographers Workshop and The Riverbank Press, 1997), 2–3 [Emphasis in the original].

[37] Ger Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals” (PhD diss., McGill, 2008), 16.

[38] Cossman, Censorship and the Arts, 23–23.

[39] “Calendar of Events in Toronto from Monday April 22 to Thursday May 31,” The Body Politic, no. 114 (May 1985): 25.

[40] John Greyson, “Security Blankets: Sex, Video, and the Police,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (Routledge, 1993), 383–94.

[41] Dot Tuer, “Mirroring Identities: Two Decades of Video Art in English-Canada,” in Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, ed. Janine Marchessault (YYZ Books, 1995), 123.

[42] Philip Monk, “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,” C Magazine 59 (1998).

[43] Geoffrey Shea, “The 1986 New Work Show,” Cinema Canada, November 1986, 33–35; Patterson, “Curating Video.”

[44] Phil Van Steenburgh, “‘Habits’ by YYZ, Toronto: Invitation to a Screening.,” Cinema Canada, August 1986, 26–27.

[45] Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” 137.

[46] Dipti Gupta and Janine Marchessault, “Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traffic,” in Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities, ed. Johanne Sloan (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2007), 251.

[47] Tom Warner, Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2002), 326.

[48] Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances,” 116.

[49] Brenda Longfellow, “Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism,” in Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, ed. André Loiselle and Tom McSorley (Canadian Film Institute/Institut canadien du film, 2006), 194.

[50] According to Ger Zielinski, the first festival might have happened as early as 1980. Zielinski, “Furtive, Steady Glances,” 144n114.

[51] “Gay Fest in T.O.,” Cinema Canada News Update 1 (November 10, 1986): 3.

[52] Kevin Dowler, “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art,” in Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, ed. Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson (YYZ Books, 2001), 34.

[53] Joceline Andersen, “From the Ground up: Transforming the inside out LGBT Film and Video Festival of Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 40.

[54] Cossman, Censorship and the Arts, 31.

[55] Mary Louise Adams, “Gay Clout Turns inside Out,” Herizons 7, no. 4 (1997): 14; David Roche, “Queer Film Fest Is Homeless. Euclid Collapse Forces the Inside Out Collective Elsewhere,” Xtra!, November 1993; Dowler, “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art,” 34.

[56] Similar attempts to withdraw funding from gay and lesbian cultural organisations were made in 1997. See: Andrew Paterson, “Private Parts in Public Places,” Fuse 12, no. 4 (1989): 43–44.

[57] Northern Vision Collective, “Images 88,” 1988, 3.

[58] I limited myself to the organisational team. A similar argument could be made through an analysis of festivals’ acknowledgement sections and film selections. For instance, Inside/OUT’s 1993 catalogue reads like a credit from a tape by Greyson and/or a who’s who of his collaborators — referencing among others Kay Armatage, Desh Pardesh, Doug Durand, Ellen Flanders, Richard Fung, Fuse magazine, Ian Rashid, Gita Saxena, Euclid Theatre, Full Frame, Vtape and YYZ.

[59] Lord, “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson,” 136.

[60] Mike Hoolboom, “Audio Visual Judo,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 209–10.

[61] For instance, Greyson wrote the introduction to Thomas Waugh’s anthology The Fruit Machine: John Greyson, “Foreword,” in The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, by Thomas Waugh (Duke University Press, 2000), ix–xii. His academic writings further preface several books on censorship and/or AIDS, such as: Greyson, “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P”. Conversely, B. Ruby Rich wrote the foreword to an anthology on Greyson: B. Ruby Rich, “Foreword,” in The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, ed. Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), xv–xvi. Significantly, this chapter is immediately followed by Waugh’s own contribution, which theorises his friendship with Greyson: Waugh, “Notes on Greyzone.”

[62] Thomas Waugh and Chris Straayer, “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Antoine Damiens holds a PhD in Film Studies from Concordia University (Montréal). His dissertation interrogates the historiographical and political project of festival studies through an analysis of minor, ephemeral, LGBT festivals. Antoine serves as the co-chair of SCMS’ Film &amp; Media Festival Scholarly Interest Group and as Synoptique’s festival review editor. He has participated in organizing various festivals, among which Cannes’ Queer Palm.

