UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Feminist Post-Cinema

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

in Design Media Arts

by

Christina Yglesias

2018

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Table of Contents

Abstract (pg. 2)

0. Preface: or why the future starts now (pg. 3)

1. Introduction: Post-Cinema: The New Expanded Field (pg. 7)

2. Methodologies and Practices

2.1 Appropriation: Taking Back Control (pg. 10)

2.2 Database Aesthetics: Collective Narratives (pg. 25)

2.3 Restagings: Past and Present Collide (pg. 35)

3. Conclusion (pg. 44)

Works Cited (pg. 46)

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ABSTRACT

The goal of this thesis will be to bridge the gaps in scholarship between the subjects of the post-cinematic—a further expanded field of film and video art—and feminist film studies. Feminist ​ ​ ​ ​ post-cinema, both a term I am coining and the title of this paper, reinvigorates feminist film studies within the context of the post-cinematic moment. In post-cinematic works, artists interrogate conventions of time and space codified by Hollywood, and traditional filmmaking is reimagined, restructured, and rejected. Instead, simultaneity, database aesthetics, and embodiment are privileged and utilized to respond to and highlight the conditions of networked culture. Scholars in feminist film studies, especially in the

1980’s and 1990’s, called attention to the sexism embedded into the very apparatus of the cinema, beyond the sexism often present in narratives and characterization, and called for a revolutionary alternate cinema. Arguably, that utopian cinema was never achieved in any cohesive way. The post-cinematic moment, which began roughly in the beginning of the 21st century in tandem with the proliferation of networked technology, offers an opportunity for the reinvigoration of a feminist cinema, since it has already begun to break the bonds of linear narrative, clear characterization, traditional projection, and reliance on the standard production and distribution pathways. The current political climate, although divisive, has been heavily marked by feminist efforts such as the Women’s March and the #MeToo and the #TimesUp movements, which further bolsters the possibility of a new feminist cinema. This thesis is in part a research paper, a manifesto, and a positioning of my own artistic practice. Feminist post-cinema is an approach to image-making and a set of practices to guide artists and their projects. Appropriation, database aesthetics, and cinematic restaging will all be discussed as methods that can be utilized to support this practice, both calling attention to and liberating woman as signifier from the tyranny of the male gaze and the narrative cliches that bind her.

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Preface: or why the future starts now

In order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released. -Claire Johnston

Feminist Post-Cinema is simultaneously a manifesto, research paper, and extended artist ​ statement. It links existing scholarship in feminist film studies and the post-cinematic to call for a new field of feminist post-cinema. Feminist film theory arguably reached its peak as a field of study in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Many seminal feminist film theory texts were published in the seventies, coinciding with second wave feminism. For example, Marjorie

Rosen’s book Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream, which outlined and ​ ​ criticized female cinematic stereotypes, was published in 1974. In 1974, Molly Haskell’s From ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) laid out the limiting themes and ​ characters that comprise ‘women’s pictures’. British film theorist Laura Mulvey’s influential ​ essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was first published in the journal Screen in 1975, ​ ​ which introduced the ideas of the male gaze and gendered spectatorship through a psychoanalytic lens.1

Scholarship continued into the 1980’s and 1990’s, coinciding partially along with third wave feminism, which began to queer theory and include discussions of race as it intersects with gender. bell hooks introduced the idea of the black woman’s oppositional gaze in her 1992 book

Black Looks: Race and Representation. The influence of the field’s seminal ideas and texts still ​

1 It is important to note that Feminist Post-Cinema will not provide an entire history or overview of feminist film ​ ​ theory, since its story is a complex one with many nuanced arguments and counter arguments. Instead, key ideas from the field will serve as departure points and as tools for understanding the current state of feminism in cinema. 4

permeates film studies as a whole but there has been little recent further development. Instead, contemporary film scholarship has been focused on the digital, global cinema, post-colonialism, and race. Similarly, fourth wave feminism is grappling with intersectionality and the role of networked culture’s ability to either reinforce or push back against everyday oppression.

Aside from formal scholarship, feminist movements and conversations have become more and more prevalent in mainstream media and the American consciousness today. The #MeToo movement, beginning in Hollywood and bolstered by social media, is a battle cry to end sexual harassment and assault, especially in workplaces, from movie studios to agricultural fields. Time

Magazine named a collective person of the year in 2017 to honor the many ‘silence breakers’ who have made up the #MeToo movement. The movement has been rapidly reshaping the film and TV industries, with countless abusive actors, directors, and executives blacklisted by the women who have spoken out against their behavior. According to the Time Magazine feature,

...women everywhere have begun to speak out about the inappropriate, abusive and in ​ some cases illegal behavior they've faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down

a charmer like former Today show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no ​ ​ recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier

to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.2

The momentum of the #MeToo movement creates the potential for change both within the film industry and more broadly, which provides yet another reason for why the time for a feminist post-cinema is now.

2 Stephanie Zacharek, et al. “TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers.” Time, Time, ​ ​ ​ time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/. 5

Simultaneously, cinema has reshaped itself to fit into a networked culture which has changed access to filmmaking technologies, distribution methods, and more broadly, to the way viewers relate to moving images. Cinema finds itself in a moment of explosion, expansion, and reconfiguration.3 The term post-cinema has emerged within media scholarship to describe this phenomenon.4 It is this very reimagining and redefinition of cinema that is making more space for feminist practices to emerge. Coupled with the strength and presence of fourth wave feminism in everyday life, culture, and media in the United States and beyond5 means that the conditions are ideal for a feminist post-cinema to emerge.

Feminist post-cinema is a set of practices to ignite feminist discourse and to inject feminist values into the images we create and put out into the world for consumption. Any artist or image maker can utilize this set of practices in their approach to making, discussing, critiquing, or teaching film and video. In this context, feminist values are flexible, remaining open to change and redefinition in response to the particular place and moment. Feminist post-cinema demands seeks to be a cinema free of gendered exploitation, sexual objectification, and messages that

3 Changes in viewing practices due to online streaming services has also led to more emphasis placed on the ​ production of television series. For example, Netflix announced that the company anticipates spending between seven and eight billion dollars on the production of original content in 2018. Matthew Lynley, "Netflix's original ​ ​ ​ content costs are ballooning," TechCrunch, October 16, 2017, , accessed February 22, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/netflixs-original-content-costs-are-ballooning/. 4 Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, is published online and in ​ ​ e-book formats by REFRAME Books offers the following explanation in the book’s introduction. “If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the twentieth century, shaped and reflected the cultural sensibilities of the era, how do 21st-century media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? Various attempts to identify the defining characteristics of these newer media (and hence their salient differences from older media) emphasize that they are essentially digital, interactive, networked, ludic, miniaturized, mobile, social, processual, algorithmic, aggregative, environmental, or convergent, among other things. Recently, some theorists have begun to say, simply, that they are post-cinematic.” ​ ​ 5 I am writing from an American perspective, which is important to note, but feminist post-cinema does not need to ​ limited to a national scope. 6

uphold and reinforce patriarchal systems. If cinema is our collective dreamscape, we deserve that dreamscape to be one that privileges gender equality in its narratives and apparatus.

