CONTRIBUTORS

ANDREW PENDAKIS

NATHAN HOLMES

ISSUE 9-1 COLIN WILLIAMSON

K. R. CORNETT

FRASER MCCALLUM THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: VISUALIZING THE 70S ADAM CHARLES HART

KAITLIN POMERANTZ

SEB ROBERTS

REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES

THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: VISUALIZING THE 70S

ISSUE 9-1, 2018

GUEST EDITORS

NATHAN HOLMES

ANDREW PENDAKIS

CONTRIBUTORS

ANDREW PENDAKIS

NATHAN HOLMESI

COLIN WILLIAMSON

K. R. CORNETT

FRASER MCCALLUM

ADAM CHARLES HART

KAITLIN POMERANTZ

SEB ROBERTS

REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: VISUALIZING THE 70S

ISSUE 9-1, 2018 THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: ISSUE 9-1, 2018 VISUALIZING THE 70S Guest Editors – Nathan Holmes and Andrew Pendakis Issue Managing Editor - Brent Ryan Bellamy Editor in Chief | Rédacteur en chef Markus Reisenleitner Managing Editor | Rédacteur Brent Ryan Bellamy Editorial Team | Comité de rédaction Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominique Laurent, Andriko Lozowy, Tara Milbrandt, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Sheena Wilson Elicitations Reviews Editor | Comptes rendus critiques – Élicitations Tara Milbrandt Web Editor | Mise en forme web Brent Ryan Bellamy French Translator & Copy Editor | Traductions françaises Ève Robidoux-Descary English Substantive & Copy Editor | Rédacteur Shama Rangwala Copy Editor | Révisions Shama Rangwala Founding Editors | Fondateurs William Anselmi, Daniel Laforest, Carrie Smith-Prei, Sheena Wilson Previous Team Members | Anciens membres de l’équipe Marine Gheno, Dennis Kilfoy, Daniel Laforest, Lars Richter, Katherine Rollans, Angela Sacher, Dalbir Sehmby, Justin Sully Editorial Advisory Board | Comité scientifique Hester Baer, University of Maryland College Park, United States Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam & Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Netherlands Andrew Burke, University of Winnipeg, Canada Ollivier Dyens, Concordia University, Canada Michèle Garneau, Université de Montréal, Canada Wlad Godzich, University of California Santa Cruz, United States Kosta Gouliamos, European University, Cyprus Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom Anton Kaes, University of California Berkeley, United States Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, Canada Sarah McGaughey, Dickinson College, United States Peter McIsaac, University of Michigan, United States Marie-Dominique Popelard, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris, France Christine Ramsay, University of Regina, Canada Laurence A. Rickels, Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, Germany Will Straw, McGill Univeristy, Canada Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada

HTTP://DX.DOI.ORG/10.17742/IMAGE.P70S.9.1

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Sommaire/Contents

Fade of the Polaroid: Towards a Political Ontology of the 70s • 5 Andrew Pendakis Preface • 17 Nathan Holmes ‘An Escape into Reality’: Computers, Special Effects, and the Haunting Optics of Westworld (1973) • 19 Colin Williamson Predictive Landscapes • 41 K. R. Cornett Archaeology of the (1970s) Commune: Notes Towards an Old/New Ontology of Students: A Conversation between Fraser McCallum and Andrew Pendakis • 61 Fraser McCallum and Andrew Pendakis Killer POV: First-Person Camera and Sympathetic Identification in Modern Horror • 69 Adam Charles Hart Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labor in All the President’s Men• 87 Nathan Holmes Image and Discursive Landscape: Roaming the Land Art of the American Southwest • 109 Kaitlin Pomerantz Strange Vices: Transgression and the Production of Difference in the Giallo • 115 Seb Roberts Contributors • 133

Front Cover Image: The Post newsroom set for All the President’s Men.

FADE OF THE POLAROID: TOWARDS A POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF THE 70S

ANDREW PENDAKIS

…that memories are the only posses- oblivion, they keep their strength, they sions which no-one can take from us, are endangered like all that is alive. belongs in the storehouse of impo- tently sentimental consolations that the —Theodor Adorno (2005: 166) subject, resignedly withdrawing into inwardness, would like to believe as the The clocks are never synchronized, very fulfilment that he has given up. In the schedules never coordinat- setting up his own archives, the subject ed, every epoch is a discordant mix seizes his own stock of experience as of divergent rhythms, unequal du- property, so making it something whol- rations, and variable speeds. ly external to himself. Past inner life is turned into furniture just as, conversely, —Rebecca Comay (2011: 4) every Biedermeier piece was memo- ry made wood. The interior where the hough we are tempted to imagine time soul accommodates its collection of as intrinsically open, free to combine and memoirs and curios is derelict. Mem- re-combine with moments past or still to ories cannot be conserved in drawers Tcome, eras instead become compulsively entan- and pigeon-holes; in them the past is gled with each other, linked in such a way that indissolubly woven into the present. neither can be understood apart. We know, after No-one has them at his disposal in the Walter Benjamin, that history looks less like a free and voluntary way that is praised in finished building than it does the latter ruined— Jean Paul’s fulsome sentences. Precise- shards of basement in the attic, holes slashed ly where they become controllable and through floors at strange angles, staircases that objectified, where the subject believes end suddenly, mid-air. When times interpen- himself entirely sure of them, mem- etrate like this they find themselves suddenly ories fade like delicate wallpapers in linked by a historically necessary energy of fili- bright sunlight. But where, protected by ation or disavowal. In a structure loosely analo- gous to that of the unconscious of an individual FADE OF THE POLAROID

subject, a time enters into an orbit with anoth- itself—that they were, in some complex way, the er period or era. Times fall in love, though the last real “decade.” parameters here are not defined by transparen- cy or fullness, but dependency, fear, aggression, But why might this be? Is it that when compared and misrecognition. with the 1990s (and later the 2000s) the 70s al- tered culturally and technologically at a com- It may be that our own time has entered into paratively slower pace, that this rate of change precisely such a relationship with the 1970s. Un- was still slow enough to congeal into the recog- like the 1990s, which may still be too close to nizablity of a style or idea? Is it less a question us, the 1960s, 70s, and 80s are decades amena- of pace and more one of quality, of the kind of ble to representation as discrete units or peri- change that took place in this period, with the ods; they strike us as wholes bound by a cer- internet and mobile phones representing a more tain internal aesthetic logic or flow. It may be, substantive redistribution of space and time of course, that this is little more than an opti- than the CD? Is it that the 1970s were not yet cal illusion produced by representation itself: technologically fragmented in the way that the we intuit the 1960s as such only because we’ve 1990s and later our own time would be, with been trained by popular culture to recognize its the cultural tone of our age now effectively dis- tell-tale cues and signs. The unrepresentability persed across a thousand platforms, media, and of the 1990s then may in fact turn out to have “content providers”? Is it the belated effect of been nothing more than the interval required by globalization on our capacity to generalize an a culture to transform its past into a concept; al- era? Or is it that the 1990s when held up against ternatively, it may be that there is actually some- the 1970s were experienced even by those living thing in the object, in the historical specificity through them as a kind of terminus or endpoint, of the 1990s itself, that prevents its translation a time apparently without events (at least in the into a coherent image or idea. Today one watch- West), which, depending on one’s perspective, es the TV show Friends fully aware of the way marked the triumph of liberalism and a new its tone, style, and forms of speech are proper to era of perpetual peace, or alternatively (and the period, but the various bits and pieces that less naïvely), the triumph of unfettered capital- comprise the decade’s content seem more like an ism and a new era of hyper-consumerist banal- aggregate of externally related parts—one damn ity. It may be too that this failure of the 1990s thing after another—than they do the organelles to achieve its own iconicity is the expression of a functioning temporal whole. Where certain within historiography of the problem that Guy “decades” come to appear wrapped around cen- Debord once posed as the moment in which tral organizing events/problems or are saturat- all that was once lived moves into the domain ed from within by dominant styles (anything of the image. The capacity of an era to register from fashion to sounds), others seem to wade events as actually happening would in this sense through a zone of indifferentiation, a toneless- be the minimal ontological condition for the ex- ness that leaves its key objects and moments istence of Hegelian Geist, of an era’s inner spir- linked by nothing more than sheer contigui- itual coherence and necessity. It is in this sense ty. It may be in fact that the 1970s were among that we might be said to be living in something the last eras phraseable in the idiom of the “era” like a long 1990s, a decade without discernible texture that persists, despite its contradictions,

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despite the obvious differences between then about the 1970s happens in the light of a strange- and now, for as long as no viable political al- ly universalized New York, a New York of the ternatives to neoliberalism can be imagined. It movies, one rotten with crime and sex but also could be too, finally, that this very conceit, that gorgeously soaked in neon? The dorm rooms of a transformation in the capacity of history to of university students, especially those of men, generate “eras” proper, tells us less about the log- continue to bizarrely orbit the era: Led Zeppelin, ic of the 1970s, the last “real” decade, than it does Pink Floyd, and Bob Marley posters in music, the structure of our own time’s desire (a time, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Clockwork Orange perhaps, so desperate to mark its own specific- in film. Even a cursory glance into these spac- ity that it is open to imagining itself as unprec- es reveals a strangely paralyzed campus imagi- edentedly devoid of sense, feeling, historici- nary; the expected transition to a version of the ty, etc.). In the postmodern drive to frame the classic grounded in new content, in the “best of present as an end—to history or experience, for the nineties,” takes place, but only partially. If example—the present itself is flooded with a vi- the process by which things become translated brating ecstasy of the new, a sense that nothing into the idiom of the classic is linear, a huge ma- like this has ever happened before and that we, chine that slides through time along predictable here, at the end of history can now know all of inter-generational cycles—say, every 25 years— the things those who came before us didn’t. then the mechanism almost certainly jammed in the 1970s and has since stuttered around the The most obvious symptom of our moment’s en- decade with a strange insistency. Perhaps it is tanglement with the 1970s is the intensity with not surprising then that among the most oft-en- which we continue to attach ourselves to its ar- countered (contemporary) posters found in tifacts. This is expressed first in the ease with these spaces is that of Quentin Tarantino’s film which film and music from the decade contin- Pulp Fiction, a 1990s text completely saturated ue to be consumed under the sign of the “clas- by the motifs and forms of the 1970s (and featur- sic,” a concept that clearly imbues productions ing one of the decade’s most recognizable stars): from the era with greater authenticity or origi- it is as if we could only cobble together our con- nality than their counterparts in the present. We ception of the classic through the detritus of the should not assume that this is something like 1970s, as if the decade had become necessary to the natural aura of history, one that organically any attempt on the part of a text to convincingly begins to fringe all things past or old at inter- canonize itself. Troublesome is the way this on- vals that can be predicted in advance. Instead, tologization of the decade’s key figures and mo- it would appear that the dimensions that accrue tifs dovetails with the logics of contemporary around the concept of classic rock and film in misogyny, fears about the declining manliness the present are soldered to many of the proper- of men, and the confusing vagueness of gender ties of the 1970s itself. What is it about the de- roles fed into a nostalgia for a time when “men cade as a whole that allows for this intensified were still men.” The brute maleness of the mob- investment, as if it were the time itself, its own ster—or any one of the decade’s myriad agents grittiness, its own contradictory realness, that of charming violence, ranging from serial killers vibrates through the signature cultural objects to rogue cops—comes to be intuited as some- and gestures we tether to the period? Isn’t there how closer to the savage Real of things them- a way, after all, in which everything we know selves. The humiliations of the present—say the

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banalities of office work—can then be re-cali- and contradictions. We could not have imag- brated as female, as markers of a mass emascu- ined in 1977 that Star Wars was the Trojan horse lation of men that has led them into a world of for a new way of being in the world. That films fakeness and passivity. This is precisely the posi- could become worlds—self-sustaining spaces in tion taken by Fight Club; it comes as no surprise which a whole generation might imaginatively then that Tyler Durden is decked out in the garb live out much of its time, spaces complete with of the 1970s (wide-collared disco shirt, aviator alternative histories, entire cosmologies—would glasses, vintage leather jacket, etc.)—he’s func- have been surprising to those alive amidst the tioning in 1999 as an id dressed up as natural pressing historicity of the 1970s (and for whom masculinity. To what extent this “natural mas- film often critically reflected on the most rele- culinity”—grounded in a fantasy of the 1970s as vant historical matters of their day, from the war a time of unconstrained male gesture and de- in Vietnam to Watergate). It is perhaps a mark sire—continues to haunt the moustaches of ur- of how badly things have gone politically in the ban hipsters is an open question, one not easily wake of Reagan—America’s first (but not last) solved by an invocation of irony. Hollywood President—that our culture contin- ues to understand these expansionary fictional We consume the period’s visual culture, then, universes as no more than good clean fun, a fun, also through its reiterations in contemporary albeit, that has expanded—through bedsheets content set in the period. 1990s cinema looped and toothbrushes, video games, and food pack- back to the decade constantly—Goodfellas aging—in directly inverse proportion to the ca- (1990), Casino (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), Sum- pacity of individuals to understand in even the mer of Sam (1999), 54 (1998)—orbiting objects most minimal of ways their own place in histo- and motifs (disco, mobsters, the birth of the se- ry. Wouldn’t this be the ultimate expression of rial killer) that continue to haunt contemporary postmodern thinking taken to its extreme limit? films (Zodiac, American Hustle, The Good Guys). A world in which every subject, having chosen Again, the kind of tone grounding these films the content it likes best (Star Wars, Harry Potter, reveals an era that is intense, expressive, high, X-Men, etc.), embraces the sovereign right not fast, and violent—manically Real in a way that just to escape politics, but the planet itself, dis- has been lost to a seemingly less volatile, more tant fictional galaxies rendered in greater detail “mediated” present (with this mediation often (and lusher colour) than the basic political out- fantasized from the both the Right and the Cen- lines of their own neighbourhoods? The sight of tre as the encroachments of “political correct- a middle-aged man at home with his collection ness”). Recent television—Narcos, Mindhunter, of Star Wars figurines—or pointing proudly at etc.—mirror many of these interests and contin- the office to a life-size Boba Fett doll he’d had in- ue the trend of imagining the life-world of the stalled to improve morale—reminds us that, de- decade as mostly violent and male. So total is spite all of the delusions of modern adulthood, the penetration of the fictional universe of Star it at least always held in reserve the ghost of a Wars into the molecules of contemporary rep- materialist ontology. For all of its conservatism, resentation that it is easy to forget that it is in for all of the ways every claim to adulthood is many ways, at least for those over the age of 40, a lie, there remains in the latter’s contempt for a living artifact from the 1970s, one inseparable children’s fictions, and myth itself, a bare his- from an encounter with the period’s core logics torical-materialist gesture—an insistence on the

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serious Oneness of situations and on the exis- with rats); a series of States of Emergency (five tence of a ground we somehow complexly and in total) declared by Edward Heath between share. After 1977 it became possible to be in pos- 1970-74 (placing social democracy on the same session of detailed technical knowledge of the dangerous plane as terrorism or war). Instead of blueprints of the Death Star (and to display this being a conjuncture of possibility plied by myr- knowledge as edgy intelligence), while at the iad speculative futures, the 1970s in this view is same time openly (and unashamedly) know- reduced to the scintillating obviousness of cri- ing nothing about the existence of Toussaint sis. Thatcherite austerity then comes to appear Louverture. as necessary medicine, a strict but fundamental- ly sound treatment designed for a patient that “Back to the 1970s” would have died without it. In this sense, neolib- eralism is never opposed to a genuine political f popular culture returns to an idea of the alternative or different form of political reason, 1970s that is at the very least variegated, but only ever to networks of dangerous drives, mainstream political discourse perpetuates instincts, and emotions—to an irrational expan- Ia much less flexible image of the decade as a sion of the political into the sovereign necessi- period of undifferentiated ruin. One could ar- ty of the market. In other words, neoliberalism gue that neoliberalism in many ways survives, lacks interlocutors because those who contest it masking its own profound failure, on the basis are always no more than force-fields of instincts. of a highly codified set of associations—what we Any desire to “return to the 1970s”—that is to might call “stock footage”—that frame the 1970s systematically reassess its political legacy—can and social democracy itself as an objectionable only be understood as: a) a naïve form of eco- form of politics, ludicrous to re-consider as via- nomic illiteracy (there is, after all, no such thing ble. The codes at work here appear most clearly as an economically sound social democracy) or in the near-hysteria that has greeted the rise of b) a bad Marxist death drive—a desire for the Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. In 2015, Centrist La- pleasures of stupid negation, of a class war that bour MP David Blunkett claimed that those vot- destroys for the sake of destruction itself. Such a ing for Corbyn were mostly hard-Left militants desire, either way, is nothing less than unnatu- fueled by an irrational politics of hate (of the ral— a corpse left out in the sun. rich, the successful, etc.); if left unchecked they would drag Britain back to the 1970s, a time in One way to track the tropes at work in neolib- which the nation was torn apart by “strikes, food eralism’s occluded history of the world is to fo- shortages, and blackouts.” To tilt in the direc- cus on one of its great, spectral bogeys: inflation. tion of social democracy—higher taxes, for ex- Hatred of inflation is perhaps the closest thing ample, or tightened regulatory regimes—would our moment has to a (bi-partisan) moral abso- be to unthinkingly follow “a road to nowhere.” lute. Left unchecked, allowed to “spiral,” infla- A nightmarish montage accompanies even the tion is almost universally decried as wrong or merest hint of a return to these policies: corps- risky; economic policy (so we’re told by the cen- es left unburied by unionized gravediggers; the tral bankers and institutional lenders) should three-day work week (imposed to conserve coal be tailored to prioritize and control this danger, supplies hobbled by striking miners); streets even if it is at the cost of a rise in unemployment crowded with uncollected garbage (and flush or involves significant cuts to basic services.