 

Bibliography 

Adams, Mary Louise. “Gay Clout Turns inside Out.” Herizons 7, no. 4 (1997): 14.

Andersen, Joceline. “From the Ground up: Transforming the inside out LGBT Film and Video Festival of Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 38–57.

Bad Object-Choices. How Do I Look? : Queer Film and Video. Bay Press, 1991.

Biskind, Peter, Michelle Citron, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, Peter Steven, and Thomas Waugh. “Alternative Cinema Conference Times Seven: Jump Cut Editors’ Individual Perspectives.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 29 (1979): 37–40.

“Calendar of Events in Toronto from Monday April 22 to Thursday May 31.” The Body Politic, no. 114 (May 1985): 25.

Cossman, Brenda. Censorship and the Arts: Law, Controversy, Debate, Facts. Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995.

Czach, Liz. “Affective Labor and the Work of Film Festival Programming.” In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, edited by Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, 196–208. Routledge, 2016.

Damiens, Antoine. “Festivals, Uncut: Queer/Ing Festival Studies, Curating Queerness.” PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018.

———. “The Queer Film Ecosystem: Symbolic Economy, Festivals and Queer Cinema’s Legs.” Studies in European Cinema, 15, no.1 (2018).

de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

Dowler, Kevin. “In the Bedrooms of the Nation: State Scrutiny and the Funding of Dirty Art.” In Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, edited by Sally McKay and Andrew J. Paterson, 29–49. YYZ Books, 2001.

“Eggo Film Festival 1983 – Southampton College, Fine Arts,” 1983. Folder Film festivals 1900-2012, ONE Subject Files Collection. Coll2012.001. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

“Fest of Fests May Get New Deal from Censors.” Cinema Canada 145 (1987): 63.

Forgione, Steve. “Organizing on the Left: Some Thoughts on the Lesbian/Gay Struggle.” New Political Science 1, no. 4 (1980): 74–75.

Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, 135–40. The New Press, 1982.

Foundation for Independent Film and Video. “Agenda.” The Independent 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 24.

“Gay Fest in T.O.” Cinema Canada News Update 1 (1986): 3.

Gever, Martha, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson. “On a Queer Day You Can See Forever.” In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parma., xiii–xv. Routledge, 1993.

———. Queer Looks. Routledge, 1993.

Greyson, John. “Don’t Cry for Me, Project P.” In Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, edited by Lorraine Johnson and John Greyson., 1–5. Toronto Photographers Workshop and The Riverbank Press, 1997.

———. “Foreword.” In The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, by Thomas Waugh, ix–xii. Duke University Press, 2000.

———. “Security Blankets: Sex, Video, and the Police.” In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar, 383–94. Routledge, 1993.

Gupta, Dipti, and Janine Marchessault. “Film Festivals as Urban Encounter and Cultural Traffic.” In Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities, edited by Johanne Sloan., 239–54. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

Guthmann, Edward. “The Cruising Controversy: William Friedkin vs. the Gay Community.” Cineaste 10, no. 3 (1980): 2–8.

Hoolboom, Mark. “Audio Visual Judo.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 209–15. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Horne, Larry, and John Ramirez. “Conference Report: The UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 29 (1984).

Iordanova, Dina. “The Film Festival Circuit.” In Film Festival Yearbook I : The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 23–39. St Andrews Film Studies, 2009.

Jump Cut. “Alternative Cinema Conference: Documents from Caucuses and Workshops.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (1980): 34–37.

Loist, Skadi. “Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of (Queer) Film Festivals.” Screen 52, no. 2 (2011): 268–73.

Longfellow, Brenda. “Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism.” In Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, edited by André Loiselle and Tom McSorley., 167–202. Canadian Film Institute/Institut canadien du film, 2006.

Longfellow, Brenda, Scott MacKenzie, and Thomas Waugh. The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Lord, Susan. “Fables of Empire: The Intimate Histories of John Greyson.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh., 135–47. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Monk, Philip. “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years.” C Magazine 59 (1998).