The first chapter of this paper will outline the concept of post-cinema so that I can expand upon its ideas. Once I have laid out this essential context, the work of creating connections between post-cinema and feminism will begin. The second chapter will discuss feminist post-cinematic methodologies and practices in relation to my own work and works by other artists. I will discuss appropriation and restaging, database aesthetics, and cinematic restagings as powerful and subversive tools. These methods and tools can be wielded to push back against the dominance of mainstream cinema, which has been upholding patriarchal values and limiting gender roles since its inception. I will discuss existing works, including my own, to prove that a feminist post-cinema already exists but has yet to be named or defined. To move towards a feminist post-cinema, we look to the past, create work and ideas in the here and now, and leave a legacy for the future. In other words, the future of feminist post-cinema is now. ​ ​

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Introduction: Post-Cinema: The New Expanded Field

The history of cinema in the twentieth century is a history of plurality of cinemas. -Mark Nash

If the twentieth century offered up a ‘plurality of cinemas’, the twenty-first century is marked by an excess of cinemas. Here the term cinema is used broadly to refer to any moving image based art, which can include the dominant form of the feature length narrative, but does not presume its supremacy. Hollywood is still an omnipresent force, but changes in the technology of cinematic production and distribution have created even more space for artists, amateurs, and professionals working outside of the constraints of the studio system. From installations in galleries, massive public urban projections, online platforms and services such as YouTube and Netflix, album-long music videos, interactive works, generative and code-based moving images, and independent narrative and documentary filmmaking to experimental digital filmmaking, what we have come to know as cinema is no longer limited to feature-length narratives enjoyed in the collective space of a theatre.6 The term post-cinema refers to this necessary broadening of what can be considered cinematic.

To discuss post-cinema, I will be drawing on the research of Holly Willis who teaches at the

University of Southern California School of the Cinematic Arts. In her 2016 book, Fast ​ Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts, she approaches the idea of the post-cinematic by ​ laying out the practices and projects of many artists and makers that point towards the

6 This is only a partial list of what might be considered post-cinema, as the definition is broad enough to encompass a constantly changing landscape of moving images created in the context of technology and networked culture. In this paper, I will be mostly focused on the narrowed scope of post-cinematic video art. 8

broadening of an already expanded field. For Willis, the post-cinematic both results from and contributes to networked culture, in which portable technologies, social media, and the omnipresence of data inform our lived experiences and media culture.

Cinema, the primary mode of storytelling for the twentieth century, is being reconfigured

for the twenty-first century through a process of dismantling and a proliferation of

screens, stories, performers and viewers, all of which are reconsidered and re-mobilized

towards new ends….These are works [outlined in Fast Forward] that experiment with

expressions of time and space, and, in the process, disassemble the temporal and spatial

codes of classical Hollywood cinema, and the illusion of coherence that they engender. 7

The expansion of the cinematic into the post-cinematic is therefore not just a broadening of a field or the arrival at an accurate terminology, but a reconfiguration of cinema as we know it.

The post-cinematic privileges multiplicity, non-linearity, simultaneity, and embodiment in reflection and reaction to the networked culture that dominates the present moment. This broadened field creates room for new forms and for makers who may have previously been excluded from mainstream cinematic production.

Although the ‘post’ in post-cinema may linearly imply a coming after, post-cinema can be understood instead in relation to discussions and definitions of postmodernism. In his 1984 seminal text The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, first published in his native ​ ​

7 Holly Willis, Fast forward: the future(s) of the cinematic arts. (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016) pp. 1-2. ​ ​ ​ 9

French in 1979, Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernism as ‘an incredulity towards ​ ​ ​ ​ metanarratives’.8 While modernism put forth grand narratives of progress in the arts, sciences, and history, postmodernism is defined by a wariness towards and rejection of these narratives.

Modernism, by privileging efficiency, linearity, profit, and accepted forms of knowledge, exerts control over society. Similarly, according to Piotr Woycicki, post-cinema can be seen as “a cultural trend that is a reaction to cinema’s ongoing culture of dominance”. 9 This incredulity and rejection is extended towards both the narratives of Hollywood cinema and the cinematic methods used to put forth these narratives.

Twentieth century feminist film scholarship largely focused on deconstructing the woman as signifier in existing filmic material, which was a herculean task. Feminist video works influenced by these ideas were also often preoccupied with deconstruction of woman’s on-screen representation. This deconstruction was and at times, still is, necessary, but feminist post-cinema focuses on work that creates new material unbounded by the task of deconstruction. Feminist post-cinema is indebted to this past work of feminist film scholarship but seeks to construct works anew. The next chapters will outline and discuss methodologies for this ambitious goal.

8 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of ​ ​ Minnesota Press, 1984). 9 Quoted by Willis in Fast Forward, p. 23. ​ ​ ​ 10

Chapter 2: Methodologies

2.1 Appropriation: Reclaiming Control

Post-cinema is a present cinema conditioned by the past, a so-called new cinema obsessed with the old. It is a cinema whose enactments and experiments often reference and restage moments of the past while simultaneously striving to do justice to what it means to be human now and in the near future. -Holly Willis

Appropriation in avant-garde and art cinema has a long and rich history.10 Joseph Cornell, the outsider artist best known for his collage boxes, produced montage films by recutting existing reels as early as the 1930’s. The next seminal example of found footage is arguably Bruce

Connor’s 1958 A Movie, regarded as ‘the one experimental film that everybody likes.’11 From the ​ ​ 1960’s to the 1980’s, artists such as Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Su Freidrich used found ​ ​ footage to explore film from post-colonial and feminist perspectives, respectively.12

By the 1980’s, appropriation not only became a prevailing practice for video artists, but an especially essential practice for feminist artists. What better way to deconstruct and critique woman’s representation than by manipulating the very material that binds her? I will first discuss three examples of early appropriation film works and then move onto contemporary examples that illustrate feminist post-cinema. These early feminist film and video works are the historical predecessors of appropriation in feminist post-cinema. Feminist film has long remained a niche

10 Appropriation in art more generally is often traced back to Dada and Duchamp’s readymades. Hannah Hoch also ​ offers an interesting example of proto-feminist appropriation with her Dada photo collages. Mark Hudson, "Hannah Hoch: The Woman That Art History Forgot," The Telegraph, January 14, 2014, , accessed June 8, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10545071/Hannah-Hoch-The-woman-that-art-history-forgot.html. 11 Rob Yeo, "Cutting Through History: Found Footage in Avant-garde Filmmaking," Cut: Film as Found Object in ​ ​ Contemporary Video, 2004, 17. ​ 12 There are many more examples of early appropriation art in film, but for the sake of focus and brevity, they are ​ not discussed here. 11

category, often studied more in the context of feminist art than in the context of film and video.