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That such a choice in the 1950s—the era of One because it links the experimental skepticism of Nation conservatives such as Harold Macmil- the natural sciences with a much older custom- lan—would have been unthinkable, not just po- ary logic grounded in the association of chaos litically, but on emphatically moral grounds is with excess. In contradistinction to the mor- entirely forgotten. Stranger, though, is the way alizing Christian or Confucian, the neoliberal our moment finds in inflation an idea of -ca economist can point to the political necessity of tastrophe that is more readily imaginable and a anti-inflationary measures, not as an injunction greater spur to action than the risk posed to life to ascesis or moral balance but as an effect of by climate crisis. This is not an empty assertion: unquestionable natural scientific law (complete governments regularly act politically to curb in- with precise numbers and graphs). If we can’t flation even as they do nothing in the face of imagine measuring mass unhappiness we can at potential extinction. It is as if the hyper-infla- least know precisely what’s going on in the sta- tionary environment, one in which the simple bility of our money: we can accord to chaos a act of exchange spectacularly collapses, presents precise measure and respond to it with mone- a more complicated puzzle—and a more terri- tary governance. Yet this injunction (to balance) ble prospect—than the collapse of the global works precisely because it lies so closely to the eco-system: one can fantasize, for example, dra- inherited customary norms that structure the matic scientific fixes for climate change or imag- West—dreams of order as harmony, balance fi- ine a world in which humans eek out an exis- nally restored, and of excess or chaos as an un- tence on the edges of a changed natural world, natural deviation from things as they should be. but our creativity fades when tasked with the Our moment illustrates or dramatizes this cha- spectre of a $10,000 load of bread. One cannot os using stock photos of the 1970s. On the other survive or endure inflation; one can only imme- side of inflation is a future drawn directly from diately move to extinguish it. In a capitalist en- the past: scenes of riot, produce rotting out of vironment in which everyone is spontaneously the backs of trucks, garbage-strewn streets, etc. relativist, nothing is more structurally surreal or The tone here is biblical; this is a time of plague really more fundamentally evil than a shift in the and rot. Nothing better signals social failure stability of prices—it is as if the consistency of in the eyes of the middle class than the public money were the last of the classical certitudes, display of uncollected trash: it contains “Third one that persists despite the fact that it was pre- World” [this is not a claim about the “Third cisely the marketization of life—the sovereignty World” but about the way the latter is imagined of money—that killed the old truths in the first in the minds of the white middle class], devo- place. It is perhaps not surprising then that his- lution, the threat of a complete collapse of lib- torians regularly locate the Holocaust, a politics eral civilitydevolution, and the total breakdown of death taken to a point beyond all limits, as of liberal civility. Inflation, for neoliberals, is a emerging out of the terrible fog of the 1923 Wei- moral fable in which the main villains are prof- mar inflation. The message is clear: keep one’s ligate (self-serving) welfare states and greedy, monetary house in order or risk a return of the wage-distorting unions: at the root of inflation- repressed of world-historical proportions. ary chaos, one that ends the natural simplicity of buying and selling, are states and unions who Hatred of inflation passes for truth, even in an have made it all so troublingly political. age characterized by the suspicion of absolutes,

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Thus, we must reject the idea that inflation is ax- etc.)—it was possible in the 1970s, buoyed by a iomatically bad or that it is simply the symptom sense for the continuing relevance of social de- of self-evident economic failure. This is because mocracy, for the political power of students and inflation reveals the truth that every claim of an unions and for the revolutions that continued to economy to transcendental naturalness is false. emerge in places like Nicaragua or Afghanistan The fog of inflation makes clear the falsity of to conclude that the planet was still tilting slow- growth, its claim to be an axiom, and its seem- ly to the Left. There were signs of crisis, certain- ing automatic quality. In an inflationary spiral ly, and symptoms of accumulating contradic- there is no longer any sense that an economy is tions and limits, but almost nobody envisioned something comprised of individuals nor that it is the answer to these problems in the form of a simply a natural whole that operates behind the jarring lurch to the Right; apart from a tiny mi- back of its agents; instead, the world splits into nority, mostly Friedmanite economists or poli- virulent stakes and interests, classes and forces, cy wonks such as Keith Joseph, the thought of a fog or smoke in which everything is sudden- using unemployment to tame inflation, or of ly debatable. Coal doesn’t simply move along actively disempowering the unions, was un- smooth tracks from pit to factory, but is slowed imaginable. Adorno, of course, is correct to down by the Real of truculent labour, the incon- point to the ways Auschwitz interrupted the En- venient fact that nothing happens without the lightenment dream of perpetual progress; yet it latter’s consent. Money doesn’t flow from hand was precisely the defeat of those who had engi- to hand, between a seller and a natural buyer, neered Auschwitz, combined with the post-war but takes the form, finally, of a problem. Money spread of social democracy, that made it easy in these contexts becomes the local historical in- to see the slow trickling into common sense of vention it has never ceased to be. Certainly, any once-radical Left ideas—unionism, full employ- possible Left politics has to “keep the lights on,” ment, etc.—as an extension of Reason into the “keep the trains running,” etc., but whatever Left last remaining bastions of ignorance and priv- efficiency stands to be imagined by future praxis ilege. For many in 1975 the idea that post-sec- will also be distinct from its present counterpart ondary education should be free (or near-free) by being oriented from the beginning towards was as accepted as the suggestion in 2018 that a the possibility of a life never wholly sutured to cigarette should never be smoked in the hallway efficiency in the first place. A life, in other words, of a hospital. Publically funded libraries were in which efficiency never becomes a govern- then as axiomatically irreversible as the rights ing ideology (nor a justification for suffering or of women to drive or vote. Even those on the exploitation). Right—such as Edward Heath or Richard Nix- on—broadly conceded as necessary many of the It bears keeping in mind that the last moment things that today, under neoliberalism, we view one could realistically imagine the planet’s fu- as excesses or impossibilities (workers’ rights, ture as communist—or post-capitalist, socialist, for example, or pensions). etc.—passed quietly and without anyone really noticing on a day without a date sometime in To live in the 1970s was to inhabit a horizon on the 1970s. All over the world—in China, parts which the future was, if not Red, at least red- of Africa, South America, and even at the sys- dish or pink. This strange, now almost structur- tem’s very centre (in the United States, Germany, ally unrememberable fact, is at the heart of the

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1974 travel diary of Roland Barthes’ time in Chi- that is finally nothing more or less than fab- na. When he notes with amazement the “abso- ric itself, fabric worn on a secularized body for lute uniformity” of the outfits worn by citizens which there no longer any Gods (save, maybe, in the People’s Republic, he is to some extent for Mao). Certainly, these garments are alienat- channeling a fairly predictable liberal response ed, still blurred at the edges by Maoist myth, but to communist alterity: sameness encountered at the same instant, they are nothing more than in this most private of domains—that of fash- cloth, and so become objects on the edge of ev- ion and the bodily articulation of the personal- ery personal imaginary, objects of utility and use ity—can only be registered as repression, as the value, freed on some level from the imaginary banal symptom of totalitarianism, rather than as itself. To contend with the 1970s then is to con- a difference that capacitates as much as it limits. tend in part with the remarkable richness and Beneath the many snarky liberal asides that pep- residual ontological signatures of actually exist- per his diary, however, there is at the same time ing communism. something more—a sense for the sheer exterior- ity of communism. It is along the thread of this A film such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for ex- anatomist’s gaze, one that restlessly but amoral- ample, presents communism not as a spectral ly documents differences, that the text comes to ideal, nor as a well-intentioned feeling, nor even register communism as a gigantic, world-his- as a form of malevolent extremity or failure, but torical object. Communism, on this account, is as a boringly existent force, something blunt- not merely the history of a radical dream, nor ly present in the world. Communism in such a a subjective process sustained by the activity of film is an object among objects, something im- militants, but something that has already hap- bued with conatus, struggling to remain in ex- pened to the world (in the form of MiGs and free istence but certainly there, real, a fact among health care, but also shorter working days and, facts. In such films the Eastern Bloc is not de- yes, even gulags). Barthes texts registers, in oth- monized, but encountered like natural history, er words, the scalar totality of communism—its “beyond good and evil.” This quality—that of hugeness but also its improbability, all of the boring, amoral facticity—still comes through in risk and torpor it had to traverse to exist at all. the kind of photographic travelogues of Moscow Barthes, who taught us to read our bodies like or Leningrad put out by National Geographic in books and that outfits too were systems of signs, the decade. Communism in fact gets directly finds in the command economy a kind of abso- folded into the magazine’s vision of the world lute alterity or limit: “the reading of the social as a system of cultural rather than political dif- dimension is turned upside down. Uniform isn’t ferences—communism itself becomes a kind uniformity” (57). To move from within the nat- of local colour, slightly exoticized, for sure, but uralness of a world in which we dress ourselves nevertheless included as such within the varie- comfortably in any manner we like to a world gated spectacle of the “human family.” Regard- in which the heterogeneity of fashion, its em- less of one’s position on the relative strengths piricism, has been arrested by centralized pro- and weaknesses of the Soviet system, the fact duction is to move anthropologically between it happened at all—and that for many decades two radically different life-worlds or ways of fed, educated, and clothed its citizens and pro- being alive. Millions of people suddenly wear duced cutting-edge scientific research—remains the same piece of clothing, a piece of clothing a significant political fact. This is because even

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in the rottenness of the Soviet experiment there the name for an actual historical era it is argu- is the trace of a miracle, a break, an outside for able—despite all the talk of a return of the re- thought and practice. Jean-Paul Sartre remains pressed of history, a new cycle of the Real, a re- correct that without this rotten, beautiful exper- turn to the divisiveness and intensity of strug- iment, the world would have remained ontolog- gles, and so on—that postmodernity as a politi- ically bourgeois. Alongside attempts to discred- co-aesthetic regime has never been more securely it Left imagination by reference to its blighted founded. Anybody who has spoken at length to history—in which its existence was exhausted a Trump supporter, a fan of the Kardashians, a by failure—there exists another tendency, one liberal banker, or an urban “creative” knows all very much at the heart of neoliberalism: it is not too well that the negative remains as moribund only that communism failed, that the facts of its as it felt to Herbert Marcuse writing at the end existence were eaten up by failure, it is that its of the post-war boom: the only way to serious- failure was so profound that it comes to be per- ly believe that we are living in an era of sharp- ceived as never having existed in the first place. ened negation is to confine one’s conversation to In this context, the bare gesture of pointing to a tiny coterie of like-minded academics. Badi- communism as having existed at all (and in a ou’s meta-philosophy is not just true in the weak form not simply isomorphic with failure) be- sense that it compellingly describes the struc- comes political. ture of human history, it is true in the stronger sense of offering to humans a picture of them- Recently, we have begun to hear a lot about the selves as radically capable of change. Yet nothing supposed end of postmodernism, the turn, af- in the grandeur or even descriptive adequacy of ter Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meil- Badiou’s position changes the fact that there lassoux, Jodi Dean, and others, towards a was perhaps no time in history in which it was post-postmodernity. Whether it be in the form more difficult to actually make (let alone sus- of a return to the radical intensity of Truth, a tain) a truth claim. In many ways, the core texts disruptive materialist psychoanalytic Real, a of Jean Baudrillard on simulation or Debord on certain kind of Marxist sociological determina- the spectacle or Frederic Jameson on the flat- cy, or even, as in Object Oriented Philosophy, a tening of affect—all written before the advent thought capable of grasping things themselves of the internet, social media, and a 24/7 tem- (rather than simply their appearances), our mo- porality—now look less like the slightly mad, ment can be said to be characterized by a desire “abstract” rantings that serious social scientists to exit the era in which philosophy came to see once denounced them as, and more like sober, itself as a storyteller rather than as a practitioner empirical accounts of the world as it is. We live of strict German Wissenschaft. What then, of the in a moment, we should recall, in which main- claim, that postmodernism is over? In so far as stream scientists and thinkers as well as some of these are claims for a turn within the restricted the world’s most influential “business leaders” cultural sphere of philosophy they are certainly (Elon Musk, for example) have sincerely come correct; positions that celebrate the irreconcil- to believe that reality is a sophisticated simula- able multiplicity of perspectives, the sovereignty tion. This simulation hypothesis—famously ar- of pleasure, or the ecstasy of an identity in con- ticulated by Nick Bostrom in 2013—points to stant flux have never looked less interesting nor the possibility of a time in which we can plausi- as philosophically weak as they do today. Yet as bly imagine a human being who, after spending

ISSUE 9-1, 2018 · 13 FADE OF THE POLAROID

its day in various simulated realities (VR, televi- roughly the same functions or operations (the sion, etc.) removes the goggles only to encoun- tape-recorder, type-writers, etc.). It also comes ter a world it also openly believes to be false (or as no surprise that details about this ontologi- second-order). This is unparalleled cultural ter- cal shift are refracted through the visual history ritory, the strange revenge of Platonism (though (and after-effects) of the technologies implicated a Platonism miserably emptied of truth and of in this erasure and in the fundamental redistri- the possibility of a world beyond the cave). bution of space-time it involves. 1970s films re- veal to us a world that is at once uncannily sim- It may be that the experience we once called “Be- ilar and totally different. It is the uncanny prox- ing”—that old lofty HeideggerianDasein —itself imity to ourselves—offices that are recognizable died, along with the communist outside, on that but computerless, fully contemporary automo- obscure day lost somewhere in the 1970s. That biles outfitted with ash trays and dial-switch ra- Jameson was diagnosing this situation in the dios—that allows us to witness materially proof 1990s is remarkable given how preliminary the of the fact that there was life before the smart symptoms were at the time. Given this context, phone. Revealed here is the objective superflu- there is a way in which 1970s visual culture may ousness of all of those modes and habits that end up carrying a heavier ontological signature make up the fabric of contemporary communi- than much of the cinema which comes before or cation, the presence to desire of a world content after it. Like a photograph taken by someone at despite the absence of wifi. This historical struc- the instant before their death—the genre of the ture of desire—the bliss of the past vis a vis all death selfie is now commonplace among stego- of the pleasures or “necessities” held in store for philes, extreme tourists, etc. —1970s visual cul- it by the future—may be less universal than one ture registers the traces of a Dasein intensified might think, with the washing machine, for ex- in the moment before its own erasure. It should ample, “dreamed of” by the historical suffering come as no surprise then that the signals left by of women’s bodies in a way that has no analogue the collapse of a thematics of Being (and even of in the cellphone. an end to the motif of collapse itself) ping loud- er the closer we get to those visual artifacts that The 1970s is a time that is close enough to re- commemorate or register the technologies most semble ours but at once separated from us by an implicated in this process. There is something unfathomable distance. Though one could point impossibly odd about the sight on film of a 1970s to the great ontologists of 1970s cinema—for ex- telephone booth, an uncanniness that can’t be ample, Andrei Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr, in whose understood apart from the operations of a cer- films we are confronted by a gritty being-there tain diffuse historical-materialist metaphys- of History we encounter almost nowhere to- ics. An image of a contemporary cell-phone or day—even films in popular, plot-driven genres laptop has no capacity to register the difference seem ontologically haunted vis-à-vis their con- between the postmodern and what came be- temporary analogues. This is evident mostly on fore it—they are bluntly contemporaneous with the level of pace, in a remarkable slowness that themselves. However, this immediately chang- characterizes so much of the film production of es when we are presented with primitive proto- the period and in which what is happening on types of these objects or even with wholly other the screen is never quite absorbed into the im- objects on alternative developmental arcs with mediacy of its notional content.

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There is no going “back to the 70s”. There are, very same here-and-now. We are haunted by the however, good reasons for thinking that any Polaroid–an aesthetic now widely circulated on possible means out of the present--out of neo- Instagram filters, for example—not just because liberalism, out of postmodernism--will require it was superseded as a medium by the arc of a detour through the decade’s repressed political technological change (that is, not just because its and ontological signatures. It is easy to romanti- dead). Rather, the desire of the Instagram filter cize the 70s, a time which, after all, provided us is the fade of the Polaroid: what it craves, on the with some of the last great photos of Revolt, of border of everything it finds intolerable about history captured collectively by a genuinely op- the present, is ontology. It isn’t nostalgia then positional Idea. It is not romanticism, though, that leads us back to the Polaroid, nor a belief in that leads us back curiously to flit through old some kind of unmediated Being or Erfahrung, shoe-boxes of Polaroids (shots of long-gone but a tinkerer’s interest in the possibilities inher- suburban streets, of faded birthday parties, of ent in everything still capable of fading. now-rusted playgrounds, of loved ones dead for decades, etc.). Held up against the immaterial- ity of the digital image, the Polaroid today has Works Cited about it the aura of a cemetery or burial ground. Why is this the case? Though the Polaroid ex- Adorno, Theodore. Minima Moralia: Reflections from tracts a moment from the flux in which it takes Damaged Life. Verso, 2005. place in a way that is similar to the digital image, it suddenly transforms that moment into an ob- Barthes, Roland. Travels in China. Polity Press, 2012. ject that is itself instantly claimed by singulari- ty and time, itself immediately unrepeatable and Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the subject to deterioration. Rather than disappear- French Revolution. Stanford University Press, 2011. ing into the permanence of an orbiting Cloud, the Polaroid object can now be lost, shredded, Wooding, David. “Corbyn will take us back to the fade, burn, etc. Unlike the traditional photo- 70s”. The Sun. September 12th, 2015. Available at: graph, however, the moment extracted from https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/politics/89310/ the flux is not separated from its transformation corbyn-will-take-us-back-to-the-70s/. 07 October into an object by the interval of development: 2018. instead, slightly displaced, it appears within that

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PREFACE

NATHAN HOLMES

he essays and reflections collected in this the western, and the road film. Examining Mon- issue excavate 1970s visual culture across te Hellman’s The Shooting (1966) and Bob Rafel- a number of sites, each investigating how son’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), she traces a mode Tmodes of visuality developed within and around of citation and subversion that allowed both the decade resonated in their immediate mo- films to produce a visual mediation on ­America’s ment and yet remain tethered to our present. open spatiality. In particular, the contributions here gravitate to genres and tropes that either flourished in the Colin Williamson considers a different varia- 1970s—from landscape art and digital film ef- tion on the western in “An Escape into Reality: fects to giallo—or, like the western, horror, or Special Effects and the Haunting Optics ofWest - the journalism film, were revisited and renewed. world (1973),” drawing attention to the way the Taken together, these contributions offer rang- sci-fi western’s digital effects can be seen as -fig ing considerations about how visual concepts ures for the anxiety and imagination surround- germinate, multiply, survive, and transform, and ing both computer technology and emerging how they might be seen differently when turned contexts of geopolitical volatility. The equally in the light of alternative historical coordinates. volatile, crisis-ridden world of the 21st century, Williamson points out, makes HBO’s resurrec- Analyzing the proliferation of point-of-view tion of the world of Westworld apposite, even cinematography in 1970s horror, Adam Hart if the expansive technological anxieties of the pivots from the theories of identification that present seem to demand more elaborate narra- have pervaded the discourse of slasher films. In- tive images. stead he argues for the uncanny, subjectively de- stabilizing effects of point-of-view as a mode of The landscape of the American west and the land spectatorial address, contrasting it with the sur- artists who took it as their object form the basis veillance aesthetic found in recent found-foot- of Kaitlin Pomerantz’s reflection piece. Wander- age horror. ing around Robert Smithon’s Spiral Jetty­ (1968) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70) In “Predictive Landscapes,” K.R. Cornett con- provokes Pomerantz to consider how the artist’s siders the relation between American landscape, assumptions about natural history have fared PREFACE

as questions of anthropogenic environmental investigative journalism expressively delineates change have intensified. aspirations for a white-collar workplace that would never materialize. Italian gialli films have likewise been associated with contextual, if more localized, social anxiet- Finally, in “Archaeology of the (1970s) Com- ies. Seb Roberts argues, however, that the trans- mune,” Andrew Pendakis interviews the artist gressive sensation and exuberant stylization of Fraser McCallum about his installation, Come the cycle allowed Italian audiences an experien- Live with Us. McCallum’s project reconstructs tial departure from the moral conservatism that the experience of Rochdale College, an exper- characterized their moment. imental, student-run school spawned within a modernist dormitory high-rise at the border of Moving from the sensational to the seeming- the University of Toronto campus. Drawing on ly mundane, Nathan Holmes investigates the archival materials, interviews, and present-day production design of office space in “Deep images of the building’s architectural surfaces, Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labour in All the McCallum’s installation grasps toward Rochdale ­President’s Men.” Drawing on the film’s pro- as a radical moment of possibility, even as it ac- duction history as well discourses in office de- knowledges the difficulty of solidifying its his- sign and management theory, Holmes argues torical presence. that the film’s staging of knowledge work via

REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES ISSUE 9-1, 2018 · 18 “AN ESCAPE INTO REALITY”: COMPUTERS, SPECIAL EFFECTS, AND THE HAUNTING OPTICS OF WESTWORLD (1973)