National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. “Dear Friends…,” Winter 1981. Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

———. “Meeting Minutes, June 28th,” n/d. Box 13. Folder National Association for Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers. International Gay Information Center Organizational Files Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Northern Vision Collective. “Images 88,” 1988.

Paterson, Andrew. “Private Parts in Public Places.” Fuse 12, no. 4 (1989): 43–44.

Patterson, Nancy. “Curating Video.” Cinema Canada, March 1987, 14–15.

Pevnik, Stefan. “Gay Filmmakers Confront Media Homophobia in the US.” The Advocate, November 26, 1981.

Philadelphia, beverley, and wendy stevens. “Why Protest Windows?” Off Our Backs 10, no. 4 (1980): 9, 13, 20.

Rhyne, Ragan. “Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders.” In Film Festival Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, 9–22. St Andrews Film Studies, 2009.

Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Duke University Press, 1998.

———. “Foreword.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh., xv–xvi. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Roche, David. “Queer Film Fest Is Homeless. Euclid Collapse Forces the Inside Out Collective Elsewhere.” Xtra!, November 1993.

Scott, Jay. “Ending on a Negative Note: Censor Board Accused of ‘Attempting to Destroy Festival.’” The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1982, 11.

Shea, Geoffrey. “The 1986 New Work Show.” Cinema Canada, November 1986, 33–35.

Tuer, Dot. “Mirroring Identities: Two Decades of Video Art in English-Canada.” In Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, edited by Janine Marchessault, 107–25. YYZ Books, 1995.

UCLA Gay & Lesbian media Festival. “UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Festival,” 1983. Folder Film Festivals — Outfest, The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

Van Steenburgh, Phil. “‘Habits’ by YYZ, Toronto: Invitation to a Screening.” Cinema Canada, August 1986, 26–27.

Warner, Tom. Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Waugh, Thomas. “Notes on Greyzone.” In The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson, edited by Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, 19–42. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Waugh, Thomas, and Chris Straayer. “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 599–625.

Zielinski, Ger. “Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence & Cultural Politics of Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals.” PhD diss., McGill, 2008. 

Filmography

Dennis Day and John Greyson. Trailer – Inside/OUT (1997, Tonronto, ON: Inside/OUT), 35mn.

William Friedkin. Cruising (1980, Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists), Film.

Richard Fung. Chinese Characters (1986, Chicago, IL: Video Data Bank), Video.

Richard Fung, John Greyson, and Ali Kazimi. Rex v. Singh (2009, Vancouver, BC: Out on Screen), DV.

John Greyson. The Visitation (1979, undistributed), Video.

———. The First Draft (1980, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The Jungle Boy (1985, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Kippling Meets the Cowboys (1985, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. You taste American (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. A Moffie Called Simon (1986, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The ADS epidemic (1987, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. Urinal (1988), San Francisco, CA: Frameline Distribution), Video transferred to 16mn.

———. Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (New York and Toronto) (1989), Video.

———. The Pink Pimpernel (1989, Toronto, ON: Vtape), Video.

———. The Making of Monsters (1991), 16mn.

———. Zero Patience (1993, Toronto, ON: Cineplex Odeon Distribution), Super-16 mn, released 35mn.

———. Lillies (1996, Toronto, ON: Alliance Atlantis), 35mn.

———. Un©ut (1997, Toronto, ON: Vtape), D-Beta transferred to 16mn.

———. Herr (1998), DV.

———. The Laws of Enclosures (2000, Toronto, ON: Momentum Pictures), 35mn.

———. Proteus (2003, Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing), D-Beta transferred to 35mn.

———. Covered (2009), DV.

———. Fig Trees (2009), DV.

———. Captifs d’Amour (2010), 16mn/DV.

———. The Ballad of Roy and Silo (2010), DV.

Mike Hoolboom. Fascination (2006, Chicago, IL: Video Data Bank), DV.

Ian Iqbal Rashid and Gita Saxena. Bolo Bolo!: Talking About Silence, AIDS and Gay Sexuality (1990, San Francisco, CA : National Asian American Telecommunications Association), Video.

Gordon Willis. Windows (1980, Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists), Film.