However, for the purposes of this paper, it is important to trace this lineage to situate appropriation in feminist post-cinema historically.

One of the earliest and most important examples of feminist found footage is Dara Birnbaum’s

1978-1979 video, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Through repetition and ​ ​ arrangement, the Wonder Woman of the 1970’s series of the same name becomes stuck in a dance of transformation from ‘real’ woman to sexualized superhero. She spins and explodes into a ball of light which turns her from secretary bounded by her human gendered condition to a superhero with strength, power, and grace. She runs the same length again and again, which draws our attention to her simultaneous display of power, sexuality, and femininity. In one scene, she finds herself trapped in a room of mirrors, her image surrounding her. She scratches the mirror violently at the image of her own neck, spins in transformation, and eventually escapes the room of her image by throwing herself against the mirror. The video ends with a karaoke-style text display of the lyrics of the song Wonder Woman Disco (1978) by The ​ ​ Wonderland Disco Band. With double entendres and breathy vocals, the song further emphasizes

Wonder Woman’s sexual undertones. Through the selection of footage, repetition, and addition of the music, Birnbaum forces viewers to reexamine the popular cultural imagery of the female superhero, and by extension, on-screen representations of women more broadly. 12

Stills from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979) by Dara Birnbaum ​ ​

In her 1999 work, Removed, filmmaker Naomi Uman chemically removes the female protagonist ​ ​ of a soft-core pornographic film, frame by frame. What is left is a writhing and morphing blank space upon which male fantasy is simultaneously placed and displaced. Michele Smith’s 2003 film, Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive, is a rapid collage of orphan film reels, Hollywood ​ ​ melodramas, art history slides, paparazzi images, which have been physically manipulated frame by frame with physical objects, such as a dying butterfly, trash, or even dirt and wood pellets.

What results is an open ended, fast-paced film that fluctuates between abstraction and a loose, non-linear narrative. 13

Removed by Naomi Uman (1999) ​

Martin Arnold’s work reveals underlying conflicts in wholesome mid century film and TV.

Rather than using repetition as in Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman or reduction and ​ ​ removal as in Removed, Arnold uses optical printing to transform a brief scene into a much ​ ​ longer exploration of the original frames.Through a two frames forward, one frame back manipulation, violence and repression is revealed. In Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) a ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ short and sweet kiss scene is transformed into a disturbing, frenetic sequence in which the characters, played by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, hiss at one other, recoil from contact, exhibiting primal violence and sexuality in the process. In Pièce Touchée (1989)13 a few simple ​ ​ shots of woman sitting in an armchair awaiting the arrival of her husband from work, her

13 Niklas Goldbach, "VideoArtBlog," Pièce Touchée, January 01, 1970, , accessed June 12, 2018, ​ http://niklasgoldbach.blogspot.com/2009/12/piece-touchee.html. 14

husband coming through the door, and the two of them walking to the kitchen becomes a disturbing fifteen minute dance. The woman, a perfect vision of a 1950’s white american housewife, is transformed into an anxious and trapped figure. Her husband, a cheery breadwinner, becomes a threatening and overbearing presence through the material’s manipulation. The characters’ gender roles and harmonious relationship become more and more fractured and broken down over the course of the film.

Martin Arnold’s work is not usually discussed in the context of feminist film, but the work perfectly demonstrates Betty Friedan's ideas from her seminal 1963 book, The Feminine ​ Mystique.14 By looking back at this footage, Arnold reveals that ‘the problem that has no name’ which Freidan named so powerfully in her book, lingered even in representations of American ​ ​ women in 1950’s upper and middle class domestic life. Arnold’s work disrupts ideas and images of stability, both of blissful family life and of the semblance of stable time and space set forth by twentieth century Hollywood. This deconstruction of time and space combined with its exploration of gender roles and relationships makes Arnold’s work a relevant precursor to feminist post-cinema.15

Women have historically been excluded and underrepresented in the world of mainstream image production, but appropriation is a method of taking back control over this process. These artists work outside of the bounds of Hollywood production but are able to steal content, manipulate it

14 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963). ​ ​ ​ 15 I am not considering either Birnbaum’s or Arnold’s work post-cinematic because it was created before the advent of networked culture. Both artists were working in ways that make them precursors, ahead of the rough timeline of the post-cinematic moment, which is from the year 2000 to the present. 15

comment upon it, and release it back into circulation. In this way, working in the margins offers certain freedoms but unfortunately often means that these works have not received as much recognition as they deserve. Birnbaum used appropriation to unpack representations of Wonder

Woman, and women more generally, through repetition, remixing, and juxtaposition to other content.16 Arnold’s appropriation used a distinctive frame by frame manipulation to uncover the unrest hidden in previously wholesome representations of domestic relationships.

Now that a few historical precursors have been discussed, I will move into examples that I define as feminist post-cinema, including a discussion of my own work. Candice Breitz’s Soliloquy ​ Trilogy (2000), is a multi-channel installation that explores gendered Hollywood archetypes by ​ isolating the dialogues of the respective protagonists of Dirty Harry (1971), Basic Instinct ​ ​ ​ (1992), and the Witches of Eastwick (1987). What we are left with is short compiled videos ​ ​ ​ ​ where the actors as characters address the audience, revealing their archetypes. Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry becomes a heroic ‘man of action’, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is revealed as a ​ ​ ​ ​ stone-cold femme fatale, and Jack Nicholson in Witches of Eastwick is distilled into an clear-cut ​ ​ ‘bad guy’. Breitz work gives us the opportunity to reflect upon the ways that character archetypes in cinema reinforce existing gender codes that uphold partriarichical values.