COLIN WILLIAMSON

Abstract | As one of the earliest experiments with integrating Résumé | Le film de science fiction de Michael Crichton, computer-generated special effects into celluloid filmmak- Westworld, (1973), l’une des premières expériences d’intégra- ing, Michael Crichton’s science fiction film Westworld (1973) tion d’effets spéciaux créés sur ordinateur dans l’industrie imagined the transition into a digital future with a familiar cinématographique, imagine la transition dans un futur dig- apocalyptic narrative about disobedient machines and vir- ital au sein d’un récit apocalyptique sur la désobéissance des tual realities. In this essay I move away from “escapist” and machines et les réalités virtuelles. Dans cet essai, je ­m’éloigne “futurist” readings of the sci-fi genre and explore how West- de la lecture divertissante et futuriste de la science fiction world was “an escape into reality,” to borrow Isaac Asimov’s pour explorer comment Westworld a constitué une “évasion phrase, that immersed audiences in the computerization of dans la réalité”, pour reprendre les mots d’Isaac Asimov, qui life, visuality, and the cinema in 1970s America. My focus plonge le spectateur dans une vie informatisée, la visualité will be on mapping the film’s use of computer simulation as et le cinéma de l’Amérique des années 70. Ma recherche s’ef- part of a constellation that includes everything from moder- forcera de documenter dans le film l’emploi de la simulation nity in fin-de-siècle amusement parks and early cinema to par ordinateur comme une partie de la constellation de tech- discourses on postmodernism (Baudrillard) and dehuman- niques utilisées depuis la modernité des parcs d’amusement ization (Sontag). I will also consider how the recent HBO fin-de-siècle et des débuts du cinéma jusqu’au discours sur le series Westworld (2016) reimagined Crichton’s film as a way postmodernisme (Baudrillard) et la déshumanisation (Son- of visualizing and historicizing questions about the virtual in tag). Je vais également examiner comment la récente série our digital moment. télévisée Westworld (2016) sur HBO a réimaginé le film de Crichton comme une manière de visualiser et d’historiciser les questions portant sur le virtuel dans notre époque digitale. AN ESCAPE INTO REALITY

Brood of hell, you’re not a mortal! by setting the robot on fire (fig. 1). Reflecting Shall the entire house go under? critically on the film in 1975, Mead and Apple- Over threshold over portal baum argue that the burning android conjures Streams of water rush and thunder. “the image of some ‘madman’ igniting himself in Broom accurst and mean, front of impassive onlookers” (12-13). The refer- Who will have his will, ence is most likely to Malcolm Browne’s photo- Stick that you have been, graph of the Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc’s Once again stand still! self-immolation in Saigon on June 11, 1963. The resemblance is striking and pointedly unexpect- -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed, not least because one image depicts a spec- “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1797) tacular destruction of a fictional machine in a Hollywood film and the other is a record of a n a provocative review of Westworld (1973), human being’s profound protest of the govern- Michael Crichton’s science-fiction film ment in South Vietnam. By linking the two im- about a futuristic, computerized theme park ages together Mead and Applebaum demand Icalled Delos, Gerald Mead and Sam Applebaum that Westworld be seen, especially by Ameri- of Jump Cut link the film to the visual culture can audiences, not as an escape into an imagi- of the Vietnam War. At the end of Westworld nary futuristic world but as a kind of futuristic one of the main characters destroys a homicid- reimagining of the present, what Isaac Asimov al android gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner) called “an escape into reality” (332).

Figure 1. Westworld: the burning android.

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It is easy to see Westworld as a reflection of a The loss of control inWestworld is a familiar world that was for many in the 1970s alarm- one. Advertisements for the film emphasized ingly out of control. The film focuses on two the volatile relationship between humans and friends, Peter (Richard Benjamin) and John machines by featuring the now commonplace (James Brolin), who visit Delos to revel in the figure of the computer “glitch.” Posters with theme park’s fantastic worlds populated by the tagline “Where nothing can possibly go exceptionally convincing hu- manoid robots. Early on Peter and John make their way to the part of the park known as West- world to immerse themselves in a simulation of the Wild West in the late 19th century, a period in American history with strong parallels to the violence, imperi- alism, and racism of the Vietnam era. Upon their arrival, a voice on a loudspeaker reassures the visitors that they are “free to in- dulge their every whim” because “nothing can go wrong.” Every- thing, obviously, does go wrong. Along with the computers that control the park, the robots be- gin to malfunction, supposed- ly through the spread of a virus, or what one of the park’s experts skeptically calls a “disease of ma- chinery.” The initial promise of freedom quickly gives way to a total loss of control over com- puterized technologies: the ro- bots rebel, the simulations be- come real, and visitors start dy- ing. Ultimately, John is shot and killed by the android gunslinger, and a chain of violence ensues that climaxes at the end of the film when Peter burns the robot “alive” and order, it seems, is re- stored to the park. Figure 2. Theatrical release poster for Westworld (1973). Source: The Official Site of Michael Crichton.

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worng” contain a minor misspelling that pres- and philosophical implications of these chang- ages disaster (fig. 2); when the line is spoken es by imagining possible futures and endings in voiceover in a trailer for the film, the audio for a society in transition. Toffler famous- is plagued by a similar glitch: “Where noth- ly characterized the transition as a “super-in- ing can possibly go wrong … go wrong … go dustrial revolution” that threatened to outpace wrong.” The fatal computer malfunction that society’s ability to adapt to changes that many undoes the safety of the amusement park re- held to be the stuff of science fiction rather calls “HAL” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space than realities of contemporary life. Rehearsing Odyssey (1968) and the long history of what earlier criticisms by Georg Simmel and Walter Scott Bukatman calls “disobedient machines,” Benjamin about the shocks of modernity at the from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s magic end of the 19th century, Toffler remarked: brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1797) and the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein In the coming decades, advances in these (1818) to the rebellious robotic creations in Me- fields [of science and technology] will tropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Blade Runner (Rid- fire off like a series of rockets carrying us ley Scott, 1982), and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, out of the past, plunging us deeper into 2015), to name a few. As part of this history of the new society. Nor will this new society (dis)obedience, Crichton’s film grapples with quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, enduring questions that have long been staples will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers of the science-fiction genre: Will the technol- jolt after jolt of high-energy change. It of- ogies we create improve humanity? Will they fers no return to the familiar past. It of- replace us or destroy us? Will they make us less fers only the highly combustible mixture human? How much control do we really have of transience and novelty. (217) over them? It is precisely this imagined future of a present While Westworld’s narrative taps into well- world on the verge of going up in flames that worn anxieties about technology, the film still haunts Westworld and is reflected, I argue, in has much to teach us, particularly about how the figure of the burning android. Americans were navigating the rapidly chang- ing techno-scientific landscape of their histor- In what follows I explore how these concerns ical moment. Shadowing Crichton’s futuristic about “future shock” in the early 1970s get nego- theme park were widespread efforts to com- tiated in Westworld’s treatment and use of com- prehend and cope with astonishing develop- puters. In 1973, computer technologies were ments in everything from space exploration just beginning to radically transform Ameri- and Cold War science to mass communication, can life and, over the decade, would “create a molecular biology, and computers. The 1970s totally new human environment,” to borrow were ushered in by a wave of cultural criti- Marshall McLuhan’s words (viii). At stake in cism—for example, Nigel Calder’s Technopo- this transformation was the stability of not only lis (1969), William Braden’s The Age of Aquar- the architecture of society but also convictions ius (1970), Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two about foundational categories such as “reality” Ages (1970), and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and “humanity,” which were being challenged (1970)—that grappled with the social, political, by computers’ capacities for simulation. It is

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significant, from this perspective, that Crich- imaginary—but also as a meta-text about the ton’s film was among the earliest experiments changing nature of the science and technology in combining computerized special effects with that went into making the film itself. celluloid filmmaking in Hollywood. For Bryn- ner’s character, Crichton collaborated with ex- Futuristic Visions of a Digital Present perimental computer animator John Whitney, Jr. to simulate the villainous gunslinger’s robot- Computers are mostly used ic point-of-view, which was achieved by using against people instead of for computers to transform celluloid footage into people; used to control peo- highly pixelated images.1 On the surface, the ple instead of to free them. resulting electronic machine vision—essen- tially Westworld as “seen” by a computer—is a -People’s Computer Company (1972) small but marvelous special effects innovation. Considering the climate in which the innova- mong the special effects employed in tion occurred, however, I argue that the use of Westworld is a curious spectacle of see- digital special effects, to borrow Kristen Whis- ing through a robot’s eyes. After the sel’s term, “emblematized” the emergence of a Aandroid gunslinger shoots John dead, it sets new way of seeing (and seeing with) comput- out in relentless pursuit of Peter, whose per- ers in 1973. spective on the chase is periodically intercut with shots of the gunslinger’s point-of-view. To this end, I situate Westworld’s “robot POV” The robot POV is signaled by the appearance of in a broader discourse of uncertainty that took highly rasterized footage that consists of pixels shape around the spread of computerization in arranged in an array of 3,600 rectangles. The early-1970s America and that helps us, look- array is introduced in the first shot of the gun- ing back on that decade, see how the film res- slinger’s view of Peter desperately fleeing on onated and resonates in complex ways. West- a horse from the scene of his friend’s murder world’s use of special effects, and the narrative when he realizes that the robot is out for blood in which it embeds them, make the film part (fig. 3). The effect is an early version of a -com of a rich constellation that includes everything puterized film aesthetic and a novel attempt to from the modernity of fin-de-siècle amuse- visualize the optics of an electronic machine, ment parks and early cinema to ideas about a kind of topos in the history of what Alex- postmodernism and the posthuman that con- ander Galloway calls “computerized, cyber- verge around computers in the late-20th centu- netic, machinic vision”—variations of which ry and that continue to unfold. Furthermore, would later appear in science-fiction films such that Crichton’s film was recently reimagined in as RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987), Preda- our digital moment as an HBO television se- tor (John McTiernan, 1987), and Terminator 2 ries suggests that the original was both timely (James Cameron, 1991) (Galloway 53).2 and prescient. Looking closely at this constel- lation, I read Westworld not only as an allegory From the audience’s perspective, the amount of for a world in crisis—for example, as a haunt- abstraction in the image makes Westworld’s ro- ed inscription of the visuality of the Vietnam bot POV difficult to read. The mosaic of tiny War or a reflection of an apocalyptic Cold War rectangles used in the special effect registers

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most part the robot POV is a cinematic attrac- tion, an interesting technological artifact.

The use of special effects to imagine how a com- puter sees was the result of a rich convergence of art and science. The robot POV was created by experimental filmmaker and computer ani- mator John Whitney, Jr., who was given the task of simulating how the gunslinger’s electronic eyes broke the world down into small animat- ed rectangles. The desired effect was limited by conventional special-effects technologies at the Figure 3. The rasterized robot POV. time and the fact that the film industry had not yet adopted the digital methods made available only general impressions of shape, colour, and by computers. Whitney found inspiration and movement. The gunslinger’s lack of visual acu- a solution in the scientific visualizations made ity is exploited for dramatic effect at sever- by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory during al points during the chase when Peter briefly the Mariner program (1962-1973). In particu- avoids detection by becoming motionless and lar, the program successfully used a spacecraft blending with the other information in the to transmit close-up images of Mars in binary gunslinger’s visual field. At one point, for ex- code, which was converted by computers back ample, Peter masquerades as a broken android on Earth into photographs that consisted of and lies down on a table in a lab where ma- coded shades of black and white compiled into chines from the park are brought for repairs rasterized images (fig. 5). Whitney collaborat- (fig. 4). Peter is ultimately discovered when he ed with computer scientists to develop a sim- moves slightly and gives himself away.3 How- ilar technique whereby a computer scanned ever, this small narrative function aside, for the celluloid footage and converted each frame of film into a series of values that could be manip- ulated at will for aesthetic purposes. Whitney explains:

Once the computer has “read” the im- age and converted it to a series of num- bers, there is tremendous flexibility in what the computer can then do with this numerical information. The image can be reconstituted with different contrasts, different resolutions, different colors. We can enlarge, stretch, squeeze, twist, rotate it, position it in space in any way. In fact, Figure 4. The gunslinger’s view of the tables in the lab the only limitations are imposed by the where Peter is hiding.

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creative talents of the person operating Kennedy Space Center, and the other was Dis- the machine. (1478) neyland (“Behind the Scenes” 1397). The sur- veillance system in Westworld is used to con- In other words, the computer transformed the trol the androids’ behavior in scenarios that are celluloid image into a kind of “plasmatic” dig- designed to fulfill each guest’s desires, such as ital painting.4 winning a gunfight without the stakes or con- sequences of committing an act of violence

Figure 5. Bottom half of Mariner 4 photograph of craters on Mars, 1965. Source: NASA Image ID number: Mariner 4, frame 09D. against a real human being. Indeed, the entire premise of Westworld is that computers make it Whitney’s celebration of the “limitless” artis- possible for each guest “to indulge their every tic control afforded by computers echoes the whim” without limits. very utopian fantasy about the relationship between humans and machines that animates This premise was already in the popular imag- Westworld. Within the film, the amusement ination by 1973. Three years earlier inFuture park’s simulations of the Wild West and two Shock, Toffler speculated on the impending re- other “worlds”—Roman World and Medieval alization of World—are made possible by an intricate net- work of computer technologies. The androids simulated environments that offer the cus- are linked to a command centre where techni- tomer a taste of adventure, danger, sexu- cians observe all of the activities in the park on al titillation or other pleasure without computer screens and video monitors (fig. 6). risk to his real life or reputation. Thus The resemblance to NASA’s mission-control computer experts, roboteers, designers, room is unmistakable (fig. 7). Crichton claims historians, and museum specialists will that one of the inspirations for the film was the join to create experiential enclaves that

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Figure 6. The computer control room in Westworld.

Figure 7. View of Mission Control during lunar surface Apollo 11 extravehicular activity, 1969. Source: NASA Image ID number: S69-39593.

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reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated visitors. The computerized command centre technology will permit, the splendor of functions as a kind of omniscient dream ma- ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Eliza- chine where engineers and technicians take on beth’s court, the “sexoticism” of an eigh- the role of all-powerful artists who, like Whit- teenth-century Japanese geisha house, ney, have complete creative control over every and the like. Customers entering these detail of the park’s mise-en-scène. The artists pleasure domes will leave their everyday behind the scenes use computers to simulate clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, realistic worlds; puppeteer the androids that and run through a planned sequence of make those simulations look and feel so real; activities intended to provide them with surveil and manipulate; fulfill desires; and bend a first-hand taste of what the original—i.e., reality itself to the will of those in charge. There unsimulated—reality must have felt like. is no limit, it would seem, to what humans can They will be invited, in effect, to live in the do with the computers they created. That is, of past or perhaps even the future. (228) course, until the puppets cut their strings.

Toffler saw such simulated environments tak- The robot rebellion that throws Delos into cha- ing shape in the ways that artists were begin- os is obvious and inevitable, partly because it ning to experiment with the uses of electron- was foregrounded in Westworld’s marketing ic media to create immersive and interactive campaign, but also because the trope is perva- virtual-reality experiences that would con- sive in science fiction and animation. Before the tinue through the decade. Bracketing the re- gunslinger shoots and kills John, there is grow- lease of Westworld, for example, are comput- ing concern among the park’s experts that the er artist Myron Krueger’s pioneering “Psychic machines are malfunctioning—a robotic snake Space” (1971) and “Videoplace” (1975), inter- bites John in the desert and a knight stabs a active (audio)visual installations that allowed guest—but the aberrant behavior is considered users to control computerized environments to be a glitch, like a computer virus. When the by moving through “responsive” spaces outfit- gunslinger misbehaves, it is clear that the glitch ted with state-of-the art sensors, cameras, and is actually a sign of life and that the machines projectors.5 are not malfunctioning but rather asserting their autonomy from the artist-engineers who The way that Westworld represents the possibil- created and controlled them. Thus, when we ities of computerized simulations is not only an see through the gunslinger’s electronic eyes, we invocation of these kinds of real and imagined are asked to see the android as more than a ma- experiments, but it also calls to mind the dis- chine; this is a vision that has a life of its own. course of power in the history of animation. As We literally see with the computer as it be- Donald Crafton explains, early animated films comes uncontrollable. That this way of seeing frequently displayed hands in the act of ani- the android as a transgressive figure occurred mating drawings—what he calls the “hand of at a time in American history when computers the artist” motif—to reflect how animators ex- were just beginning to set radical transforma- ercise a “god-like” control over their cinemat- tions in motion makes the trope of the disobe- ic creations (415). In Westworld, experts wield dient machine in Westworld deeply historical. computers like gods to animate Delos for park

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It is not coincidental that the spectacle of the the Washington Post reported similarly: “To- robot POV is introduced at the same moment day’s monsters seem to be flashing dials, end- that the utopian fantasy of Delos collapses. less banks of computers whirring silently be- When Whitney turned to computers to craft hind walls of gleaming glass” (Kriegsman C1). Westworld’s special effects, the United States The narrative structure ofWestworld —from was in the midst of what Carroll Pursell refers freedom to disaster—reads like a roadmap to as a “crisis of confidence” about technology of competing discourses on computers and (134). The crisis was broadly a shift away from the broader crisis of confidence taking shape postwar optimism toward “anti-technology around technology in postwar America. Yet views” (172). The views were largely motivated the artists behind Westworld’s digital aesthet- by Cold War uncertainties about uncontrolla- ic also wielded computers to produce wonders, ble technologies and growing fears of experts, and in this respect the film is as much a futuris- corporations, and the military-industrial com- tic vision of computers in the early 1970s as it is plex in light of the technological realities and an experiment in testing their creative powers. violence in Vietnam. This shift in perception extended as prominently to the machinery of Westworld and/as the Cinema war as it did to computers. In the years between 1971-1973, computer science made unprece- The imagery of disaster in science dented advances in cybernetics research, the fiction films is above all the -em invention of the internet, and the development blem of an inadequate response. of microprocessors that gradually made com- puters available to the public. Views of these -Susan Sontag, “The Imagi- innovations were not entirely utopian. Com- nation of Disaster” (1965) bined with McLuhan’s radical critical theories of the electronic-information age and the fact n addition to coinciding with key inno- that computers were largely the domain of cor- vations in the history of computers, West- porations and government entities rather than world appears at a point in the history of of “the people,” the computer, Pursell explains, Ispecial effects when Hollywood was just begin- developed a “reputation … as an impersonal— ning to explore the aesthetics of computer-gen- even antipersonal—force in society” (185). erated imagery (CGI). In the 1960s, computer graphics related to techniques and technolo- It is significant that computers were concur- gies of the moving image circulated mostly in rently taken up by science-fiction films and the realm of experimental animation. Main- imagined as disobedient machines. In 1974, stream innovations in what we now call digital Vincent Canby reflected in theNew York Times special effects did not rise to prominence un- on a trend rooted in 2001 and taking shape with til the late 1970s and early 1980s with the use films such asWestworld and Richard Heffron’s of computer technologies in films such as Star then-anticipated sequel, Futureworld (1976): Wars (1977) and Tron (1982).6 Westworld thus “The computers of today are the Frankenstein made its home in an important transitional pe- monsters of yesterday’s gothic fiction. We are riod in American film history that saw a new tampering with the Unknown” (8). Quoting cinematic optics emerge from the intersection Michael Webb of the American Film Institute, of older filmmaking practices—namely those

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related to the photorealist tradition—and the Seven (1960). Brynner apparently wears the digital aesthetics made possible by computers. same costume in both films (fig. 8).

