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Animating Film Theory Animating Film Theory animating film animating animating film theorytheory film theory karen beckman, editor Animating Film Theory Animating Film Theory Karen Beckman, editor Duke university Press Durham anD LonDon 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Animating film theory / Karen Beckman, editor. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5640- 0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5652- 3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Animated films—History and criticism. 2. Animated films—Social aspects. 3. Animation (Cinematography) I. Beckman, Karen Redrobe nc1765.a535 2014 791.43′34—dc23 2013026435 “Film as Experiment of Animation—Are Films Experiments on Human Beings?” © Gertrud Koch. In memory of Ruth Wright (1917–2012) Contents Acknowledgments · ix Animating Film Theory: An Introduction · karen beckman · 1 Part I: Time and Space 1 : : Animation and History · esther LesLie · 25 2 : : Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography · tom GunninG · 37 3 : : Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3- D Animation · aLexanDer r. GaLLoway · 54 4 : : “A Living, Developing Egg Is Present before You”: Animation, Scientific Visualization, Modeling · Oliver Gaycken · 68 Part II: Cinema and Animation 5 : : André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for a History of Terms · hervé Joubert- Laurencin; transLateD by Lucy swanson · 85 6 : : “First Principles” of Animation · aLan choLoDenko · 98 7 : : Animation, in Theory · suzanne buchan · 111 Part III: The Experiment 8 : : Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human Beings? · GertruD koch; transLateD by DanieL henDrickson · 131 9 : : Frame Shot: Vertov’s Ideologies of Animation · mihaeLa mihaiLova anD John mackay · 145 10 : : Signatures of Motion: Len Lye’s Scratch Films and the Energy of the Line · anDrew r. Johnston · 167 11 : : Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine, and Walter Benjamin · yuriko Furuhata · 181 12 : : Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in Experimental Identity- Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s · tess takahashi · 201 Part IV: Animation and the World 13 : : Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and Photography · thomas Lamarre · 221 14 : : African American Representation through the Combination of Live Action and Animation · christoPher P. Lehman · 252 15 : : Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military Malaria Films (1942–1945) and the Pacific Theater · bishnuPriya Ghosh · 264 16 : : Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan · marc steinberG · 287 17 : : Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine · scott bukatman · 301 Bibliography · 317 Contributors · 337 Index · 343 Acknowledgments Over the last few years, many people have helped me to think more care- fully about animation, and their ideas and suggestions have given energy and life to this book. First, I am grateful to the volume’s wonderful con- tributors. They have all been eager and inspired participants from the very beginning, and I thank them for their intellectual vibrancy, good humor, and grace. What a pleasure it has been to work with each one. Thanks also to the volume’s three readers—they gave great advice and enthusiastic support. Lacey Baradel helped me prepare the manuscript with meticulous care and incredible efficiency, and I am most grateful to her. In addition, I’ve had the good fortune to consider the topic of ani- mation in a number of different venues and with a variety of interlocu- tors. These include Dudley Andrew, Nancy Davenport, Erna Fiorentini, Maureen Furniss, Vinzenz Hediger, Joshua Mosley, Susan Napier, Jayne Pilling, Dana Polan, Jason Potts, Bella Honess Roe, Marc Siegel and his students, Vivian Sobchack, Sheila Sofian, Dan Stout, Orkhan Telhan, Rick Warner, Paul Wells, the members of the 2012–13 Penn Humanities Forum, the participants of the Enchanted Drawing conferences (parts I and II), and the members of the “Art of Animation” seminar. Duke Uni- versity Press has been enthusiastic in its support of the project since its inception, and I’m especially grateful to Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault. Penn’s Program in Cinema Studies and the Department of the His- tory of Art have provided me with collegial and thought- provoking envi- ronments for almost a decade, and I appreciate all my colleagues’ friend- ship and support. In Cinema Studies, I am especially fortunate to be able to work with Tim Corrigan, Peter Decherney, Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, Meta Mazaj, and Nicola Gentili. Dean Rebecca Bushnell and Provost Vincent Price could not have been more supportive during my time at Penn, and I thank them for their constant encouragement. I also thank Leo Charney and Brooke Sietinsons for their collaborative, energetic, and innovative spirits. Robert, Merrilee, Mari, Eric, Dieter, Jane, Robin, Lucy, Suzanne, Claire, Torben, Janek, Mikkel, Freya, and mum—thanks for sharing your lives with me. Michael, Siduri, Lua, and Bruno—how did I get to be so lucky to be animated each day by you? x • Acknowledgments Animating Film Theory: An Introduction karen beckman Animating Film Theory begins from the premise that cinema and media studies in the early twenty- first century needs a better understanding of the relationship between two of the field’s most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts: “animation” and “film theory.”1 As the increas- ingly digital nature of cinema now forces animation to the forefront of our conversations, it becomes ever clearer that for film theorists, it has really never made sense to ignore animation. Tom Gunning has re- cently described the marginalization of animation as “one of the great scandals of film theory.”2 Marginalization, of course, is not the same as total neglect; and in order to respond productively to this apparent scandal, we need to consider both where and when this marginalization has happened in the history of film theory, and where and when ithasn’t happened. Flipping through the available film theory anthologies, one could easily assume that film theorists have utterly neglected the topic of ani- mation.3 Yet as both Suzanne Buchan and Oliver Gaycken point out in their contributions to this volume, animation has been a sustained if dispersed area of interest for a surprisingly substantial and prominent list of authors. Part of the fragmentary nature of film theorists’ engage- ment with the term may stem from the fact that animation signifies in so many different ways. At different moments, it becomes synonymous with a whole range of much more specific terms and concepts, includ- ing movement, life itself, a quality of liveliness (that doesn’t necessarily involve movement), spirit, nonwhiteness, frame- by- frame filmmaking pro- cesses, variable frame filmmaking processes, and digital cinema, as well as a range of mobilized media that appear within animated films, includ- ing sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, and puppetry. These divergent terms do not always sit easily with each other, and though the tensions among them are important and interesting, they have not been ex- plored as fully as they might, in part because our critical paradigms may have foreclosed such lines of inquiry. Film theory and history both fre- quently rely on a series of binary terms, including continuous versus non- continuous, narrative versus experimental, indexical versus handmade, and animated versus live action. Though these oppositions can be useful, they can lead to inaccurate presumptions in that they do not always accu- rately reflect the differences contained within any one of these terms, such as experimental or narrative. This volume aims to unearth and think through some of these inaccuracies, blind spots, and structural inhibi- tors to clear some space, pose some questions, and set some priorities for the future as well as the retroactive work of animating film theory. It would be close to impossible to organize film theorists’ meandering thoughts on this sprawling term into any kind of coherent category that would work as well, for example, as realism, montage, spectatorship, ideol- ogy, or sound seems to do on a film theory syllabus. Yet, as the examples demonstrate, by seeking out those places where film theorists have grappled with animation, we often stumble upon ideas that complicate those concepts we think we can more easily corral into the straitjacket of the textbook (this may help us to understand animation’s margin- alization). No doubt, it would also be difficult to extract and antholo- gize, for example, writing on animation from the body of work known as classical film theory because of the way animation seems to wind in and out of the theorization of other aspects of the experience and materi- ality of cinema. Animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings makes it both easy to overlook and essential to en- gage.4 By briefly surveying some of animation’s cameo appearances in the history of film theory, I hope to encourage readers to frame today’s theoretical work on the digital’s relation to animation (a synonymous relationship is too easily presumed) within a longer history of think- ing about what cinema is and how it works. I also hope to reclaim and reanimate some of the interesting but underdeveloped questions
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