Another important appropriation work by Candice Breitz is the pair of seven channel installations, Him (1968-2008) and Her (1978-2008). Him is comprised of footage from Jack ​ ​ ​ ​ Nicholson’s many roles and Her follows the same structure with Meryl Streep. The screens are ​ ​

16 In this case, that juxtaposition was to the sexual lyrics to the song Wonder Woman Disco. ​ ​ ​

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arranged in a formation that allows the different roles, played by the same actors at different ages over their long careers, to enter into a simulated conversation with one another across screens.

Him becomes a narcissistic and fragmented exploration of self, while Her becomes trapped in a ​ ​ ​ frustrating conversation about the values, struggles, and trivialities of marriage and child-rearing.

Streep’s many characters define themselves through relationships with men and reflections of motherhood while Nicolson’s characters focus primarily on themselves. Like Soliloquy Trilogy, ​ Him and Her reveal the structures of gendered Hollywood archetypes with a strong emphasis on ​ ​ ​ pathos. In the project description on the artist’s vimeo page, it is stated that “Breitz has said that ​ Nicholson and Streep are not the true subjects of ‘Him + Her’: her focus lies instead on “the unconscious of mainstream cinema, the values and layers of meaning that slowly start to make themselves legible when the big plots are stripped away.”17 This method of appropriation is defined both by a database aesthetics of collection and selection and also by removal and reduction. In Him and Her, not only are the plots, scores, and other characters stripped away, but ​ ​ ​ ​ the backgrounds and scenes of the characters are removed from the frame, leaving only talking heads. Time, space, and linearity are disrupted and reimagined, allowing previously invisible connections to be made amongst disparate material. The breaking down of cinematic conventions and boundaries make Breitz’s work post-cinematic and its exploration of gendered representation in cinema make it feminist. Therefore, I claim Breitz as an artist that perfectly fits into my definition of feminist post-cinema.

17 "HER, 1978-2008," Vimeo, 2014, accessed February 22, 2018, https://vimeo.com/72201223. ​ 17

Stills from Him (1968-2008) and Her (1978-2008) by Candice Breitz captured from the artist’s Vimeo page ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

Next, I will discuss my two of own works that utilize similar methods of appropriation, collection, and removal as discussed in Breitz’ work. My 2014 video installation, The Looks of ​ Love, isolates moments from archetypal Hollywood romance movies in which the protagonists ​ stare wordlessly at one another. Whether a smoldering stare, a double take, or the locking of eyes ​ across the room, eye contact between lovers is a prominent trope of the genre. Each film is represented only by these moments and everything in between is reduced to a black screen while maintaining the original timings of the full feature length films. Freed from the distraction of 18

other narrative elements, this reductive process produces a more critical viewing of these familiar media images that have likely played a role in forming their ideas about love and romance. Each film is given its own projection and the films are displayed chronologically from left to right, with Flesh and the Devil, a silent 1920’s film, on the far left and Twilight, contemporary ​ ​ ​ ​ romance from 2008, on the far right.

As the installation runs, the interactions between the projections change due to the differences in the movies' looped lengths, rendering each viewing unique. This structural element of chance highlights the ideas of fate and chance encounter which permeate the romance genre. As if orchestrated, there are moments in the installation where two of the projections seemingly sync or simultaneously depict scenes with nearly identical style or content. For example, the dance scene from West Side Story might be projected at the same moment as a dancing scene from ​ ​ Titanic or Sixteen Candles. The viewer might watch Humphrey Bogart light his cigarette ​ ​ ​ moodily in Casablanca and then, a moment later, see Greta Garbo look seductively up from her ​ ​ own cigarette in Flesh and the Devil. The traditional structures of cinematic linearity and ​ ​ narrative are rejected in favor of simultaneity, chance, and duration in a post-cinematic fashion. 19

The Looks of Love installation view at the Mills College Art Museum ​

The Looks of Love documentation excerpt ​

Structured by instances of on-screen eye contact, what is left bare in the Looks of Love is the ​ ​ power of the gaze. Laura Mulvey's influential yet contested theory laid out in her essay Visual ​ 20

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema18, women on-screen are subjected to three simultaneous instances of the male gaze. The first is of the onscreen space or the male character to the female character. The second is that of the camera which doubles the male character’s gaze. Finally, the third is that of the male viewer or the female viewer given the only option of male identification.

In this way, women’s objectification is built into the very apparatus and formal structures of cinema.

However, in applying Mulvey’s theory to my project, things begin to become complicated. In some of the scenes depicted in The Looks of Love, particularly from the movies selected to ​ ​ represent the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 2000’s, this role is reversed and the male characters become the female heterosexual object of fantasy. For example, in the 1973 film, The Way We Were, an ​ ​ extended scene depicts Barbra Streisand’s character sumptuously staring at Robert Redford’s character from across the room. We not only see what Streisand’s character sees but we also watch her watching Redford, allowing us to simultaneously gaze upon her and identify with her desire. The Looks of Love explores feminist theory through post-cinematic methods to explore ​ ​ the collective dreamscape of love and desire that the genre of romance movies offers up.

Next, I will discuss another example of my own work. Cut/Cut (2017) is a dual projection video ​ ​ installation that was exhibited at FAR Bazaar, a massive art fair housed in soon-to-be ​ ​ demolished art buildings of a community college near Los Angeles. The installation combined front and rear projection suspended in an abandoned photography class darkroom. One side of

18 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen. 1975: 6-18. ​ ​ ​ 21

the projection weaves together footage of women cutting their own hair while the other side shows depictions of women having their hair cut against their will. The two montage videos were edited with one another so that the joined front and rear projections are choreographed together.

The images bleed into one another, exploring the relationship between beauty, power, and gender performance.

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Documentation images of Cut/Cut at FAR Baazar, January 2017 ​ ​ ​ ​ Forcibly cutting a woman’s hair is a punishment that has been associated with wartime, institutionalization, and revenge. While not physically painful, it is a violent act that marks a woman as abject, stripping her of an important aspect of gender performance. It also brings to 23

mind issues of sexual consent and echoes of sexual violence. When this punishment is portrayed on-screen, it often dramatically features a woman being physically restrained while screaming, crying out in objection, or silently weeping.

Alternately, on-screen depictions of women cutting off their own hair, often alone in front of a bathroom mirror, have become visual shorthand for a female character’s fraught mental state.