From this perspective, Westworld is quite rich By weaving a narrative out of androids and as an allegory for the cinema. In a 1973 inter- amusement parks, Crichton (intentionally view with American Cinematographer, Crich- or not) taps into two of the cinema’s longest ton acknowledged that the premise of the standing affinities. With regard to the gun- film—visitors living out fantasies in a futur- slinger, it is important that the cinematic ap- istic amusement park—was deeply cinemat- paratus was linked from the very beginning, ic: “In some ways,” he explained, “it’s a mov- technically and theoretically, to the automaton. ie about people acting out movie fantasies … As Alan Cholodenko argues, the link is one of wondering what it would be like to be an actor the most enduring throughout film history be- in an old movie” (“Behind the Scenes” 1397). As cause the automaton’s ability to blur the line

Crichton would have it, when Peter and John Figure 8. Left: Brynner as the android gunslinger in Westworld. Right: Brynner as Chris Adams in The visit Westworld they are not simply experienc- Magnificent Seven. ing a simulation of the Wild West, but stepping into the cinematic Western. Delos is the “old” between human and machine speaks to the cinema remade as a “new” immersive virtu- very nature of the cinema: they are both “vital al-reality system, an updated version of Bust- machines” capable of producing uncanny illu- er Keaton’s dream in Sherlock Jr. (1924) of pro- sions of life and motion. In Westworld, for ex- jecting himself into the movies. The reflexivity ample, the robots are only recognizable as such in Westworld touches on everything from the by their “shimmering” eyes. We have seen how resemblance between the computerized com- the gunslinger’s disobedience makes the an- mand centre and the behind-the-scenes la- droid within the film a vital machine, a com- bour on a movie set to the fact that the android puter that appears to have a life of its own. The gunslinger was played by Yul Brynner, who question of vitality is complicated by the fact appeared notably as the gunslinger Chris Ad- that, for audiences of Westworld, the android ams in John Sturges’s Western The Magnificent is played by a living human being. Following

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Cholodenko, the gunslinger can also be seen as Pegasus … they felt themselves passing an embodiment of the cinema, for the cinema into a special realm of exciting possibility, is an automaton.7 a distinctive milieu that encouraged types of behavior and social interaction that in Consider that the special effect Whitney cre- other contexts would have been viewed ated to simulate the android’s vision was made askance. (41) possible by a computer: that is, the computer- ized robot’s vision was in fact computer gener- The parallels with Crichton’s amusement park ated. A curious doubling is at work in Whit- are revealing. Delos is pitched in the film as ney’s footage whereby the “real” computer— “the vacation of the future,” where reality is re- Whitney’s—is folded into the “fictional” one, made into a fantasy and visitors are “free to in- implicating both machines in the narratives dulge their every whim” by immersing them- of freedom and disaster that play out in the selves in a simulated world without limits. The film. There is a nice resonance, for example, film also opens with a scene that closely resem- between the gunslinger who digitally “reads” bles Kasson’s description of visitors arriving at the landscape within the film and the comput- Coney Island. When we are introduced to Peter er that “reads” the celluloid image to produce and John, they are travelling by hovercraft to the special effect for the gunslinger’s POV. The Delos. After they disembark from this mech- doubling act is particularly significant in light anized Pegasus, they take on new identities as of the fact that the robot POV is a moving im- cowboys in Westworld, where they are free to age in transition. Whitney’s special-effects se- indulge in violence without consequence be- quence was striking in 1973 because it resem- cause reality in Delos is a game. The hovercraft bled early arcade video-game aesthetics more sequence even includes a view from the cockpit than anything “cinematic” at the time. that simulates one of the earliest convergences of motion pictures and technologies of virtu- The representation of Delos is doing simi- al travel: the Hale’s Tours ride simulators that lar reflexive work. Like automata, amusement populated fin-de-siècle amusement parks and parks share a history with the cinema that can World Fairs.8 be traced to the emergence of motion pictures. Beginning in the 1890s, amusement parks and It is remarkable that Westworld should reani- the cinema co-evolved as emblems of moderni- mate these affinities amidst a “crisis of confi- ty. They were both sites where the novel shocks, dence” about technology. In Electric Dream- dangers, and bewildering experiences of mod- land, Lauren Rabinovitz argues convincingly ern life were transformed and put on display as that at the end of the 19th century “amusement safe, entertaining, and even liberating specta- parks and movies taught Americans to revel in cles. Coney Island, for example, was designed a modern sensibility that was about adapting as a virtual city apart—like the Emerald City in to new technologies” (2). That is, by experienc- Oz—where, John Kasson explains: ing the realities of modern life virtually and safely—e.g., as a mechanical ride or a motion [V]isitors were temporarily freed from nor- picture—people could better adjust to radi- mative demands. As they disembarked cally new technologies and environments that from ferryboats with fanciful names like were, in reality, overwhelming, frightening,

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and potentially disastrous. Angela Ndalian- Symbolically, then, we might say that the ro- is has argued similarly that, because special bot POV is what Vivian Sobchack calls a “tran- effects tend to display broader technological sitional object,” hovering somewhere between changes during periods of intense innovation, the past and the future, utopia and disaster, they “have a great deal to do with acclimatizing the familiar and the unfamiliar. Writing about audiences to different forms of visual engage- computer animation in WALL-E (Andrew ment” (259). By embedding its special effects in Stanton, 2008), Sobchack proposes that the a narrative about automata and an amusement titular character, a mechanical trash compac- park modeled on fantasies about computers tor with a microchip core, “serves [in our con- and the cinema, Westworld reads like an edu- temporary moment] as a bridge to the future cation in the rapidly changing technological present of technological development” (387). landscape of its historical moment. For Sobchack, WALL-E’s embodiment of the old and the new, the mechanical and the elec- The idea thatWestworld is “about adapting to tronic, allegorizes and mediates the transition new technologies” is useful for making sense of in the cinema from a celluloid past to a digital the film’s impulse toward reassurance. Almost future. I suggest we read Whitney’s special-ef- as soon as Westworld imagines computers re- fect artifact in Westworld similarly as a kind of belling and threatening humanity it imagines “bridge” that, although it is ultimately set on the machines’ spectacular destruction: the an- fire, mediates an aesthetic and cultural transi- droid gunslinger is ultimately burnt to ashes. tion shaped by the cinema’s intersection with The significance of this narrative of (un)con- early computer animation techniques. (The trollability is deepened in light of the fact that parallel that Ingmar Bergman draws in Persona computers in the 1970s were revolutionizing [1966] between the footage of a self-immola- the relationship between humanity and tech- tion that appears on a television screen and the nology. Cybernetics and philosophy were rais- subsequent melting of the celluloid filmstrip is ing profound questions about what it means to uncannily resonant here.)9 be human, to be conscious, and to be alive. As N. Katherine Hayles has shown, early comput- As if haunted by the growing power of com- ers contributed to conceptualizing “humans as puters to pull reality and humanity apart at the information-processing entities who are essen- seams, the spectacle of the gunslinger’s “death” tially similar to intelligent machines” (7, orig- thus seems to invite the audience to bear wit- inal emphasis). In this analogy, the human ness to humanity asserting its definitive con- mind was reimagined as a thing that was not trol over an increasingly computerized world. bound to the human body, a “posthuman” idea A central concern about the ways that comput- that gets visualized in Westworld by the robot ers were revolutionizing life in the early 1970s POV: we transfer our subjectivity to a com- was the loosening of what Toffler called “man’s puter. Although more latent in 1973, comput- grasp on reality” (231). The concern was fueled ers similarly upended the nature of the cinema by a sense that computer technologies were be- when the digital image began to erode the cel- ginning to erode the distinction both between luloid image’s indexical bond to reality, which reality and illusion in their capacities for sim- set in motion a crisis of visuality that continues ulation, and between human and machine in to unfold today. their implications for philosophy and biology,

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including the possibility that “life” and “hu- course of scientific and technological innova- man” would have to be re-imagined if comput- tion is imperative and requires action. ers were successfully combined with living or- ganic material. The erosion was compounded It is precisely what Westworld does not ask au- by the fact that computers were opening the diences to see or do that motived Mead and human experience up to infinite new possi- Applebaum to invoke “the image of some ‘mad- bilities at a rate that threatened to exceed peo- man’ igniting himself in front of impassive on- ple’s ability to anticipate, let alone control, the lookers” with which I began this article. Draw- short- and long-term effects of the changes tak- ing a parallel to the Western genre’s tendency ing place: “The problem,” in Toffler’s view, “is to mythologize and glorify American imperi- whether [humans] can survive freedom” (187). alism, they criticized Westworld for protecting Considering this, we might say that, if Delos the American psyche from the dark social and is a computerized “electric dreamland,” a vir- political realities of the early 1970s. While I am tual space where the freedoms made possible primarily concerned with the representation of by computers are unleashed, the unravelling technology and disaster in Westworld, their in- of that dreamland is presented as a nightmare dictment is worth quoting at length for what from which American audiences can wake up. it reveals about the reach of the film’s fantasy In delivering this lesson Westworld positions of control: the cinema as a safe space for playing with and alleviating anxieties about frightening techno- It is not [the guests’] conscious aware- logical changes that were already underway in ness that these are robots, non-human American culture. machines, that determines their reac- tions, but rather their feeling and convic- Writing in the 1960s, Susan Sontag called the tion that these “others” are some kind of trend of “imagining disaster” this way in sci- less-than-human humans, real, living ob- ence fiction an “inadequate response” to real- jectifications of their fantasies. So what we ity because it does not oblige audiences to ad- have in fact are the beginnings of a rath- dress the very real “terrors” that get fictional- er thinly disguised racial perspective, an ized and resolved in the cinema. Westworld’s exploitation justified by an explanation— reassurances no doubt make the film complicit the “others” are less than human—and by in preserving an illusion of safety in the face an economic right—the “guests” pay … . of radical changes that radiate outward from Nor does it seem coincidental that for the film and computers to the fate of humanity it- leader of the robot revolt Crichton should self. The act of covering over can be seen as an cast the former king of Thailand, the lead- attempt to make the uncertainties of modern er of the mad Huns, Mexican radical, in- life bearable, to imagine safety in the ongoing scrutable hired killer, the suggestively nightmares of the Cold War, for example, when Mongol-featured Yul Brynner. Along with humans were grappling with the possibility of infrared sensing devices, weapons that kill their own self-annihilation, which, as Sontag only the “enemy,” willing, thankful prosti- points out, “could come at any time, virtual- tutes, etc., Westworld simply provides the ly without warning” (224). What gets left out, triumphant, guiltless hero that Indochina however, is a clear sense that changing the didn’t. (12-13)

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Much more can and should be said about West- through the cinema to experiment safely with world as a kind of racialized war game—Mead the realities of its unsafe historical moment and Applebaum offer a fairly thorough discus- while covering over a whole range of social and sion of this. Here it is notable that the film’s political issues. Looking back on the film from “vacation of the future” premise conjures a re- our contemporary moment, the future present lated discourse of power in histories of travel that Crichton imagined in 1973 feels very close in film and related media. Delos’s promise of to home. Given that our networked, media-sat- safety and freedom to visitors who embark on urated, and increasingly virtual reality resem- futuristic journeys in the park is reminiscent of bles Delos more than it ever has before, we the kind of mastery promised by amusement might ask: What kind of work can Westworld parks, World Fairs, and the travelogue genre in do for us now? the cinema. These other forms of virtual trav- el are historically wedded—particularly in the The Memory of Reality early-20th century—to what Jennifer Peterson calls a “visual imperialism,” a mode of repre- Don’t give yourselves to these un- sentation filtered through “racial perspectives” natural men—machine men with of colonialism and tourism that rendered for- machine minds and machine eign and exotic places safe and consumable for hearts! You are not machines! Western audiences (8) (see also Ruoff, Virtual Voyages). -Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940) This is all to say thatWestworld was engaged in a similar kind of cultural work aimed at ren- n 2016, HBO renewed Crichton’s film as a dering the “monstrous” and “villainous” com- 10-part television series that deviates sig- puter safe at a time when the effects of that nificantly from the path Westworld imag- technology were only beginning to come into Iined in 1973. The new version follows the tra- focus. This dimension of the film betrays the jectory of the original, but it unfolds largely simplicity of its narrative of reassurance, not from the perspective of the androids, name- to mention the simplicity of its special effects. ly a rancher’s daughter named Dolores Aber- Crichton offers the computer up as a highly se- nathy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve Mil- ductive machine—like the cinema—with the lay (Thandie Newton), a madam in a brothel potential to satisfy an enduring human desire in Westworld. Whereas the gunslinger’s POV to exceed the limitations of reality and the hu- was an important special effects attraction in man experience. The fantasy is a messy one in Crichton’s film, the shift to the android per- which the computer emerges as neither utopi- spective in the HBO series is primarily a nar- an nor dystopian; it is an object of debate and a rative device. Dolores and Maeve are unaware tool Crichton uses to grapple with the difficulty of their machine natures, but as they play out of comprehending what a digital future might their programmed roles over and over for the look like, and what might become of humani- park’s guests, they slowly become haunted by ty if it continues to push technological innova- memories that cause them to question what tion in the direction of that future. The fanta- they consider to be their humanity. Their ques- sy is also not simply escapist. Westworld works tioning is profound—What does it mean for a

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machine to feel uncertain about its nature? Or existential crises unfold it becomes more and for humans to imagine a machine’s uncertain- more difficult for them and for us to determine ty for that matter? The questioning is also the if their questioning is a sign of life or the result source of the androids’ disobedience: Dolores of their programming; if the memories that embarks on a quest to unravel the mystery of haunt them are real or fake; and if what we are her place in Delos, and Maeve arranges her witnessing is occurring in an android’s dream own escape from the park by modifying her or in “reality.” The narrative also employs an in- programming. Ultimately, it is revealed that creasingly ambiguous flashback structure and one of the park’s founders, Robert Ford (An- “reboots” so often that even determining pre- thony Hopkins), spent decades secretly design- cisely where, when, and if events occurred be- ing the androids’ search for answers that would comes a challenge. The web of uncertainty is lead to their rebellion and freedom. Unlike the one from which there is apparently no escape original Westworld, however, there is no fi- for us. ery android death; in 2016 the machines win and, as if taking up Chaplin’s call, declare their Yet why weave the web? If Peter’s destruction of humanity. the gunslinger in 1973 is more or less comfort- ing, what is the successful robot rebellion in While a lengthy analysis of the series is beyond 2016 doing? The difference no doubt makes the the scope of this article, the manner in which new Westworld more distinctly postmodern the 2016 version renews the allegorical dimen- than its predecessor. Take, for example, Jean sions of the original is worth mentioning, even Baudrillard’s quite fitting assessment of the if only to open up a dialogue about what the spectre that haunts both Westworlds: Disney- connection reveals about our enduring fasci- land. Writing in 1981 in the light (or shadow) of nation with that decade and how we are deal- the impact of electronic media on conceptions ing with the “future shock” of our contempo- of reality, Baudrillard claims, “Disneyland is rary moment. Most notable here is the fact that presented as imaginary in order to make us be- the lack of reassurance in HBO’s Westworld is lieve that the rest is real” (12). In other words, pervasive and daunting. Whereas Brynner’s humans create “simulations,” such as amuse- gunslinger is cold and mechanical, these new ment parks, androids, and the cinema, to an- androids are humanized and sympathetic, the swer the question of what is “real”—i.e., reality tragic victims and playthings of humans who is real because Disneyland is fake. Baudrillard commit acts of murder and sexual violence suggests that the faith we place in this distinc- almost mechanically. Seeing humans mecha- tion covers over the fact that the distinction is nized and machines humanized compels us to imaginary, that there is no “real” and “simula- question our humanity, especially when by the tion” but only the “hyperreal” (12-13). Where- end we might find ourselves rooting, against as Crichton questions but ultimately preserves our nature, for our own demise. To compound this faith—Peter successfully defends reality the inversion, some characters that we are ini- against the simulation and secures the distinc- tially led to believe are human—such as the tion between both categories—the HBO series lead programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)— seems to be exploring what it would be like are later revealed to be androids, which makes to embrace hyperreality, perhaps as a way of everyone in Delos suspect. As the machines’

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working through the unique challenges of our that define how we experience, understand, historical moment. and “design” our environment, as Nolan puts it. Seeing from the perspective of the androids In an interview about Westworld (2016), the now is not like imagining seeing through the show’s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy eyes of an unfamiliar machine—as the com- suggest that their version grapples with the puterized robot POV allowed audiences to do fact that, in the 21st century, humans are living in 1973—but like encountering something like very real lives in the virtual realities made pos- our android selves. It is also revealing that the sible by videogames and the internet. Nolan perspective audiences are asked to take now is explains: shifted from the predominantly male cast in 1973 to female leads in 2016, and that many of As our world becomes more cloistered the central characters in the TV series are peo- and the experiences we choose for our- ple of colour, especially given the prominent selves, especially in the West, we’re able lack of diversity in the original film. The new to design not just our environment but Westworld seems to grapple more openly (al- also our intellectual environment to suit though problematically) than the original with our preferences and predilections. We the politics of race and gender that are current- are, you know, sort of designing this odd ly playing out, sometimes violently, in the me- prophylactic universe in which we can—we dia, in the cinema, and in society in the United can do whatever we want (qtd. in Gross). States.10

On one level, the idea is that computerized It thus cannot be coincidental that Westworld technologies have finally transformed our real- has reappeared at a time when humanity is once ity into the Delos that Crichton imagined. On again being torn apart at the seams by forces another, we have so thoroughly diffused the that are increasingly incomprehensible. Just as real into the electronic phantasmagorias we Mead and Applebaum saw their violent histor- create that “reality” exists for us in the digital ical moment reflected and refracted in the sub- age only as a flickering memory. TheWestworld lime image of the burning android, we might be that Nolan and Joy imagined is thus a fraught haunted by the uncomfortable and quite devas- escape into the plural realities in which we find tating familiarity of the new Westworld. Partic- (or lose) ourselves every time we turn on our ularly in the United States, the techno-scientif- TVs, boot up our computers, or pick up our ic realities of surveillance, cyberwarfare, social smartphones. media, and governance are wreaking havoc in old and new ways on everything from politics, By asking us quite unapologetically to bear race, gender, and class to civil liberties and the witness to the disappearance of reality as we very fabric of culture, if not humanity, itself. Is knew it, it may well be that that the dark mir- it any wonder that the first season ends with a ror the HBO series holds up to us is doing a striking scene of a diverse android army led by different kind of work than the original. The women emerging from the woods on the edge series is noticeably less about special effects of Westworld seeking violent retribution? (fig. and more about the impossibility of disentan- 9) Viewers find no solace in this place because gling humanity from the digital technologies this is not a cinema of reassurance.11 Indeed,

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perhaps that is precisely the point: to bring us closer to what Sontag might call an “adequate” Works Cited response to the terrors and uncertainties of our present realities. If nothing else, when looking Asimov, Isaac. “Escape into Reality.” The Humanist out at our Westworld, we should feel the deep vol. 17, no. 6, November-December 1957, pp. 326-332. urgency of Goethe’s question, “Shall the entire Print. house go under?” Bady, Aaron. “Westworld, Race, and the West- ern.” The New Yorker, 9 December 2016, http:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ how-westworld-failed-the-western.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

“Behind the Scenes of Westworld.” American Cine- matographer vol. 54, no. 11, November 1973, pp. 1394- 1397, 1420-1423. Print.

“The Bicameral Mind.” Westworld. Written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, directed by Jonathan No- lan, HBO, 2016.

Bukatman, Scott. “Disobedient Machines.” In Be- yond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science. Ed- ited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte, Ox- ford University Press, 2011, pp. 128-148.

Canby, Vincent. “Movies Are More Sci-Fi Than Ever.” New York Times, 17 March 1974, pp. 1, 8.

Cholodenko, Alan. “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton.” The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, edited by Alan Cholodenko, Power In- stitute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, 2007, pp. 486-528.

Crafton, Donald. “Animation Iconography: The ‘Hand of the Artist.’” Quarterly Review of Film Stud- Figure 9. Top: Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) taking aim to assassinate Robert Ford ies, Fall 1979, pp. 409-428. (Anthony Hopkins) and initiating the android revolution. Bottom: The android army emerging from the woods to bring a violent end to humanity. Episode: “The Bicameral Mind.”

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Eisenstein, Sergei. Eisenstein on Disney. Edited by Mead, Gerald and Sam Applebaum. “Westworld: Jay Leyda. Seagull Books, 1986. Fantasy and Exploitation.” Jump Cut, no. 7, 1975, pp. 12-13. Fielding, Raymond. “Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture.” Cinema Journal vol. Musser, Charles and Carol Nelson. High-Class Mov- 10, no. 1, Autumn 1970, pp. 34-47. ing Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920). Princeton Univer- Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic sity Press, 1991, p. 55. Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Ndalianis, Angela. “Special Effects, Morphing Mag- Gross, Terry. Interview with Jonathan Nolan and ic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions.” Meta-Mor- Lisa Joy. “‘Westworld’ Creators Explore the ‘Dark phing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Thrills’ of the Digital Age.” NPR, 7 November 2016. Quick-Change, edited by Vivian Sobchack, Univer- http://www.npr.org/2016/11/07/501009226/west- sity of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 251-271. world-creators-explore-the-dark-thrills-of-the-dig- ital-age. Nolan, Jonathan and Lisa Joy, creators. Westworld. HBO, 2018. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infor- Peterson, Jennifer Lynn. Education in the School matics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film. Duke University Press, 2013. Kasson, John. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. Hill and Wang, 1978. Pursell, Carroll. Technology in Postwar America: A History. Columbia University Press, 2007. Kriegsman, Alan. “Visions of Futures Past: Future Visions.” Washington Post 13 May 1971, pp. C1, C4. Rabinovitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. Columbia Krueger, Myron. “Responsive Environments.” University Press, 2012. AFIPS Conference Proceedings–1977 National Com- puter Conference, edited by Robert Korfhage, AFIPS Rogers, Ariel. Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of Press, 1977, pp. 423-433. New Movie Technologies. Columbia University Press, 2013. The Magnificent Seven. Directed by John Sturges. Performances by Yul Byrnner, Eli Wallach, and Steve Ruoff, Jeffrey, ed.Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Trav- McQueen. The Mirisch Company, 1960. el. Duke University Press, 2006.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Shilina-Conte, Tatiana. Black Screens, White Press, 2001. Frames: Recalculating Film History. 2016. State Uni- versity of New York at Buffalo, PhD dissertation. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Ex- tensions of Man. The New American Library, Inc., 1964.

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Sobchack, Vivian. “Animation and Automation, or, Michael Crichton. http://www.michaelcrichton. The Incredible Effortfulness of Being.”Screen vol. 50, com/westworld/ no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 375-391. Figure 3. The rasterized robot POV. Reproduced Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” from Westworld, directed by Michael Crichton Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, Farrar, (MGM, 1973), DVD. Straus, and Giroux, 1990, pp. 209-225. Figure 4. The gunslinger’s view of the tables in the Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. 1970. Bantam Books, lab where Peter is hiding. Reproduced from West- 1984. world, directed by Michael Crichton (MGM, 1973), DVD. Turnock, Julie. Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Tech- nology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aes- Figure 5. Bottom half of Mariner 4 photograph of thetics. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print. craters on Mars, 1965. Source: NASA Image ID num- ber: Mariner 4, frame 09D. Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton, perfor- mances by Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, and Figure 6. The computer control room in Westworld. James Brolin. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973. Reproduced from Westworld, directed by Michael Crichton (MGM, 1973), DVD. Westworld. The Official Site of Michael Crichton. http://www.michaelcrichton.com/westworld/. Figure 7. View of Mission Control during lunar sur- face Apollo 11 extravehicular activity, 1969. Source: Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI NASA Image ID number: S69-39593. and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2014. Print. Figure 8. Left: Brynner as the android gunslinger in Westworld. Reproduced from Westworld, directed by Whitney, Jr., John. “Creating the Special Effects for Michael Crichton (MGM, 1973), DVD. Right: Bryn- Westworld.” American Cinematographer, vol. 54, no. ner as Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Re- 11, November 1973, pp. 1477-1480. produced from The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges (The Mirisch Company, 1960), DVD. Williamson, Colin. Hidden in Plain Sight: An Ar- chaeology of Magic and the Cinema. New Brunswick: Figure 9. Top: Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Rutgers University Press, 2015. Wood) taking aim to assassinate Robert Ford (An- thony Hopkins) and initiating the android revolu- Image Notes tion. Bottom: The android army emerging from the woods to bring a violent end to humanity. Repro- Figure 1. The burning android. Reproduced from duced from Westworld (Season 1, Episode 10), di- Westworld, directed by Michael Crichton (MGM, rected by Jonathan Nolan, (HBO, 2016). 1973), DVD.

Figure 2. Theatrical release poster forWestworld (1973). Source: “Westworld.” The Official Site of

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Acknowledgements

I would sincerely like to thank Nathan Holmes and 6 For more on the early computerization of special Andrew Pendakis for their excellent editorial guid- effects, see Turnock. ance, and two anonymous reviewers for their help- ful comments on an early draft of this article. Part of 7 Martin Scorsese’s digital 3D film Hugo (2011) of- this paper was also presented at the 2018 Society for fers an interesting allegory of early cinema as an au- Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Toronto, tomaton. For more on this, see Williamson. and I am grateful for the generous feedback I received from panelists and attendees there, particularly Tanya 8 For more on Hale’s Tours, see Rabinovitz 2012 and Shilina-Conte. Fielding 1970.

9 I am very grateful to Tanya Shilina-Conte for Notes bringing this connection to my attention. For more on the parallel between the self-immolation and the 1 John Whitney, Jr., is the son of the American ex- burning celluloid in Bergman’s film, see Tatiana Shi- perimental computer animator John Whitney, Sr. lina-Conte, Black Screens, White Frames: Recalculat- Both were pioneers in early computerized special ef- ing Film History, PhD dissertation, State University fects. The avant-garde connection is visible in the ab- of New York at Buffalo, 2016. stractness of the gunslinger’s POV. 10 In an outstanding article on the subject, Aaron 2 For more on iterations of machine perspectives, Bady argues that the HBO version gestures beyond see also Rogers, Cinematic Appeals. but ultimately does not escape the Western genre’s historical sanctioning of American racism and 3 Indeed, Crichton would use the play between an- imperialism. imate and inanimate similarly in the context of char- acters trying to avoid being detected by dinosaurs in 11 I am borrowing “cinema of reassurance” from his 1990 novel Jurassic Park, which Steven Spielberg Charles Musser and Carol Nelson’s description of adapted for his landmark special effects film three how Lyman Howe’s early-20th century travelogues years later. preserved an ideal image of America against the re- alities of racism and imperialism at the turn of the 4 See further Eisenstein 1986 and Manovich 2001. century.

5 See further Krueger 1977.

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K.R. CORNETT

Abstract | The popularity of the road film in the 1970s is of- Résumé | La popularité du road movie des années 70 est sou- ten attributed to its updating of the Western film genre, an vent attribuée au fait qu’il constitue une adaptation moderne enduring form in Hollywood cinema. This essay argues that du western, genre éternel du cinéma hollywoodien. Cet essai a hierarchical understanding of the relationship between the veut montrer qu’une compréhensio hiérarchique de la relation two genres is detrimental to understanding their efficacy. Case entre les deux genres de films nuit à l’appréciation de leur effi- studies of two minor films produced outside of the Hollywood cacité. Des études de cas de deux films mineurs produits en de- studio system reveals the centrality of landscape and spatiality hors du système des studios hollywoodiens révèle la centralité to generic evolution. While the mythology of New Hollywood du paysage et de la spacialité dans l’évolution du genre. Alors Cinema touted a reflexive deployment of genres that perpet- que la mythologie du Nouveau Cinéma Hollywoodien étalait uated in Hollywood for most of the studio era, these inde- un développement réflexif des genres qui a perduré à Holly- pendently produced films endeavored to imagine an alterna- wood pendant la plus grande partie de l’ère de domination des tive to this ideologically dominant system. This article explores studios, ces films de production indépendante s’efforçaient de the uneasy balance of subversion and citation of genre to gain concevoir une alternative à ce système idéologiquement domi- an understanding of the complex relationship between author- nant. Cet article explore l’équilibre précaire entre la subversion ship, production, and hegemonic practices in this transitional et le respect du genre afin d’acquérir une compréhension de era of American film history. la relation complexe entre l’écriture, la production et les pra- tiques hégémoniques dans cette ère de transition de l’histoire du cinéma américain. PREDICTIVE LANDSCAPES

magazine advertisement for the 1963 Figure 1: Advertisement for 1963 Ford Galaxie Ford Galaxie (figure 1) foregrounds in both its form and content the necessi- a set of crises in the postwar era. This particular Aty of restorative nostalgia for America’s frontier anxiety was recognized in the early-20th century past in order to contextualize the modern (Har- by literary critic Van Wyck Brooks as the desire vey). Three iconic images sit in remarkable re- for a “usable past,” a lineage of American cul- lation and tension: the landscape, the cowboys, ture that would enable cultural production as a and the automobile. The rock formations in- continuous practice, part of a domestic tradition voke the Western landscapes made famous by that could inform the development of an Amer- the filmmaker John Ford, further emphasized ican ideal that always held individuality and col- by the presence of the cowboys. The automobile lective identity in careful simultaneity (Cooney sits in the foreground as a kind of continuum of 22). The invocation of the frontier landscape and the history of mobility, from horses to the sedan. the cowboys also suggests a mobilization of the The specific layout also suggests a particularly past itself, a way to bring an important aspect of modernist anxiety about the function of the past American identity to bear on the construction and the necessity for continuity as a key aspect of of its future. This project of historical specific- American identity and culture even as it came to ity, of reconstructing visual iconography in the

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service of a telos of American progress, is cen- up the question of the status of American ad- tral to an understanding of the nostalgic use of vertisements and their relation to the Pop Art landscape in Hollywood Westerns during the movement is a tempting prospect, the juxtaposi- Cold War. The function of nostalgia in films of tion of the three elements presented in the Ford this genre throughout the studio era is striking- Galaxie ad present a clear opportunity to think ly consistent and almost always distinguished by through the relationship between the Western, the ways in which landscape is used to suggest a genre that seemed to wax and wane in popu- the longing not for a bygone era, but rather for larity throughout the 1960s, and the road film, a a notion of “truth” that is bound up with the au- genre often thought of as best positioned to cap- thenticity of nature. ture the zeitgeist of the Vietnam Era. At stake here is the way in which the landscape, repre- In the twilight of the studio era in Hollywood, a sented in the ad as a kind of restorative nostal- dialectic emerged from this simultaneous look- gia, becomes the defining aesthetic object of the ing forward and back: a constant consideration road film in the 1970s. of not only the use of the past but the way that this very consideration changed the function A brief delineation of terms is in order here, giv- of what had previously been taken for granted. en that the distinction between these descrip- This advertisement deploys the iconography of tors is essential in order to discuss the relation- the landscape to make the history of the fron- ship between the Western and the road film. tier useful as something more than a static, col- The concepts of space, place, and landscape are lective identity—it becomes a useful point of distinguished through their functions, not their departure, a dynamic origin that suggests any denotative meanings but rather how they circu- number of American virtues, from ingenuity to late and interact with each other. Using the Ford tenacity. Americans prospered via their mobil- Galaxie automobile ad as an example, we can ity on horseback, passing through difficult ter- define place as the specific setting of the image, rain to bend it to the will of civilization. The ad- often considered as a background. Notably, the vertisement asserts that in its present of the ear- “place” of the ad is self-consciously non-specif- ly 1960s American industry and prosperity has ic: this is the key tension of the term, the pre- allowed Americans the leisure and freedom to carious status of elaboration. Is this Monument travel as they please, in a new iteration of the Valley, or somewhere geographically similar, or settlement and manifest destiny of the cowboys is it merely meant to evoke this specific loca- seen in the background. These three examina- tion? Place carries ambiguity as one of its defin- tions of mass culture—the advertisement, the ing aspects—it can be all of these things or some Pop Art movement, and the Hollywood genre combination of them, but it explicitly points to film—operate on this fulcrum of modernity. In- something in particular. Following from this formed on the one hand by a tension between notion of place, space is a location that is made the promiscuity of image-based culture and a distinct by its political or cultural status; it is de- desire to explore the mediation of mass art, and fined by interaction and intersections of vari- on the other by a distinct relationship to the past, ous practices. Thus, we can think of the space the movement of mass art from the mid-1950s to of the advertisement in terms of its presentation the 1960s predicts the aesthetics of the 1970s in that suggests not only particular modes of en- an astonishing variety of contexts. While taking gagement but also a relationship between these

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modes (the car and the horses). To contemplate of the landscape, which is also a significant dif- the spatiality of an image is to discern what Mi- ficulty of the Western film genre in the postwar chel de Certeau describes as “vectors of direc- era. tion, velocities, and time variables” (117). The space of this ad is strikingly oriented, with the This essay engages the question of the use of modern car in the foreground of cowboys on landscape in terms of form, genre, and political horseback. Perhaps the most useful part of this purchase in the context of a particularly fraught understanding of space as distinctive from place era in American history as well as the history and landscape is the way in which it forces us of the Hollywood film industry. Both the West- to contend with the hierarchy of presentation in ern and the road film take location as the cen- a mise-en-scène. Here, the sharp dimensions of tral identifier of their genre, as opposed to oth- the automobile help delineate it temporally from er genres such as the melodrama, which centres the deliberate flatness of the cowboys—the sug- affect, or the blockbuster, with its emphasis on gested continuum is made explicit in the con- spectacle. Consequentially, both Westerns and trast. Both these figures can inhabit the place road films must in some ways articulate their suggested by the background; an understanding relationship to landscape, and thus to history, of the space of the composition gives us a deep- and this is the source of their divergence. The er understanding of their respective relations to Western posits landscape as restorative. That is, this background, and therefore to an intended it uses the significance of landscape to perpet- audience. Mobilizing these conceptions to ac- uate an idealized aesthetic that is to be longed count for the rhetoric of this visual presentation for (this particular kind of longing is, of course, allows for a more active understanding of land- a more general understanding of “nostalgia”). scape, the final term in this triad. Engaging with The form of the landscape is one of reconstruc- the history and multiplicity of the term is far be- tion and ritual—of returning home, completing yond the scope of this essay; instead, I want to the cattle drive, and bringing justice and order draw attention to the way in which these defini- where there is seemingly none. The endurance tions of space and place innervate the notion of of the Western is due not merely to the repeti- landscape. Geographer J.B. Jackson offers a use- tion of these plots, which has also come to de- ful conception of landscape as “a composition fine the genre, nor the politically advantageous of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve position wrought by the establishment of law as infrastructure or background for our collec- and order as a collective good, but instead the tive existence” (8). The interplay between these way in which it repeats various landscapes that terms focuses on the function of landscape, become symbolic of these qualities. In contrast, rather than its definition. An active understand- the road film tends to present its landscapes as ing of what landscape does emphasizes Jackson’s reflective spaces. An emphasis on travel through helpful suggestion that landscape is about col- various places, which gain significance through lective recognition of a composed space, and the establishing space, situates the road film as far role this space occupies in “not only our identity less likely to engage in the static aesthetics we and presence, but our history” (Jackson 8). The tend to associate with landscape. Many of these significance of this advertisement as an example films use landscape as an aestheticizing of this does not lie in the relationship between dispa- process of negotiating the dynamics of space, rate elements, but rather in discerning the telos place, and landscape.

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Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966) is an ex- printing. It thus embodies the terms of the road ample of a film that has the iconography of a film’s relationship to mass culture and a con- Western but the political and aesthetic sensi- struction of spatiality that is shaped by subjective bility of a road film—a kind of proto-road film experience and spectatorial engagement, rather that acknowledges a precise relationship be- than ideological reconciliation and restorative tween two genres while instantiating a relation- nostalgia for a coherent America. The plot of the ship to landscape that predicts the aesthetics of film is deliberately difficult to follow. Ex-bounty the 1970s road film. Hellman’s film is particu- hunter Willet Gashade (Warren Oates) and his larly suited to a discussion of the emergence of colleague Coley (Will Hutchins) react with mea- a 1970s road film aesthetic because it so readi- sured skepticism upon the arrival of a character ly and precariously does away with the conven- only known as Woman (Millie Perkins). She en- tions of one genre while predicting the conven- gages Gashade and Coley as guides across the tions of another. The Shooting occupies a rela- desolate terrain, having already hired the mer- curial gunman Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson) to help her exact revenge for the killings of her husband and son. The motley group travels un- easily toward a tragic conclusion that finds Ga- shade’s fugitive brother and the Woman in a bat- tle of mutually assured death.