She might, as in the case of the movies Joy, Mulan, or GI Jane cut or shave her hair short to ​ ​ ​ ​ assimilate into a boys club or man’s world. She also might cut off her hair in a state of distress or after a trauma, as in the movies Empire Records, Frida, Gimme Shelter, Insurgent, Legends of ​ the Fall, and The Accused. This trope is rarely performed by male characters. With regards to the ​ ​ ​ same trope in the context of television, in the article “Haircuts Are a Shorthand for Trauma on ​ Television”, Alaina Levey explains why this tired trope is so often utilized.

This trope works because it shows viewers a character’s internal state in a very external

way. “In a practical sense, the depiction of a femme character cutting her hair after a

traumatic experience condenses a multitude of complex emotions into one simple,

visually arresting action,” says Patricia Grisafi, a film and TV critic. “This can be

reductive because it eschews all of these complex emotions, but it’s efficient; over the

years, viewers have learned to automatically associate hair cutting with a characters’

deteriorating mental state.” 19

Cut/Cut digs into this narrative trope, juxtaposing it with the related but distinct imagery of ​ women having their hair forcibly cut or shaved. These two cinematic conventions are common

19 Alaina Leary, "Haircuts Are a Shorthand for Trauma on Television," Racked, May 22, 2017, accessed February ​ ​ ​ 12, 2018, https://www.racked.com/2017/5/22/15654574/tv-haircuts-trauma-13-reasons-why. 24

ways that women punish themselves or are punished on-screen. This combination of footage explores women’s agency, beauty standards, and the complex associations with short versus long hair.

Appropriation is utilized in The Looks of Love and Cut/Cut as a feminist strategy to create loose ​ ​ ​ ​ and creative explorations of dense feminist critical theory like Mulvey’s. The Looks of Love ​ explores Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze in a way that is more accessible to the average person than academic language and theory may be. It also lays bare the archetypes of the romance movie genre, calling attention to the conventions that have changed less over the decades than one might expect and have arguably influenced ideas and ideals of love and romance. Cut/Cut juxtaposes shots of women on screen altering their own image with shots of ​ ​ their image being violently changed in order to explore ideas of women’s control and agency within narrative representation and over their own image.

Appropriation becomes an increasingly natural method in the context of networked culture and the post-cinematic. Collecting, storing, and editing large amounts of footage is easier than ever for consumers thanks to non-linear editing software like Adobe Premiere, the ease of ‘illegal downloading’, and massive online video platforms and archives from YouTube to the Prelinger archives. Practices of collecting and the archival impulse will be further explored in the next subchapter of this essay.

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2.2 Database Aesthetics: Collective Narratives Database Narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematises the dual process of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial to language: the selection of particular data (characters, images, sound, events) from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales. -Marsha Kinder

Database aesthetics is a methodology of making that is defined by collection, interpretation, and presentation of data or materials. Not confined to moving image based practices, this term in relation to new media art was outlined by UCLA Design Media Arts professor and Art+Sci

Center founder Victoria Vesna, along with co-authors, in her 2007 book, Database Aesthetics: ​ Art in the Age of Information Overflow.20 Database aesthetics is one method that artists have ​ utilized in response to networked culture. There are many database aesthetic works that fall into the new media or interactive installation category, but this essay will focus only on moving image based works. As the term suggests, these works sometimes rely on a database or custom software to store and display footage. Other works do not use an actual database but follow the logic of selection and collection that define the aesthetic.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are an artist duo that exemplify moving image database aesthetics.

Their installation, I number the stars (2004), catalogs, organizes, and represents the first season ​ ​ of the original 1960’s Star Trek. According to the artists, the footage is organized by “a variety ​ ​ ​ of keywords such as ‘events’, ‘objects’ and ‘emotions’”.21 The collected videos corresponding to these keywords are placed on disks and labeled accordingly. The installation consists of an open

20 Victoria Vesna, Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minneapolis, Minnesota: ​ ​ ​ University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 21 Jennifer McCoy and Kevin McCoy, "I Number the Stars," Mccoyspace: I Number the Stars, , accessed February ​ 23, 2018, http://www.mccoyspace.com/project/26/. 26

metal briefcase that contains all of the video CDs and a monitor on which to watch them. The viewers can then customize their viewing experiences based on the keywords they select and play. For example, one CD is labeled with the phrase ‘I see space phenomena’ and the footage features a glowy blob of light approaching a character in a barren landscape. A similar work by the McCoys, Learning From Las Vegas (2004), organizes footage from twenty-one films that are ​ ​ set in Las Vegas. Displayed in the same format as I Number the Stars, the CD’s labels include: ​ ​ ‘Learning from Casinos’, ‘Learning from Nudity’, and ‘Learning From Wood Paneling’. The categorizations suggests that through collection, selection, and organization, these films can become case studies for understanding Vegas, an iconic American city of excess.

Video stills from documentation of I Number the Stars by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy ​ ​

Taking a slightly different approach, the McCoy’s Horror Chase, configures a single cinematic ​ ​ scene into an seemingly endless possibility of shot by shot combinations. To create Horror ​ Chase, the artists restaged a thirty second scene from the horror film, Evil Dead 2. In the scene, ​ ​ ​ the protagonist runs for his life—a common trope of the horror genre—fear and panic on his face. Custom software allows the scene to be endlessly reconfigured, changing the order, combination, and direction of the shots in relation to one another. The protagonist becomes stuck in an endlessly changing loop of fear and movement, running but neither escaping nor getting 27

caught. These examples illustrate that database aesthetics can be applied to either a large collection of previously separate material, as in Learning from Las Vegas, a selection of one type ​ ​ of media, as in I Number the Stars, or can be used to break down a single piece of media into its ​ ​ smallest components, as in Horror Chase. The works of the McCoys are also examples that ​ ​ demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between database aesthetics and appropriation.

Contemporary technology assists in the ability to collect, store, and manipulate large amounts of content. Database aesthetics offers a powerful methodology to do so.

Video still from Horror Chase by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy ​ ​

The form of the supercut provides another example of video works in which database aesthetics coexist with appropriation and found footage. The supercut is a popular remix culture format that was defined by the blogger Andy Baio as a ‘video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive ​ superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage. 22 While the deep roots of the supercut ​ genre may be traced back to the early appropriation works discussed in the last chapter, the

22 Andy Baio, "Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages," Waxy.org, April 11, 2008, , accessed February 26, ​ 2018, https://waxy.org/2008/04/fanboy_supercuts_obsessive_video_montages/. 28

phenomenon did not truly emerge until 2006, when YouTube granted these superfans a forum.23

Two clear examples of these fan culture supercuts include montages of every utterance of the word ‘dude’ in the film the Big Lebowski or every curse word in the television series The ​ ​ ​ Sopranos.

Supercuts are also utilized as a form of critique, often to point out filmic cliches. One of the most delightful examples of cliché-driven supercuts is the 2009 video, Let’s Enhance by Duncan ​ ​ Robson.24 This short video focused on the tired trope in detective and crime dramas in which security footage or photographs reveal previously hidden details upon a process of digital zooming and enhancing. I’m Not Here to Make Friends (2008) by Rich Juzwiak is a lo-fi ​ ​ ​ supercut that draws attention to the title phrase’s repeated utterances by reality TV show personalities.25 Other supercuts celebrate the styles and nuance of famous directors, such as

Hitchcock's Eyes (2015) and Hands of Bresson (2014) by Kogonada or Hearing Tarantino ​ ​ ​ ​ (2015) and Darren Aronofsky’s Extreme Close-Ups (2017) by Jacob T. Swinney. 26 Some take a ​ ​ more conceptual approach, such as LJ Frezza’s Nothing (2014), which extracts every moment in ​ ​ which nothing happens in every episode of Seinfeld, the sitcom ‘about nothing’.27 The six and a ​ ​ half minute video opens with a montage of the outsides of New York buildings set to a funky slap bass score, establishing shots for scenes not pictured. Beginning cheerfully, the video shifts

23 Since then, the term has become so ingrained in the vernacular of the internet that the popular singer, Lorde, ​ released a song of the same name in 2017. The lyrics detail the recollection of a past relationship, and she uses the term as a metaphor to describe looking back upon stored memories in succession. 24 Dunkin Robson, "Let's Enhance (HD)," Vimeo, February 26, 2018, accessed February 26, 2018, ​ https://vimeo.com/69663986. 25 Rich Juzwiak, "Im Not Here to Make Friends!" July 02, 2008, , accessed February 26, 2018, ​ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24. 26 More works by Kogonada can be found at kogonada.com. Additional works by Jacob T. Swinney can be accessed ​ at vimeo.com/jacobtswinney. 27 LJ Frezza, "Nothing," Vimeo, 2014, , accessed February 26, 2018, https://vimeo.com/88077122. ​ 29

into unnerving silence in which shots depict phones about to ring, doors about to open, and empty hallways about to be entered. Mystery and even suspense is rendered through stillness and its suggestions of what is about to occur.

Video still from Let’s Enhance by Duncan Robson (2009) ​ ​

Video Stills from Nothing by LJ Frezza (2014) ​ ​

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The supercut’s indebtedness to and reliance on the internet for both the collection and dissemination of its material links it to the post-cinematic. What then, links the supercut to a feminist post-cinema? As discussed earlier, the supercut can be utilized to critique mainstream media through the manipulation of its materials. This lends itself well to feminist goals, allowing representation of women to be deconstructed through critique. There are few examples of artists using the supercut for this promising feminist post-cinematic potential. However, In the more mainstream or mimetic supercut world, some examples pointing out sexist clichés can be found. The Huffington Post published a supercut in 2014 titled Let Her Go: A Movie Cliche ​ Supercut.28 The video lays bare the overuse of the outdated and patriarchal damsel in distress ​ narratives throughout Hollywood’s history and the lazy screenwriting that often comes with it. In

2015, Mother Jones published a supercut of Republican candidates talking about women, namely their wives and daughters.29 The video was intended as a sharp joke in response to these candidates lack of regard for women’s rights and issues.

Database aesthetics reveals not only the content of the material presented but also the structures at play that normally remain unseen. When linearity is broken down and certain contexts are removed, viewers can focus on particular elements and the structures that disseminate them.

Connections between and within media emerge, allowing for a more holistic view of media culture. To quote Holly Willis once more:

28 Oliver Noble, "‘Let Her Go’ The Movie Cliché Supercut," The Huffington Post, October 06, 2014, , accessed ​ June 04, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/30/let-her-go_n_5908396.html. 29 Mattie Kahn, "Watch This Supercut of GOP Candidates Talking About Women During Debates, Cry Angry ​ Feminist Tears," ELLE, October 11, 2017, , accessed June 04, 2018, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a32653/supercut-gop-candidates-talking-about-women-debates/. 31

The traditional pleasure of immersion within a singular, all-engaging story world gives

way to the play involved in viewing the entirety of the storytelling assemblage. No longer

are we swept away into another world; instead we exist in a parallax experience of

witnessing not just the story but also exploring its edges and mechanics. Rather than

finding pleasure only within the story, we enjoy understanding how the story is produced.

Rather than suspending disbelief, we enjoy an awareness of suspension itself.30

Many of my own works are indebted to the logic of collection, organization, and structure of database aesthetics. My 2017 work, I guess I just want a clean slate, is a video installation of ​ ​ love lost, archived, collected, and performed. The video is a partially coherent narrative performed by two actors, with dialogue crowdsourced from real emails and texts of failed romantic relationships.

The video installation is comprised of a fabricated room that evokes a kitschy love motel, complete with red satin curtains, brown shag rugs, the artificial scent of roses on the crisp white sheets, towels arranged in a heart, and fake rose petals on the bed and floor. Hotels are transient spaces that belong to no one and offer temporary comfort. Love motels in particular attempt to create romance through the simulacrum and imagery of love. Many of these symbols and references can be traced back to cinema, making the installation a physical manifestation of appropriation. The installation becomes a stage or a set that references back to the apparatus of cinema. Viewers must get into bed with one another to watch the video as the audio is only

30 Holly Willis, Fast forward: the future(s) of the cinematic arts. (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016) p. 88. ​ ​ ​ 32

offered through headphones secured to the headboard. This awkward and forced suggestion of intimacy mirrors the two actors on screen, who sit uncomfortably next to one another on a couch while performing emotional and difficult dialogue which was originally never delivered face to face. It forces the viewer to consider their own body in relation to viewing the work, and by extension, the way that the performers on screen embody interactions that previously existed only digitally. The intentional activation of the body through performance and installation is one element that links this work to the post-cinematic.

I guess I just want a clean slate utilizes the aesthetics of kitsch, soap operas, and reality TV to ​ explore the relationship between performances of love and heartbreak and the digital baggage of relationships that we carry around, archived intentionally or not, in our devices. The actors each perform a collective character, rather than a stable individual who is easy for viewers to identify with. The structure is revealed through a sustained viewing, as it becomes clear that the dialogue is a collection of fragments rather than a cohesive narrative. This is the parallax viewing experience that Willis describes. The video entices the viewer with its emotive acting, lavish aesthetic, and relatability of its content. At times, the actors appear to be responding to and answering one another in a linear and coherent fashion. Moments later, the conversation breaks down and reveals itself as a collection of disparate materials, releasing the viewer back out to view the structure of the project. Many of the source messages were never answered by their original recipient. By weaving the messages together into a dialogue, the highly emotional texts are finally given the response they never received.