Shot with a minimal budget outside the Holly- wood studio system, The Shooting has been re- ferred to as an “existential Western,” (Bandy and Stoehr, 228) perhaps because its depiction of an increasingly inhospitable environment eventu- Figure 2: The Shooting-title card ally renders the plot and the actions of the char- acters irrelevant. Their ultimate lack of choice tion to both genre and Hollywood that offers an emphasizes absurdity, and the spectator is left opportunity to explore the efficacy of both these to consider man’s place in a universe in which categories in the post-industrial era. While the it might be possible that a landscape bears no Western tends to look back towards history as a trace of human existence. The idea of an existen- legacy to be revered, the road film is about for- tial Western seems to resonate in many exam- ward momentum. Rather than denying either ples of the genre throughout the 1960s, from the of these positions to history, The Shooting of- spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone to the spir- ten elides them both, creating an enigmatic ex- ited outlaws of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance perience that articulates both the limits and the Kid (1969) and the extreme violence of The Wild possibility of using spatiality to explore a new Bunch (1969). These examples arrive primari- aesthetic. ly at the end of the 1960s, a context that distin- guishes them from the psychological Western Hellman’s film asserts its aesthetic with its un- cycle that exerted its influence earlier in the de- usual opening shot (figure 2), and ends with cade. The subgenre of psychological Western is an enigmatic series of shots that employ step limiting in an examination of spatiality because

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of its primary concern with the interrogation of of space. While this self-conscious approach to the Hollywood Western. The invocation of the form allows for and perhaps even encourages a myth of the genre is central to the fascinating particular ambiguity, it also problematizes the ways that these films point to the inadequacy of status of realism. The style of Hellman’s film is America’s frontier history, but this kind of inter- less concerned with the appearance of artifice rogation means that landscape is largely left to than it is with the privileging of experience. In its symbolic origins. From its opening sequence, other words, there is a specific way in which this The Shooting solicits a different relationship to points to a structuring of landscape that calls the the landscape, beyond reverence but without necessity of mainstream genre films’ adherence cynicism. While the so-called existential West- to a kind of looking into question. The Shooting ern is always positioned counter to the austere recognizes the versatility of landscape; its val- postwar Westerns of Hollywood, films such as ue as representation surpasses its use as an as- The Shooting imagine an alternative to the hege- sumed framework. mony of the industry. Neil Archer claims, “It is not an exaggeration In her study of texture in cinema, Lucy Don- to say that, for many, the road movie is syn- aldson argues that the opening of The Shooting onymous with America cinema” (11). This as- moves “against the grain of a smooth entry into sertion points to the fascinating way in which the world, and immediately transmits a sense of Hollywood cinema maps onto essential desires roughness and even precariousness” (Donald- mobilized by the medium: the desire for speed, son 6). As part of a series of disjointed cuts, this for nearness and distance, and for a sensuality opening frame is either a subjective shot from that engages both objective representations and the point of view of the first character shown subjective experience. Take Archer’s statement onscreen, Willett Gashade, or from his horse, along with Andre Bazin’s declaration that “the or from both of them. This ambiguity follows Western is the only genre whose origins are al- the deliberate violation of continuity editing in most identical with those of the cinema itself” the previous shots of the title sequence and, in (Bazin 140), we come to an essential question: the style of Hollywood films, dictates both tone if the Western is “cinema” and the road film is and mood for the rest of the narrative. The priv- “American cinema,” where does this national ileging of form over content is not fully realized specificity come from and why is it integral to here, but is certainly suggested in the unsteady the definition of the latter genre? This question framing of dirt, rocks, and a scant suggestion of seems particularly difficult if we assume that the plant life. This tie to a subjective experience of Western is a generic form that is primarily dis- the world is a moment that expresses texture as cussed and perceived as having a deep preoccu- “an expression of quality and nature” (Donald- pation with American structures and ideologies. son 1). The combination of overt construction of the opening sequence and the expression of The claim that the popularity of the road film is space via texture points to the central dialectic at the expense of the Western assumes that both of the film’s form: the subjective experience of genres occupy a similar role in the environment the world presented in a style indebted to the of industrial American cinema and merely vary reflexivity of the European art film, and the ac- their approaches to American exceptionalism. knowledgment of the Western’s ideological use This perspective informs the reasoning behind

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the reception of Easy Rider (1969), for exam- plethora of psychologically complex examples ple, as being a kind of modernized Western. The of the genre attest. theory that ‘they traded horses for motorcycles’ (Feeney, 226) in the road film locates the key The road film does not emerge from the wan- difference between the two genres in their pre- ing of Western, but rather from the constant re- ferred mode of transportation—the iconogra- positioning and re-articulation of daily life in phy of the horse is simply updated to the motor- modernity. The political positioning of the road cycle. Elaine Carmichael concludes that “Easy film vis-à-vis dominant ideology is its most sig- Rider successfully replaces the time-honored nificant distinction from the Western, while the cowboy with two countercultural antiheroes relation to the American landscape is the prima- who resolve the waning importance of men on ry point of convergence for the genres. In one horses during the late 1960s” (Carmichael 148). of the few books to engage with the road film, Actor Peter Fonda also referred to it as “a mod- Steven Cohan and Ina Hark figure the basic di- ern Western” (Biskind 42), and Jack Nicholson alectic of the genre as a tension between indi- observed that the modern-day cowboys are such vidualism and populism, with the specific aim because they ride motorcycles instead of horses to “imagine the nation’s culture” (3) as either co- (Engelmeier, 104). These facile understandings herent or disjunctive space. This attempt to rec- of the significance of the Western threaten to oncile both the political aim and the nature of relegate the road film to a subservient role as the spatiality in the road film as something distinct updated version of a genre that has enjoyed far from the Western is ubiquitous in scholarly dis- more critical scrutiny. cussions of the genre. The tension between so- called “conservative values” and “rebellious de- Films that feature automobility have been as sires” (3) marks the road film as distinct from significant to the development of cinema as the the Western. David Laderman figures the afore- Western because the medium is concerned with mentioned dialectic as “depoliticized” (3), while not only realism but with the process of move- film critic Michael Atkinson notes, “Road mov- ment through space. Thus, we can appreciate the ies are too cool to address seriously socio-polit- ways that the Western’s use of location shooting ical ideas” (Atkinson 16). Yet scholars also cite encouraged various understandings of cinemat- the spaces of the road film and the nature of its ic realism in the same way that the road film’s approach to narrative as evidence of its politi- obsession with movement and speed contributes cal tendencies; the films either “define the road to the cinema’s complicated and fascinating rela- as a space that disavows virtues extolled by the tionship not only with modernity but everyday Western” or “take over the ideological burden life. In this sense, the road film cannot replace of its close relation, the Western” (Cohan and the Western because its relationship to technol- Hark 12). In other words, the road film permits a ogy has entirely different priorities. Moreover, political position that is contrary to the political the Western is not unsustainable given its rela- position of the Western but also grapples with tionship to modernity and the modern, and thus similar ideological tensions that, according to a cannot be said to be replaced by the road film. number of scholars, are based both in the com- In other words, it is not the Western’s anxiety plexities of gender politics and the reconcilia- about or inability to represent modern life that tion of historical context. Indeed, both Timothy causes it to wax and wane in popularity, as the Corrigan and Shari Roberts note the centrality

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of gender to the road film. For Corrigan, “the specific concerns of the Western, the austerity contemporary road movie responds specifical- of the genre throughout the immediate postwar ly to the recent historical fracturing of the male era took precedence over the continued explora- subject” (Corrigan 138), as if this crisis were an tion of some of the most fascinating contradic- unusual symptom of a particular era in film his- tions and ideological inquiries that are realized tory or a concern that was somehow exclusive to in films such asHigh Noon (1952) and Bad Day the road film. In an essay about the road film -in at Black Rock (1955). The significance of the tele- cluded in the influential The Road Movie Book, vised Western should neither be underestimat- Shari Roberts contends that the relationship be- ed nor misunderstood in moving the discussion tween the Western and the road film is based of the movement of the genre out of its primary in a specific understanding of an “ideal of mas- role as a mythical standard for Hollywood cin- culinity” (Cohan and Hark 45), following Jane ema. It is not simply that the televised Western Tompkins’ astute observation that “the West- made moviegoers less likely to patronize their ern is about men’s fear of losing their mastery, big-screen counterparts, but rather that this was and hence their identity” (Tompkins 45). While a symptom of a much larger change in Ameri- these discussions contribute helpfully to articu- can life. The postwar years in America ushered lating common features of both genres, they do in unprecedented prosperity to a growing mid- not necessarily elucidate why this association is dle class that began to diversify its leisure activ- helpful beyond offering a facile theory for their ities in new domestic spaces that were often sit- historical ebb and flow. The combination of the uated far from city spaces. Televised Westerns foregrounding of modernity and its inherent so- offered iconography and thematic consistency cial crises with the potential for space to operate in episodic narratives that perpetuated the most as something other than an ideological ideal or traditional virtues of America, from the central- nostalgic background is the basis for the appeal ity of family life to the ultimate authority of the of the road film, which is often more self-con- rule of law. Scale and spectacle were the way for- scious about the relationship between spatiality ward for Hollywood Westerns, as the star sys- and political ideology. tem promised typecast cowboys and the films became increasingly concerned with confirm- There is also the matter of context and generic ing their origins. evolution in considering how the road film is of- ten characterized as occupying a space in Amer- As with most Hollywood feature films, the open- ican film culture that had been reserved for the ing sequence suggests a thesis not only about the Western. Although the Western is notably con- ideologies the narrative puts forth, but a specif- sistent in its use of iconography and the deploy- ic subject position as well. The opening shot of ment of capitalist ideology throughout the his- Shane (1953, figure 3) offers a way to understand tory of Hollywood cinema, it is far from mono- an important aesthetic distinction from The lithic. Discussing Stagecoach (1940), Bazin rec- Shooting. The landscape featured in the open- ognized an emergent self-consciousness in the ing shots of Shane is immediately looked at by a genre that shifted the “balance of social myth, character in the frame, played by Alan Ladd, who historical reconstruction, psychological truth, pauses in reverence, inviting the audience to fol- and the traditional theme of the Western mise- low suit. In contrast, the shots that occur before en-scène” (149). In this understanding of the the title card of The Shooting feature a medium

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but to temporality as well. This reflexive -ap proach bears the early influence of the Eu- ropean art cinema and traces of authorship that most Hollywood studio films would ef- face. Both Hellman’s narrative and aesthet- ic experimentation arrive at a transitional period in the history of Hollywood cinema, when the industry underwent profound changes as a result of a number of factors, including the aforementioned shifts in mass culture and leisure activities toward driving and automobility as well as the import of Figure 3: Shane-title card foreign films that were less inclined to appeal to general audiences. The landscapes in The Shoot- close-up of the profile of a horse, who is shown ing function similarly to the landscapes of a cy- looking straight ahead. It is notable that this po- cle of road films in the 1970s, as a way of work- sition is separate from the spectatorial position; ing through the unfamiliarity of what should this is the most significant point of comparison be familiar. If the very notion of landscape de- between two films as disparate asShane and The pends on curation and composition, then an al- Shooting. Classical Hollywood cinema often in- ternative does not have to call this practice into sists on the audience’s identification with the question so much as it must determine the ulti- protagonists of the narrative and does so by si- mate function of its aesthetic. Many 1970s road multaneously presenting the look of the camera films begin with this essential question: what is with that of the main characters. Given the in- there to make of the constant imperfection of an credible consistency of this subject position and encountered landscape? From this, we get the its conflation with the position of the spectator, terms of the wanderlust and determined travel the opening of Shane is an important example of of films fromEasy Rider (1969) to Bonnie and how the Western can use the picturesque land- Clyde (1967), Badlands (1973) to Two Lane Black- scape to suggest not only the primacy of Alan top (1971). Central to this question is the absence Ladd’s gaze but the implication that the specta- of the status quo, the desire to rebel against the tor’s look is aligned to and affirmed by the mise- hegemony that perhaps informed the vectors of en-scène. Of course, this structuring of identi- various roads. If we see the characters in these fication is not exclusive to the Western, but the films as desirous of a coherent subject position role of landscape as an ideological symbol is one vis-à-vis an incoherent American identity then of its most generative features. we would conclude, as many critics and scholars have done, to see them as failures. We can leave What is predictive about the opening of The this project to the romanticized New Hollywood Shooting is the way in which it presents the am- Cinema, where the likes of Chinatown (1974) biguity of landscape as its central aesthetic. The and Taxi Driver (1976) quote the French New slight jump cuts used to depict Gashade mak- Wave and flaunt their auteur status in search ing his return to the mining camp indicate a of a new legitimacy. If, however, we locate the self-conscious relationship not only to spatiality priorities of the road film in its relation to the

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difficult work of asserting an identity and pres- the differences between minor and major ar- ence to reconcile with history, and recognize tistic practices, but also to suggest that there is that this work happens in the significance of genuine significance in the specificity of the -mi landscape, we can begin to understand how an nor practice. They acknowledge the subordinate emphasis on the quotidian, the texture of every- relationship of the minor to the major, insisting day life, becomes a political choice. The Shooting that the process of deploying the constructs of may not take up this project in its entirety, but the major (rather than developing a distinct lan- it does imagine its possibilities. Its small-scale guage) is the defining trait of a minor literature. production, outside of the studio production, positions it as a marginalized cultural object in Deleuze and Guattari outline three character- the same way that the “B” Western formed sepa- istics of minor literature, which are all relevant rately from Hollywood Westerns. to the road film and its status both in relation to the Western and to the construct of Holly- If the Hollywood Western can be considered a wood cinema as a cultural phenomenon. The dominant genre in American cinema, then an first characteristic is concerned with the oc- argument can be made that the road film rep- casion for a minor literature: for Deleuze and resents a minor tradition of this mode of film- Guattari, this is motivated by a desire to de- making. In order to think through the political territorialize language. Various impossibilities purchase of the road film, I adapt the term “mi- challenge this ambition: “the impossibility of nor” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s not writing, the impossibility of writing (in an work Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In their adapted language), the impossibility of writ- conception, a “minor literature” is a work that ing otherwise” (16). While The Shooting is not a originates from the margins while using the lan- revolutionary film, nor one that thoroughly ad- guage of the centre. If we understand The Shoot- dresses the ramifications set forth by the minor ing as a proto-road film and not merely a subver- literature concept, there is a tangible sense that sive or existential Western, we can acknowledge Hellman’s film conveys these sensibilities. Given the significance of the ways in which it “stutters” its iconography and emphasis on the American (to use Deleuze’s term) (Bogue 21) the centred landscape, the film suggests a Western; as such, ideology of the Western. The film engenders a it must situate itself in a certain consciousness of kind of amorality that exists in the road film, for the genre. Given this awareness, it is impossible example, rather than the potential for immorali- in this context not to acknowledge the collective ty that exists in a Western. To discuss a film such perception of the Western, despite (or perhaps as The Shooting purely in terms of its deviance especially because of) the skepticism towards diminishes the political presence of morality, the genre as it has been expressed both in Hol- which is precisely the mode in which the road lywood cinema and in the psychological West- film often operates. The idea of the “stutter” -sup ern. Distinct from the “A” Western, the psycho- poses a mode of expression that both escapes a logical Western is distinguished by its fatalistic, dominant system and reifies its decomposition; obsessive subjectivity and its alienated protag- it is not that the Western is obsolete, but that onists. Where these films are often marked by a new language can be discerned in its decay. their disillusion with the dominant norms and Deleuze and Guattari construct a way to use the ethics as dictated by Hollywood ideology, the implication of this theory to consider not only road film bears some traces of this sensibility.

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The primary tension in the cycle of American understood as a symbolic clash between vigilan- road films made between 1969 and 1974 is one te justice and the rule of law, where both could be of legibility: how to express the desire for an al- satisfied with the same outcome. Gashade’s op- ternative political position using language that position is personal, not political; it is his broth- exists largely to perpetuate rather than create— er who is being pursued, and the fact of guilt or thus, this desire is impossible to articulate. This innocence is irrelevant. The Woman wants retri- “stutter” occurs in the conclusion of The Shoot- bution not to uphold the rule of law, but to satis- ing. As the characters race toward a vaguely de- fy her own desire for vengeance. Although Will fined figure in the steep terrain, the sound of is clearly fascinated with her, she has no roman- gunshots echoes over a step-printed series of tic or physical connection to any of the charac- shots. For this brief period, spatiality expresses ters; she does not seek their approval or make temporality and conveys the subjectivity of the any attempts to domesticate their environment. event. These disorienting cinematic techniques By the conclusion of the film even the expan- imagine a spectatorial experience in which af- sive beauty of the American landscape seems fect is central. to be in inarticulate opposition to the inhabi- tants depicted onscreen, neither ideal vista nor The second characteristic of a minor litera- admired wilderness. In minor cinema the per- ture concerns its position within the dispositif sonal is political, to borrow an integral phrase of American society and culture. Deleuze and coined in the wake of various social movements Guattari describe minor literature occupying a of the late 1960s. The characters in The Shoot- “cramped space” as opposed to the expanse of ing are not the archetypes often observed in the a “social milieu serving as a mere environment Western, but rather individuals whose connec- or a background” (17). Individual concerns are tion to the political is not necessarily predicat- always the concerns of society at large in major ed on the norms of American society. From Ga- literature; the subjugation of the personal to the shade to Billy Spear, the Woman to Will, the iso- collective is one of the primary ways in which lated characters have little relation to social and Hollywood cinema presents repetition as dif- systemic issues; if the film had aspirations to a ference. The cognitive focus of classical cinema major cinema, each might have a trait or moti- turns on a systemic series of revelations of any vation that functioned to reinforce or represent number of coherent, denotative possibilities. a significant aspect of thedispositif . This char- Politically, these possibilities enhance the illu- acteristic of minor cinema is often attributed to sion of individual choice, suggesting that what a general malaise or sense of alienation that is characters want at the conclusion of a Holly- one of the defining traits of 1970s American cin- wood film is ultimately what will benefit society ema. The idea that conflict or character motiva- at large: marriage, bringing a criminal to justice, tion as experienced by an individual character the return to a mutually agreeable equilibrium, is symptomatic of a pathos of failure, as Thomas etc. The sense of political scale in a minor cin- Elsaesser claims, is an example of the necessity ema is fundamentally different, presenting the of understanding independent American cine- “cramped space” of individual conflict as the in- ma in political terms. The assumption that the tegral issue. In The Shooting, the Woman’s desire characters represent exceptions to the norms of for revenge is singular and personal. The conflict mass culture also assumes that the political po- between this character and Gashade cannot be sition of these films to dominant culture is the

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same as films made within thisdispositif , which (Deleuze 17) . It is no coincidence that Monte limits the ways that we can understand the po- Hellman’s work has benefitted from the enthu- litical terms of independent American cinema. siasm for auteur theory, having arrived at a mo- Deleuze and Guattari quote Kafka in their de- ment in the history of film criticism that cham- scription of this second characteristic of minor pioned the director as the ultimate architect of literature: “what is there (in a major literature) a film. The auteur theory is a consequence of a a passing interest for a few, here absorbs every- tradition of spectatorship that finds meaning in one no less than as a matter of life and death” the excess of cinematic expression; it privileges (Deleuze 17). the oeuvre of a film director over an individu- al film. In this sense, Hellman can be described The third characteristic of minor literature—or as a kind of master, given the way in which his cinema—is bound up with earlier discussions work has maintained its significance in no small of the significance of vernacular and its rela- part through an effort to understand his aes- tionship to the Western. The Western bifurcates thetic concerns as they manifest in several films. along industrial lines, between the event-ori- Hellman’s partnership with Roger Corman, one ented “A” Western and the vernacular “B” West- of the most influential independent film pro- ern. The latter demonstrates a distinct relation- ducers in American cinema, is key to under- ship with contemporary popular culture that standing the collaborative spirit at the core of attempts to account for its shifting function in The Shooting. The balance between the authority American society, while the Hollywood West- of the director, the industrial ethos of the pro- ern continued in its invocation of certain gener- ducer, and the dedication of the cast and crew ic tropes. The term vernacular suggests not only on these films anticipates the complex relation- common usage but a particular deployment in ship minor films have with spectators and the terms of contemporary popular culture, which changing audiences of the era. is hardly static. Given its smaller scale and great- er accessibility, being shown on television or as A singular narrative can engage with everyday part of a double feature, the “B” Western is in life precisely because it places the individu- a far greater position to function collectively. al voice at the center of its expression. Specta- Deleuze and Guattari assert that “because col- tors can innervate their experiences with cine- lective or national consciousness is often inac- matic narratives that are more concerned with tive in external life. . .literature finds itself pos- the relationship of the individual to a collective itively charged with the role and function of than with a perpetuation of the status quo. Thus, collective, and even revolutionary enunciation” our understanding of The Shooting has less to (17). The notion of collective expression seems do with its position to other Westerns than to in contradiction to the previous tenet of a minor what it has inherited from the genre. The ways literature, which places individual narratives at in which we might make sense of the narrative the centre of a minor work. It is precisely these corresponds to our relation to the public sphere individual narratives, however, that emerge as a rather than the inverse. It is the collective under- kind of collective voice by virtue of their mass standing of an individual narrative that drives a accessibility and given the ways in which these minor cinema—the road film genre is the prod- narratives engage with ‘the people’s concern’ uct of this mode of American cinema. The fo- (Deleuze 18) rather than a ‘literature of masters’ cus of a minor cinema is not the known quantity