33

The emotional but sometimes mundane context is treated cinematically through the scripting of the content and the formal qualities of the video. For example, I used a fast-paced shot/reverse shot shooting and editing method to render the conversation, referencing one of the most common techniques for shooting conversations in romantic comedies. The lighting is both dramatic and artificial, amping up the emotional tone of the dialogue. This linkage to the cinema places these everyday conversations of love and heartbreak up against popular culture’s representation of these topics until the lines begin to blur. If we resort to clichés when talking ​ ​ about difficult topics, do we pull from one of the largest references we have, cinema? Or does cinema reflect the ways that we struggle to talk about these subjects? What happens when these references of romance have been upholding limiting gender roles and normative sexualities through their formulaic portrayals of heterosexual relationships?

I guess I just want a clean slate is a feminist work because it explores relationships through a ​ woman-centered lens and questions a cinematic genre that has been marketed to women for decades. The two actors are both women, queering the dynamic and exploring what happens when women embody stereotypically heterosexual male behavior. The work is post-cinematic because it engages directly with networked culture through its choice of material, in this case, emails and text messages, and arranges that material with the logic of database aesthetics with an added emphasis on embodiment on behalf of the performers and viewers.

34

Installation documentation and video still from I guess I just want a clean slate (2017) ​ ​

35

2.3 Restagings: Where the Past and Present Collide

The present task of women’s cinema may not be the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure, but rather the construction of another frame of reference, one in which the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject. -Teresa de Lauretis

Restaging and reperforming are powerful methods for connecting to the past from a contemporary context. In this section, I will focus on video art that restages cinematic moments in order to reimagine them and provide them new contexts. One infamous example of cinematic restaging is Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, largely regarded as a complete failure ​ ​ and an offense to the original.31 Christoph Draeger, a video and installation artist, is credited with pioneering a remake style in which everyday people re-enact iconic films or scenes of films.32 Compared to appropriation and database aesthetics, I will trace restagings as an underappreciated methodology in video art and posit it as a tool for feminist post-cinema practice.

Rather than utilizing footage as raw material as in appropriation art, restagings allow for more levels of mediation between the reference footage and the completed project. Further, different elements of the reference material can be reimagined. Scripts, sound, sets, cinematography, acting, lighting, and directing all

31 Gus Van Sant’s Psycho falls firmly into the world of cinema, rather than being considered video art. As a film it ​ ​ ​ was considered a failure, both lacking the impact and ‘directorial gaze’ of the original and also failing to truly update or add something new to the original. If viewed as video art, outside of the film world, it could be considered more successful. Edelstein, David. "Gus Van Sant's Own Private Hollywood." The New York Times. July 17, 2005. ​ Accessed May 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/movies/gus-van-sants-own-private-hollywood.html. 32 Draeger’s work focuses on the depictions of violence and destruction in cinema through the restaging of violent scenes without the polish of Hollywood. While I will be discssuing this DIY or ‘amatuer’ restaging technique, I will leave out an in depth discussion of his work as it relates more to masculinity and the impact of violent imagery than to feminism. "Christoph Draeger: Destroying LA," Young Projects Gallery, 2015, accessed May 29, 2018, ​ http://www.youngprojectsgallery.com/christoph-draeger. 36

become material to work with in cinematic restaging. Connections can be made between the past and present, creation and consumption of media, and disparate references. One example is Michael Mandiberg’s 2017 video, Postmodern Times. ​ ​ The work is a shot-by-shot remake of the 1936 silent film Modern Times starring ​ ​ Charlie Chaplin recreated through crowdsourced labor.33 Mandiberg used the online marketplace Fiverr.com to hire and instruct performers around the world to film each scene themselves.

Mandiberg then reconstructed the entire film from these disparate and disjointed clips. As a result, the resulting video is a fragmented, frenetic, and chaotic collage. Through the process of crowdsourcing labor, Mandiberg links the labor struggles of early 20th century industrial factory workers depicted in the original film to the plight of crowdsourced workers of today’s so called ‘gig economy’. Released during the Great Depression, Chaplin’s Little Tramp character in Modern Times ​ reflected the dehumanizing effects of industrialization on the worker. Mandiberg’s Postmodern Times asks the viewer to consider the similar dehumanizing effect of ​ cheap, crowdsourced labor as offered on platforms like Fiverr and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. However, he uses the very practices and services he is critiquing to make his project, exploiting crowdsource workers to create his artwork. The project does ask the viewer to re-read the original film in the context of the contemporary labor landscape and to consider the ways that technology shapes both ideas of progress and working conditions. What this work is lacking is an awareness of ways that gender intersects with labor issues and crowdsourcing. In

33 Joel Ferree, "Coming Soon: Postmodern Times," Unframed, December 7, 2017, accessed May 26, 2018, ​ https://unframed.lacma.org/2017/12/07/coming-soon-postmodern-times. 37

this way, Postmodern Times falls perfectly into the category of post-cinema, in its ​ ​ direct referencing of networked culture and its non-traditional production, but it does not meet the goals of feminist post-cinema.

Postmodern Times by Michael Mandiberg ​

Titanic by Claudia Bitran is another example of a shot for shot cinematic restaging ​ through video. The New York based artist from Chile has been working since 2014 to recreate the entire film Titanic by James Cameron, creating all of the sets, ​ ​ costumes, and miniatures needed to complete the project.34 The original 200 million dollar film is rendered into a DIY collaborative project that brings to mind the distinctions between high and low, entertainment, and fan art. The artist herself plays both the lead role of Rose and the role of Rose’s mother, and hires friends,

34 Casey Logan, "Artist in Omaha Making a Shot-by-shot Remake of James Cameron's 'Titanic'," Omaha.com, ​ December 08, 2014, , accessed May 28, 2018, http://www.omaha.com/go/artist-in-omaha-making-a-shot-by-shot-remake-of/article_ad7014a7-9313-5009-896f-17f 4b5086e45.html. 38

actors, and volunteers to act in the other roles. In filming the iconic kiss, she shot multiple takes, each with a different stranger, and edited them together into a single, shifting scene.