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of dispositif but rather the potential of a collec- it is an emphasis of an immersive representation tive that is focused on the possibility of count- of space. er-terms of engagement. We can understand the minor cinema of the road film as a further deter- Whether the Hollywood Western uses landscape ritorialization of the psychological Western’s in- as nostalgia or allegory or both, it still insists on terpretation of its dominant genre. Both genres the auratic distance between its representation use the language of the Western specifically of America and the experience of the space by (and Hollywood cinema more generally), but various characters. The Shooting challenges this their approaches are distinctive. The psycholog- hierarchy of perception where the spectator is ical Western often works in a symbolic register, rarely privileged in two distinct ways: by em- presenting space and landscape as an expression phasizing the landscape’s potential to antago- of the limits of the cinematic language in use. nize sentient life regardless of mastery or nat- In contrast, the road film foregrounds the pov- ural predisposition, and by refusing to partici- erty of this language, pate in the pictorial use abstracting the use of of landscape that is an space and landscape, integral point of de- interpreting narratives parture for the West- of travel and civility in ern. Because the land- terms that engage both scape itself is presented the limits of major lan- as the defining conflict guage and the possibili- of the film, these two ty of viable alternatives. challenges to the genre negate the centrality of By emphasizing both the law in the Western the vastness of the land- and indicate, most im- scape and the diversi- Figure 4: The Shooting-Gashade’s hands portantly, that it shares ty of its features, The more with the road film Shooting uses the haptic to quite literally ground than the Western. If we understand The Shoot- its realism in the affect of the terrain. Gashade’s ing as part of a particular cycle of Westerns that hands trawling through the dirt in a pivotal mo- were made and exhibited during the 1960s, then ment: the earthy depiction of the Woman’s dis- the idea of the existential Western and its asso- gust at the accumulation of dust and dirt on her ciation to the film is supported by its relation- face and the trail of dirt from Coley’s horse as he ship to the Western and its articulation of the rides in pursuit of the hired gunman who will features of the genre. That is, the presence of ultimately murder him (figure 4). These imag- horses, a revenge plot, and the vast expanses of es contribute to the realism of the world by the windswept terrain are evidence that The Shoot- nature of their bodily interaction with the land- ing is a Western. Yet its position with respect to scape. This foregrounding of bodily engagement lawlessness, for example, is not discernible be- with the natural features of the landscape is less cause of its basic unconcern with a specific and about the manifestation of ideological tension dominant ideology. Its relationship to civil soci- and the internal status of the protagonist than ety, whether reluctant acceptance, deep yearn- ing, or a kind of oscillation between the two, is

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also secondary. If the Western is indeed a cycli- the road film of the late 1960s and early 1970s cal genre, if it consists not of members but rath- as “focusing on existential loss more than so- er iterations, the genre is complicated beyond cial critique. In this more existential focus, the recognition by The Shooting. Even if the West- genre’s core conflict with conformist society has ern is refined by films that share common fea- been internalized” (83). Throughout his discus- tures, it is also distinguished by the negation and sion of the existential road film Laderman con- subsequent substitution of these same features flates internalization with political apathy as if a preoccupation with subject position precludes other socio-political issues. The Western often has a similar kind of anxiety about the relation- ship between self and society. While the boun- ty hunter or the vengeful gunslinger are deter- mined to assert their identity in relation to soci- ety, they are still bound by social rules and rarely act in opposition to the ideology informed by these rules. The tension between individualism and assimilation is often figured by the protag- onist’s position to domesticity (symbolized by a female character) and resolved in terms of an acquiescence to the rule of law and society. The presence of society and its bearing on the char- acters in The Shooting is difficult if not impos- Figure 5: The Shooting-walking across desolate terrain sible to discern; the film is not concerned with law and society, but rather to the primacy of in another genre. Thus,The Shooting may inherit the subject and its experience of space. Thus, the desire for retribution from the Western’s ob- we can allow that the performance of self that session with justice, but it negates the necessity is essential to the Western is perhaps internal- of law and order with its articulation of indiffer- ized while making an important observation ence, which is made manifest both in the jour- about the road film. Both genres can perhaps be ney of the characters and the numerous shots of said to have a conflict with what Laderman calls humans and horses withering in the unyielding “conformist society,” but it is the situating of this environment. conformist society that The Shooting represents in its landscapes. Inviting a look but unable to A composition that occurs late in the film has accommodate specific intervention, the picto- the last surviving horses and humans trudging rial landscape is the province of the Western. towards a conclusion that is neither predictable The textured landscape is essential to the road nor necessary (figure 5). Instead, the journey it- film precisely because it encourages specific in- self is of crucial importance; having lost their tervention. The terms of this intervention are way metaphorically and physically, the only op- shaped by the haptic relationship to the environ- tion is to struggle against inertia. This descrip- ment as experienced not only by the characters tion applies to The Shooting and the road film in in a film like The Shooting but as perceived by the equal measure. David Laderman characterizes spectator as trace, as an opportunity to engage

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with the landscape image in terms of experience genre-as-medium relies on a shared interpre- rather than invocation. In the mise-en-scène in tation of a myth. This interpretation adapts figure 5, the characters and horses cross a rug- Cavell’s claim that “a performance of a piece ged, sandy expanse at the foot of a large rock of music is an interpretation of it” (Poague 33). formation, moving toward an unknown desti- Like jazz, a musical genre that often improvises nation. Their only path is made by their own ex- recognizable structures, the psychological West- perience, by their movement through the space- erns offer this possibility through subjectivity -a trench of sand cuts through the lower half of and the presentation of landscape as a symbol the mise-en-scène, suggesting a road not taken. of this subjectivity. The Shooting is an exempla- Travel is insistently contingent in road films, the ry film that offers an interpretation of the West- substitution for the static presence of law and ern’s mythology in the same way that jazz de- society in the Western, and thus the two genres parts from traditional arrangements of popular have fundamentally different political functions. songs. A key component of the traditional ar- The cultural critique of the road film is bound rangement of landscape in the mythic Western up with the assertion that the experience of is the relationship between Americans and their one’s own movement through space is akin to an landscape; conflict is figured in the tension -be American ideal, where the Western features it- tween the awe of natural space and the necessity erations of movement toward the same destina- of its subjugation so that civilization can flour- tion, the perpetuation of a static American ide- ish. The Shooting interprets this conflict as one al. Examining Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road that does not require the rule of law (a condition (1976), Deleuze and Guattari describe the rela- for a civil society), and instead offers a dialectic tionship between two types of voyages: “voyage between man’s insatiable desire for domination in place” (physical) and interior/subjective voy- and the indifference of nature or the near-hos- age (mental) are not distinguished by quantifi- tility of the landscape. This substitution moves able distance or motion, nor by virtue of a spe- the film away from the Western genre towards cific cognitive process, but instead by “the mode the road film, which is obsessed with the threat of spatialisation” (532). While the road film can of ennui rather than the promise of domesticity. accommodate either of these modes, the de- scription of spatiality as a mode is useful in un- In October of 1971, a million cars were sold in derstanding the particular significance of land- the United States. Automobility was an integral scape for the road film. part of life in America, yet the same kind of pes- simism that informed popular culture in the Stanley Cavell’s theory of genre offers a pro- wake of the Vietnam war seemed to threaten the ductive way to account for the political dis- role of cars and highways in the contemporary crepancy between subversive Hollywood films milieu. The traumatic effect of the Vietnam War and ones that position themselves alternative- on the American consciousness arguably found ly. The common inheritance of mythology cen- its way into many films in the New Hollywood tral to Cavell’s understanding of genre-as-medi- canon. Christian Keathley’s identification of a um turns on the idea that this shared mythol- cycle of films between 1970 and 1976 as a nego- ogy permits interpretation of a myth. The dis- tiation of “powerlessness in the face of a world tinction is that genre-as-cycle invokes the myth whose systems of organization (both moral and without interrogation, whereas the notion of political) have broken down” (293) emphasizes

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the war as a catalyst for this crisis. Bob Rafelson’s Bobby’s incredulous response (“Cleaner than Five Easy Pieces (1970), mentioned in Keathley’s what?”) is the catalyst for the editing and plot essay, explicitly comments on the status of auto- of the rest of the sequence. The film posits an mobility, landscape, and trauma in one extraor- answer to the rhetorical question: the “what” is dinary sequence. Five Easy Pieces is one of any indicative of the status of American automobili- number of independently produced films from ty and landscape in the early 1970s—road travel the era that attempts to represent various my- has affected the environment to the extent that thologies at stake in an America in which choice understanding the continuity of these changes is represented as ineffectual. Critical work in re- is not only impossible but of little import. The sponse to Rafelson’s film considers the histori- resignation to a landscape that is populated by cal moment of its release and the various ways infrastructure created for transit fuels both Ter- in which the protagonist presents a specific cri- ry’s active rejection and Bobby’s wanderlust, sis of masculinity in response to the aforemen- an embodiment of the transitory nature of the tioned political crises occurring in various ca- landscape. pacities worldwide. Discontinuity, chance, and incoherence—all de- Filmmaker Henry Jaglom notes of his work with vices of fragmentation and modernity—are pre- independent production company BBS in the sented in the crisis of representing the Ameri- early 1970s, “We wanted to have film reflect on can landscape in Five Easy Pieces. The sequence our lives, the anxiety that was going on as a re- is punctuated by edits that establish and em- sult of the war, the cultural changes that we were phasize the discontinuity of events involving all products of” (qtd. in Biskind 77). The aes- the four characters during their travels togeth- thetic response to various contemporary anxi- er. Terry’s rant about “crap” is not edited in the eties in the cinematography of Five Easy Pieces kind of active, causal chain typical of Hollywood is clearly manifest in a 15-minute sequence that films, but rather it is edited by affect, the emo- occurs midway through the film. Bobby Dupea, tion of the speaker and the dynamic within the the drifting protagonist of the film, travels with vehicle. Terry states, “Pretty soon there won’t his girlfriend Rayette towards his family’s home be any room for man”; the mise-en-scène point- in the Pacific Northwest. During the trip they edly shows a barrage of road signs and motel encounter two women fixing a car on the side of billboards. At various points in the sequence, the road and pick them up as hitchhikers. Ter- each inhabitant of the car is shown in their own ry, the more talkative of the hitchhikers is por- frame, performing an action that portrays their trayed by Toni Basil, a choreographer and vet- solitude and the tedium of the journey—Terry eran of avant-garde director Bruce Connor’s smokes a cigarette, Rayette styles her hair in a experimental dance film BREAKAWAY (1966). mirror. Five Easy Pieces further advances the The camera shows the four inhabitants of the car notion of automobility as anxiety and obligation from the front of the vehicle looking through that is central to this iteration of the road film, as the windshield. Bobby makes small talk with the if compensating for the representation of road two women; Terry notes that she is bound for travel as freedom that is absent from the genre Alaska. When he inquires further about her des- in the wake of cultural, industrial, and aesthetic tination, her traveling companion replies that changes. The ineffectuality of many protagonists Terry wants to live there because “it’s cleaner.” and the thematic narratives of alienation are, in

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the particular instance of the road film, bound recognizing a pivotal moment in the history of up with the representation of landscape. In road the automobile in America. films before this “landscape” cycle, the ambi- tion to travel and the freedom of mobility was The car-rant sequence inFive Easy Pieces, de- often represented in terms of scale, for example, fined by its excess to the larger concerns of the showing a lone car speeding down a seemingly film, is remarkable because it endeavors to look unending road, or by the discontinuity of phys- outward in an era that largely did the opposite. ical features of the land: vast deserts, massive The landscape becomes a consequence of in- rock formations, jagged mountains. The vague creased road travel—a symbol of an America political and cultural sense that America should that is explicitly defined by capitalist opportuni- have done better, however, is not an inherent ty rather than the potential for settlement, as de- feature of landscape, and it is worth noting that picted in the Western. Terry makes a distinction the ideologies inferred by these previous repre- between dirt and filth, the former being a nat- sentations are not problematized by narrative or ural phenomenon and the latter a consequence the act of travelling through the past, but rath- of the encroachment of civilization. Because the er interrogated in terms of the relationship be- kind of looking solicited by landscape is a com- tween the road and its surroundings. bination of experience (collective and individ- ual) and discourse, its deployment in the road In other words, the representation of landscape trip of Five Easy Pieces, a post-traumatic film of necessarily changed because of a figurative shift the 1970s, is inevitably changed by a revisionist in the political realities of life in America, and spirit that is in turn affected by the prioritization it changed materially because roads themselves of realism in American cinema in that historical began to proliferate independently of their sur- moment. Landscape is not threatened in these roundings, eventually affecting the environ- films, given its status as a formation that re- ment. John Jerome’s The Death of the Automobile sponds to a need to define and see America and (1972), one of a number of books published in the perhaps despite the desire to reinterpret the im- early 1970s expressing concern with the domi- plied mythology of the land. Cinematographer nance of automotive travel in America lament- Lázló Kovacs observed that in Five Easy Pieces ed that “We stopped building roads to places. Rafelson “never moved the camera on an exteri- We began building roads for automobiles” (qtd or (shot),” (Schaefer and Salvato, 190) preferring in Lewis and Goldstein 398). Bob Rafelson ac- to use montage to suggest movement. Regard- knowledges this resistance to vehicularity and less of the subjectivity of the experience of land- its effects on the environment in the road travel scape, the desire to portray the road as a stead- sequences of Five Easy Pieces even as he notes fast system of organization in the midst of tran- in the director’s commentary for the film that sitory politics and shifting aesthetics remained. “ecological writing (wasn’t) very fashionable at The composition of the landscape in the road that point.” Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed film is anchored by the system of roads; it is not (1965), an immediate bestseller, was instrumen- nostalgia for a disappeared experience of mobil- tal in new automobile safety laws. Several books ity but rather expreses a wistful desire for order. such as God’s Own Junkyard (1964) to The Death of the Automobile (1972) express a general con- The establishing shot of the enigmatic final se- cern with the size, speed, and availability of cars, quence of Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop

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Figure 6: Two Lane Blacktop-Establishing shot, final sequence

(1971) provides a composition that his earli- uncertainty of “possible community,” but in- er film,The Shooting, predicts (figure 6). A low stead encouraged by various potentials of “col- camera angle looks out onto a sprawling run- lective assemblages of enunciation” (88). This way; the black streaks along the asphalt suggest tendency is often intertwined with criminality not only prior movement but also velocity. The or at least an active resistance to societal norms white dividing line splits the mise-en-scène pre- in a variety of road films from the Vietnam era. cisely, depicting the moment of possibility in a Conventional readings of films such asBonnie space that is defined by such moments. In the and Clyde (1967) insist that “political frustration same way that The Shooting invites the specta- and disillusionment get internalized by charac- tor to engage with the texture of soil and dirt, ters (and) dramatized as individual psycholog- this shot fosters a desire to push forward, to con- ical and emotional conflicts” (Laderman 86) tinue that most cinematic imperative—to move. without considering the way in which the film is The 1970s road film is perpetual and oriented about the struggle to create rather than commu- towards the future. It is not concerned with the nicate. Understanding the aesthetic of the road

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film as a genre that foregrounds the landscape Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the is integral to understanding that the remarkable Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved Holly- feat of films fromEasy Rider to Badlands is not wood. Simon & Schuster, 1998. their disdain for the mainstream but their abili- ty to imagine an ideology that has no interest in Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tribu- invoking this mainstream at all. The space of the taries. State University of New York Press, 2004. road film is charged with this potential, from the iconography of gas stations to the scroll of pave- Carmichael, Deborah A. The Landscape of Hollywood ment along a seemingly endless road. These ver- Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre. nacular spaces, now in a landscape that invites University of Utah Press, 2006. active participation rather than static reverence, have the potential to represent lived experience Cavell, Stanley and William Rothman. Cavell on Film. in ways that the collective ideologies of Holly- State University of New York Press, 2005. wood films, separated as they are from politi- cized daily life, cannot. de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translat- ed by Steven Rendall , University of California Press, 1984. Images Cohan, Steven and Ina R. Hark. The Road Movie Figure 1: Advertisement for 1963 Ford Galaxie Book. Routledge, 1997.

Figure 2: The Shooting-title card Cooney, T. A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle. University of Wiscon- Figure 3: Shane-title card sin Press, 1986.

Figure 4: The Shooting-Gashade’s hands Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, Univer- Figure 5: The Shooting-walking across desolate terrain sity of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Figure 6: Two Lane Blacktop-Establishing shot, final ---. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre- sequence nia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Min- nesota Press, 2005. Works Cited Donaldson, Lucy F. Texture in Film. Palgrave Macmil- Archer, N. The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning. lan, 2014. London: Wallflower, 2016. Elsaesser, Thomas. The Pathos of Failure: Notes on Atkinson, M. Crossing the Frontiers. Sight and Sound, the Unmotivated Hero. In A. H. Thomas Elsaesser, pp. 14-17, 1994 é The Last Great American Picture Show: New Holly- wood Cinema in the 1970s (pp. 279-292). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004 Bazin, André. What Is Cinema?: Vol. 2. Translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1971.

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Engelmeier, P. Icons of film: the 20th century. Munich: exander Horvath, and Noel King, Amsterdam Uni- Prestel, 2000. versity Press, 2004, pp. 293-308.

Feeney, M. Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief. Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 Road Movie. University of Texas Press, 2002.

Goldstein, D. L. The Automobile and American cul- Poague, Leland A. Another Frank Capra. Cambridge ture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983 University Press, 1994.

Harvey, T. Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley: mak- Rafelson, B., director. Five Easy Pieces. BBS Produc- ing the modern old West. Norman: University of Okla- tions, 1970. homa Press, 2011. Schaefer, Dennis, and Salvato, Larry. Masters of Light: Hellman, M., Director. The Shooting. Proteus Films, Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers. 1966. University of California Press, 1984.

Jackson, J. B. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. Stevens, George, director. Shane. Paramount Pictures, Yale University Press, 1984. 1953.

Keathley, Christian. “Trapped in the Affection Image: Stoehr, M. L. Ride, Boldly Ride. University of Californi Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle 1970-1976.” The Press, 2012. Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Al- Tompkins, Jane P. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford University Press, 1992.