Bitran’s work walks the line between social practice, community theatre, and obsessive fan-art. Titanic is a film that was so massively popular that is has taken ​ ​ up a permanent spot in the collective unconscious. Whether or not one has even seen the film, it has influenced popular culture so widely that it is nearly impossible to escape its influence. Bitran, through recreation, both acknowledges the film’s influence and places herself into the center of the creation of imagery in a way that she previously had no access to. Bitran becomes the director, the art director, the lead actor, and countless other roles, giving her ultimate creative control over her project. This example shows us how restagings offer another method of taking back control over a media landscape that is at once massively influential and extremely elusive and exclusive. This erratic, distributed, and global production and collaboration makes the work post-cinematic. When presenting the work, she includes elements that expose the process, such as the sets, the costumes, and production images. Seeing a South American woman take over all aspects of production forces viewers to question accepted forms of directorial control over cinematic production. Her collaborative approach is more inclusive than a Hollywood system would ever be, she invites anyone who would like to be involved and finding a role or roles, often temporary, for each person. This method of production and collaboration gives this firmly post-cinematic work feminist leanings. 39

Titanic by Claudia Bitran ​

Me and My Army by Sair Goetz offers an example of a cinematic restaging that is ​ explicitly linked to feminist performance art. The three channel video installation focuses on reframing the rape scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. ​ Goetz performs both as the actress who played the rape victim, Adrienne Corri and as her character in A Clockwork Orange.35 Dressed in the costume of this character, ​ ​ Goetz performs excerpts of and homages to a long list of feminist video and performance art works, including Genital Panic by Valle Export, My Calling Card ​ ​ ​ by Adrian Piper, and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman by Dara ​ ​ Birnbaum, and Removed by Naomi Uman. The rape scene in the film serves as ​ ​ character development for the protagonists of the film by demonstrating their cruelty and violence. Goetz forces us to reframe our viewing and instead think of

35 Sair Goetz, "Me and My Army," Sair Goetz, 2017, accessed May 28, 2018, ​ http://www.sarahgoetz.com/me-and-my-army/. 40

the scene from the perspective of Adrienne Corri and her character. This brings to mind the way in which rape is often used in cinema as a plot point or character motivation, with little regard for women as both characters in the filmic world and as viewers of this world. As an experimental speculative fiction, Goetz asks us to reimagine Kubrick’s classic as if it had originally given its female characters agency over their own bodies and narratives.

Video stills from Sair Goetz’ Me and my Army ​

Finally, I will discuss my latest work, Flesh and the Devil (1926-2018), which falls ​ ​ into the category of cinematic restaging. The work also utilizes appropriation and database aesthetics in a way that makes this most recent work an intersection of the three methodologies of feminist post-cinema outlined in this paper. Flesh and the ​ 41

Devil (1926-2018) explores how imageries and narratives of romance in cinema ​ are constructed. The project is centered around two historically significant kiss scenes from the 1926 silent film, Flesh and the Devil, which features the first ‘open ​ ​ mouth kiss scene’ and ‘horizontal love scene’ in Hollywood’s history. These scenes, which are also the first and final kiss scenes in the original film, are important origin points for the kiss scene as a cultural phenomenon in Hollywood. Whether consciously or not, every kiss scene that followed is indebted to and references back to Flesh and the Devil. This film has shaped the way that imagery ​ ​ of lust, romance, and love have been constructed over the last nearly one hundred years of Hollywood’s history.

Video stills of Flesh and the Devil (1926-2018)

42

In my reconstruction, three sets of actors who are couples off-screen recreate the historic ‘open mouth kiss scene’ and ‘horizontal love scene’. The left channel is comprised of ‘behind the scenes’ shots of the restagings taking place and the right channel shows the edited scenes with the films original score and intertitles. The wide angle shot in the left channel shows the studio setup of lights, camera, monitor, and backdrop as well as the small film crew. In between takes, the cameraman moves the camera, the sound operator adjusts her equipment, and I give direction to the cast and crew. The corresponding sound of this left channel is comprised mainly of my direction, which is intentionally robotic and focused only on the actions of the characters rather than their emotional states. For example, in guiding the kiss scenes, I give detailed instructions on hand placement, head angles, movement, and pacing.

By linking the image to its own making, I draw attention to the process of constructing images of romance, and by extension, the construction of emotional affect and desire. I cast amateur actors who are couples in real life in order to link cinema to the everyday and to link life to cinema. This raises the question, are our actions ever truly ours or are we mimicking what we have seen? Or does cinema imitate life so well that we cannot tell the difference? Restaging asks these questions, while updating the casting to reflect more diversity than found in Hollywood in the 1920s, and even in Hollywood today. I also see my collaborative approach to my directorial role in the project in contrast to the image of the headstrong male auteur director. In the ‘making of’ images, my body becomes just another of the bodies in the frame, with each crew member and talent given space 43

for their role. I approach directing with a warmth and openness that we do not associate with film directors.

Like appropriation, cinematic restaging is a method to reclaim and ressert power over cinematic images, narratives, and material. Restagings create connections between past and present by pulling cinematic material from the past into our present moment. This collision of past and present engages the cinematic technologies of both time periods. Production and process become as important as the finished product, with a particular emphasis on representation in the cast, crew, and artist/director. When we restage cinema from the perspective of the present moment, we question and reject elements of the past that do not serve our feminist goals.

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3. Conclusion: A Call to Action

The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. -Guy Debord

If cinema offers up a collective dreamscape, or a large part of Debord’s spectacle, it is a critical and urgent project to transform this collective unconsciousness into a radically feminist space.

The media we consume shapes the way we view the world, how we think about ourselves, and even the way we act and think. It is no longer enough to deconstruct and critique existing content, we must create new, more inclusive images that reflect our values. When we put media created with the methods and values of post-cinema out into the public, we actively shape our collective unconscious.

Appropriation, database aesthetics, and cinematic restaging are malleable yet effective methods that can be used on their own or in tandem with one another to create feminist post-cinema works. These methods are timely and relevant tools to navigate the present networked moment and to explore the relationship between technology and feminism. Appropriation is a tool to take back what was never ours to begin with. Through restaging, we can push back against representations of gender in popular culture and reshape our visions of ourselves. Through database aesthetics, we can can organize and transform large masses of content, calling attention to patterns and reorganizing media landscapes. These methods are not the only way and should be edited and expanded upon by other makers and thinkers. We harness the momentum of fourth 45

wave feminism move to us forward towards a feminist post-cinema and not stop until we have transformed the images that surround us.

46

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