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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN FRASER MCCALLUM AND ANDREW PENDAKIS

Fraser McCallum is a Canadian artist whose University of Toronto campus. Due to zoning work on Rochdale College, an experimental restrictions, which called for 7-to-1 floorplan commune that was set up in Toronto between density relative to the lot size, the Co-op end- 1968 and 1975, explores the relationship be- ed up building a high-rise designed to house tween politics and historical memory. What 850 people—much larger than any of its exist- follows is a conversation with Fraser about his ing properties. At its height, more than double piece Come Live With Us (2016) and about the the resident capacity lived in the building. Life- political and aesthetic resonances of the com- styles denoted by the apartment units varied mune today. widely, from conventional double rooms to en- tire floors arranged as communes. The ground AP: Fraser, could you tell us briefly about the level and second floor were used for various history of Rochdale College. What was it? How self-organized facilities, including television, long did it exist for? radio, publishing, filmmaking, a library, and a restaurant. FM: Rochdale College was a free school and student co-operative housed inside an 18-sto- The educational ideals of the College were pri- rey apartment building in Toronto, operating marily developed by U of T graduate students from 1968 to 1975. It was originally conceived and sessional instructors. They sought to re- as a student housing co-op to serve the Uni- imagine postsecondary education based on versity of Toronto but evolved into its own en- principles of freedom—where learning would tity not long after planning began. The proj- be pursued for its own sake, beyond its instru- ect was initiated by Campus Co-op, which ran mental role in preparing students for the job many shared houses in the area and sought market. These educational ideals were carried to expand its operations. Empowered by new out very loosely: Rochdale was non-accredit- legislation permitting the Canada Mortgage ed and ran courses on the basis of students’ in- and Housing Corporation to loan to co-oper- terests. There was little vetting or oversight in atives, Campus Co-op ultimately opened Ro- shaping the course offerings. chdale on a vacant lot at the north end of the ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE (1970S) COMMUNE

The College ultimately closed due to its inability sight of the former Rochdale building (which to pay its mortgage, but it was a shell of its most still stands, now remodeled for use as commu- vibrant self for several years before its closure. nity housing). In a very tangible way, these two Not long after opening, runaway youth from buildings with wildly different histories are in the nearby Yorkville neighbourhood began to architectural dialogue with one another—and live in College common rooms, broom closets, with Robarts holding the Rochdale archive, the and so on; they were tolerated by a sufficient former holds the material history of the latter. majority of Rochdale’s permissive residents. For similar reasons, high-volume drug dealers also The architecture of Rochdale College became a moved in, cashing in on the inability of the po- crucial detail to consider. It’s a very unremark- lice to govern the building. The College was able building, indistinguishable from the apart- frowned-upon in the broader local and national ment towers that were being built throughout public, fueled by media portrayals of its greatest the region at the time. The literature on Roch- excesses of drug use, sex, alternative lifestyles, dale, however, shows that the social life of the and derelict living conditions. This broader dis- building vastly exceeded the constraints of its gust set the stage for Rochdale’s closure long be- architecture, and residents creatively misused fore it actually happened, regardless of what was the building to their advantage. For example: it going on inside. Local politicians’ patriarchal was made almost impenetrable to the police. views of the counterculture couldn’t withstand Residents would use fire alarms to signal police the lawlessness and immorality they associated raids, block stairwells, and remove room num- with Rochdale in such a highly visible, down- bers. This fortress-like quality was crucial to the town locale. survival of the College in its later years. While apartment towers from this period are often AP: How did your interest in Rochdale develop? criticized for alienating and atomizing their res- How or where did you come across it? idents, the College residents inverted these ar- chitectural features for a much different ar- FM: I first heard of it through friends whose rangement of social relations. parents had passed through there, which is quite common in Toronto. I then watched Dream Tower, which emphasized just how inter- esting and unique Rochdale was.1 Much later, as a graduate student at the University of Toron- to, I decided to undertake this project as a way to reflect more broadly on the contemporary education system and the ontology of student- hood. Since U of T holds the Rochdale archive, I felt the sense of two immensely different views of education throughout the process. As one View of former Rochdale site at 341 Bloor Street West, would expect, the University was quite antago- from Robarts Library nistic toward Rochdale during its time. Robarts AP: Could you describe the Rochdale installa- Library, a centrepiece of the campus, is like- tion for those who weren’t able to visit it or ac- wise a Brutalist high-rise, and is directly within cess the video?

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FM: The piece,Come Live with Us, consists of a 20-minute experimental documentary, a riso- graph booklet with a text I wrote, and an instal- lation with a table and some prints. Objects in the installation appear in the video, and vice-versa. A major facet of the work involved remaking objects from Rochdale’s archives us- ing the high-tech tools of the contemporary university: 3D printing and laser cutting. I re- made countercultural drawings from the ar- chive as laser-cut stencils, which are spray- painted on gallery walls. I 3D-scanned and printed a miniaturized replica of The Unknown Student, the lone remaining trace of the Col- lege—a public sculpture which still exists out- side the building. The installation is anchored by a large studio table, on which sit the sculp- tures and stencils, as well as reproductions of Rochdale College documents as loose prints. There’s also excess 3D-printing dust on the ta- ble because the process of extracting a print in- volves vacuuming it out of a tray full of loose dust—like an archaeological dig. The studio ta- ble, replete with dust and loose prints, suggests an active and mutable approach toward this history.

The video looks closely at my mediated re- lationship to Rochdale. I had former resi- dents read key texts from the College history for my camera: these give a sense of its aspi- CLWU Installation view rations, achievements, and public backlash.

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Photographs, documents, and archival audio de-skilled. What is it, then, about our moment appear throughout. I shot video at the former which makes these images of socialized, pro- College site and in the archives at the Univer- ductive life particularly enticing? In a moment sity of Toronto to examine the architectural in which anything anywhere can be instantly relationships mentioned above. Finally, I in- shared—a text, a thought—what might be add- tersperse long shots, which depict the process- ed to the atomized cycle of digital production es of remaking the objects in the installation: and consumption by genuinely socialized life? machines reproducing objects that were once handmade or made from technologies that are FM: I contend that residents of Rochdale Col- now obsolete. lege sought to make a more livable world in a myriad of ways, beginning with quotidian life AP: In your film about Rochdale we get a sense at home. Beyond education alone, there were of a distinctly different way of imagining do- experiments with childcare, communal living, mestic space. Home is not simply a place to and horizontal politics. But my emphasis on eat, rest and, sleep or a space of quiet famil- the material culture lies in the fact that this is ial reproduction, but an integrated produc- where their aspirations and social relations tion unit—a site for communal invention where were actualized in a way that is well-docu- things are constantly being designed, built, mented. For instance, there is a mountain of and transmitted. From the beginning we’re self-published print material from Rochdale: encouraged to look closely at shots of con- near-daily newspapers for eight years, memos, spicuously displayed communal equipment: committee meetings, protest pamphlets, and in-house radio and video technologies and ephemera of all kinds. Co-creating printed print materials, as well as what appear to be matter, radio, television, pottery, sculpture, machines for the weaving of textiles and oth- and so on served to produce and bind the Ro- er primitive industrial processes. In this sense, chdale community. It offered a public forum Rochdale is a kind of anti-suburb. Where the beyond one’s immediate peers (it’s important suburban home is for the most part isolated, to remember there were usually upward of functionally fixed, and experienced as a site 2000 people in the building), a documented of passive leisure and consumption, Rochdale way to express political consensus or dissent, is shown to be emphatically multi-modal, in- identities, affects, and so on. The art historian trinsically socialized, and politically productive. Robin Simpson describes some Rochdale me- Why did you want to emphasize these materi- dia productions using the discourse of “coun- al, quotidian aspects of Rochdale (as opposed, terpublics,” which I think is apt: it captures the say, to the interpersonal or political moments broad oppositional scope of the identities that would define a different kind of history of forged there.2 the institution)? What might we see in these antiquated communications technologies be- Rochdale’s textual and material culture offers a yond old age and redundancy? With the shift clear picture of its residents’ ideals. These ide- from analog to digital production, the poten- als were paramount for me, rather than ascrip- tial reach of a text or image has been dramat- tions of failure or success, because they express ically increased even as the conditions of pro- a genuine desire to reform the education sys- duction themselves have been privatized and tem and to restructure everyday life. Residents

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de-skilled. What is it, then, about our moment chose to stencil images from the Rochdale ar- which makes these images of socialized, pro- chive onto the wall of the gallery. In addition ductive life particularly enticing? In a moment to this you spread its prints and pamphlets in which anything anywhere can be instantly out onto a bare wooden table. You chose to shared—a text, a thought—what might be add- leave some kind of dust too on the table in ed to the atomized cycle of digital production the space between these prints. Is there not and consumption by genuinely socialized life? in all of this a real desire for the material trac- es of Rochdale, an interesting political nostal- FM: I contend that residents of Rochdale Col- gia, one that goes far beyond the ostensibly lege sought to make a more livable world in a disinterested curiosity of the historian? What myriad of ways, beginning with quotidian life political or aesthetic value do you continue to at home. Beyond education alone, there were express their aspirations with a healthy amount find in the commune or broadly in the kinds of experiments with childcare, communal living, of indeterminacy and uncertainty. Focusing utopian social experimentation we saw across and horizontal politics. But my emphasis on on the primary texts offered a different entry the late 1960s and early 1970s? the material culture lies in the fact that this is point than my interviews with former resi- where their aspirations and social relations dents, since the latter were speaking from a ret- FM: Nostalgia was top-of-mind for me were actualized in a way that is well-docu- rospective position, which was further clouded throughout the project, as there is so much mented. For instance, there is a mountain of by the media campaign to demonize Rochdale. contemporary currency placed in this histori- self-published print material from Rochdale: cal moment and it is often quite selective. I am near-daily newspapers for eight years, memos, With regards to the end of the question, I think perhaps guilty of this myself, as I don’t overtly committee meetings, protest pamphlets, and in a very straightforward way these imag- critique the naïve politics on gender, sexuali- ephemera of all kinds. Co-creating printed es are imaginative: they depict a set of social ty, and race that cloud Rochdale’s largely white, matter, radio, television, pottery, sculpture, relations that existed with relative autonomy heterosexual, middle-class resident body. and so on served to produce and bind the Ro- from the frowning public for quite a long time. chdale community. It offered a public forum They are hard to imagine given the conditions My approach was to remake archival material beyond one’s immediate peers (it’s important of possibility that exist today. To look at these using highly mediated, technological means— to remember there were usually upward of images now is to look not only at documents media that are thoroughly enmeshed in the 2000 people in the building), a documented of alternative ways of living, but also to look contemporary university. With this approach, I way to express political consensus or dissent, back—and through—this era, which was itself hope to present the material in a way that fore- identities, affects, and so on. The art historian envisioning a future much different from what grounds my alienation from it but assert that Robin Simpson describes some Rochdale me- came to be. it is worth looking closely at nonetheless. Of dia productions using the discourse of “coun- course, nostalgia exists when looking at his- terpublics,” which I think is apt: it captures the AP: Contemporary student culture shows little torical material of this nature no matter how it broad oppositional scope of the identities interest in the commune as a form of life, de- is presented, but I’m not averse to affective re- forged there.2 spite the fact that students continue to report sponses, so long as they don’t stick to conven- high rates of loneliness, anxiety, and depres- tionally defined nostalgia alone. Rochdale’s textual and material culture offers a sion and despite the fact that high rents and clear picture of its residents’ ideals. These ide- stagnant wages make collective living relevant With that in mind, I do dwell on Rochdale’s als were paramount for me, rather than ascrip- even as a means to mere economic survival. notions of freedom, self-determination, and tions of failure or success, because they express There’s a very real way in which the commune mutual aid, which resonate with me personally a genuine desire to reform the education sys- is conspicuously missing from the contempo- and politically and which I believe to be worth tem and to restructure everyday life. Residents rary cultural landscape. In your installation you re-examining. These are especially crucial to

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contemporary student life, which is charac- practice and criticism, one that has mostly ex- terized by debt, competition, and alienation. hausted itself. Rather, its focus is more specific As I was a graduate student at the time, I was and has to do with the peculiar difficulties of thinking about an ontology of studenthood— visualizing the political. How does one repre- what does it actually mean to be a student? For sent or stage a political process that has van- most people, studenthood is characterized as ished, a process that was at the same instant a a phase of maturation and knowledge-acquisi- mere sequence in a much larger conjuncture tion, one then followed by a sharp (and irre- that has itself disappeared? To narrate politi- versible) transition to adulthood. The social cal events retrospectively has always been a experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, like Roch- tricky process, in part because the tendency dale, seem to instead permanently inhabit stu- of the evental is to create something new at denthood, foregrounding transition, study, and the outer edges of an existing situation. As Ba- indeterminacy as a way of being political. This diou frequently reminds us, events are inher- refusal to “grow up” also represents a refusal to ently unpredictable. They happen against the cohere with normative ideas about respectabil- odds of everything we think we know about a ity, maturity, etc. state of affairs. But we are dealing with more than the trickiness of narrating events as such These ideas about studenthood are rooted in the here. Instead, the problem has to do with a dominant critique of the university at that time, paradigmatic shift in the way time presents it- which characterized the latter as a “knowledge self. What has vanished is the entire universe factory”—a place where cognitive capitalism is of communism—the whole ramifying world of reproduced through the making of compliant left experimentation that constituted so much and myopic workers.3 At Rochdale, students of what took place world-historically between identified this turn in higher education as a 1917 and 1980 (the latter date, when both Rea- foreclosure of their futures. In pamphlets and gan and Thatcher were elected, is as good as self-published newspapers, they express de- any to name the end of the era which preced- sires to learn and experiment without the nar- ed it). Included in this notion of a communist row frame of goal- and career-oriented course- universe—we could call it a left universe or a work. The point on “knowledge factories” is socialist universe too—would, of course, be the crucial to the formation of their ideas about actually existing state socialisms, but also left studenthood: in lieu of being melded, norma- unionism, radical student movements, guerilla tively socialized, and disciplined, they seek to groups, communes, etc. However specific or remain open to possibilities and ways of know- singular the Rochdale experiment was it can’t ing that escape the logic of the factory. really be understood apart from the now-van- ished atmosphere of this universe. AP: This question has to do with what we see as a core line of inquiry at work in Come Live How, then, does one represent an experiment With Us, one directed at the relationship be- like Rochdale, one that was, in its time, so in- tween representation and history. It is not that tensely and confidently here and now? This your piece seems particularly interested in was a confidence, a joie de vivre, that was re- representation as such—this was really a the- liant in part on a broad sense, no longer pres- oretical fetish of 1990s deconstructionist art ent on the left, that in the long run, in the end,

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we will win. I don’t mean to use this phrase flip- of historical layers at work in all of this. What’s pantly: there’s a real sense among students in going on here? the late sixties and early seventies and among organized militants and movements that the FM: I fully agree with your contention that stu- forces of reaction and conservatism are in re- dent groups and other folks on the left did be- treat and that capitalism as a system is a visitor lieve they would win! This analogy of the mir- from the past (and not the future). It is not an rored door is very apt, and it’s one that I have exaggeration to say that given our own polit- tried to recreate in my approach toward the ical conjuncture, the work of re-staging such project. While I agree that it takes an immense an experiment—giving life to its agents’ expec- conjectural shift to imagine the sociopolitical tations and actions, immanently understand- context of the 1970s, my capacity to speak with ing their desires—requires the same kind of ar- former residents helped to bridge the gaps in cheological leap required by anthropologists my understanding. They outlined the unique working on groups radically removed from conditions of possibility that enabled Rochdale themselves in time and space. In other words, College to happen. I conducted interviews we’re not sure that returning to the political with Rochdale alumni but ultimately decided universe of the early 1970s is all that differ- to ask them to read key documents from the ent from having to imaginatively reconstruct College history for the camera. One text ex- the life-world of the Etruscans! At least from presses the educational ideals of the College, my view this is how dramatic the conjunctur- another outlines rules for governing citizen- al shift has been since the rupture introduced ship at Rochdale via a policy toward “crashers,” into history by Reagan and Thatcher. It is as if and a third chronicles the federal government’s neoliberalism were a kind of garishly mirrored outrage at the clean-up they were left with door: once closed it shuts off the time/space upon Rochdale’s closure. By having College beyond it in a new way, making attempts to alumni perform these texts, I try to foreground film or write across the threshold extremely their enduring presence, no matter how far so- difficult. So your film sets itself this extremely cially and politically removed we appear to be interesting (and difficult) task, that of filming from this episode of recent history. They are in through a mirrored door and onto a world that their sixties, seventies, or eighties, and they has vanished. You seem to be explicitly trying continue to carry on and transmit the past. to thematize this by focusing very closely on the material culture of the signs and traces left by Rochdale (for example, with shots of hands moving through archives, of period docu- ments, and of its architectural remainders). You also choose to access the subjects of Ro- chdale not through direct interviews in which they are asked to reflect spontaneously on the past, but by having them read period doc- uments that were produced about or by Ro- chdale. There’s a very explicit foregrounding In a similar way, I filmed the College building with attention to its details, in spite of the fact

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that there’s little to look at. Aside from The Un- above. Representations of the political are too known Student (the sculpture mentioned above), often limited to acts of dissent and temporal- the lone evidence of Rochdale is a painted mu- ly limited to insurrectionary moments. For me, ral in the atrium. The building is underwhelm- the political elides the fragmentary nature of its ing, and mute to the events that took place conventional representations because it is be- there. In the video, I combine and overlay im- yond visuality; it exists in forms that cannot be ages of the College building with archival pho- represented. With this modest project, I try to tographs and documents that show the same go beyond visuality as a singular approach to- site as a place of dynamic social life. The bifur- ward representing history by engaging with the cation that happens here—between a building archive through mediated processes: through that cannot express its history and fleeting pho- making, publishing, and performing. In so do- tographs from the past—is part of the difficul- ing, history is not just represented, but made ties of visualizing the political you mentioned and re-made to animate the present.

Image credits Notes

Video Stills: Come Live with Us. HD Video, 20:30, 1 Dream Tower. Dir. Ron Mann. Sphinx Produc- 2016 tions, 1994.

Installation views: 2 Simpson, Robin. “Let the Buyer Beware.” This Book is a Classroom, Passenger Books, 2012. Installation view of Come Live with Us at The Art Museum at the University of Toronto 3 Raunig, Gerald. Factories of Knowledge, Industries Studio table with 3D-printed sculptures and inkjet of Creativity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) (2013). prints, adhesive inkjet prints, spraypaint. 2016

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ADAM CHARLES HART

Abstract | Killer POV—a subjective camera without a reverse Résumé | Killer POV—caméra subjective sans montage par- shot—is at the center of many of the most influential critical allèle—est au centre de nombreux articles critiques les plus writings on modern horror. However, these discussions often influents sur le film d’horreur moderne. Ces discussions se start from the assumption that the camera’s point of view pro- basent cependant souvent sur l’idée que le point de vue de la duces identification. This essay attempts to disengage our -un caméra crée l’identification. Cet essai tente de détacher notre derstanding of horror spectatorship from such models and to interprétation du regard du spectateur sur l’horreur de tels provide an alternative reading of killer POV that engages with modèles et d’offrir une lecture alternative de killer POV qui the genre’s structures of looking/being looked at while remain- implique les structures du regardant/regardé de ce genre de ing sensitive to what precisely is being communicated to view- film tout en demeurant sensible à ce qui est exactement com- ers by these shots. Killer POV signals to the viewer the presence muniqué aux spectateurs par ces scènes. Killer POV signale au of a threat without displaying the monster/killer/bearer of the spectateur la présence d’une menace sans représenter le mon- look onscreen. In addition to keeping the threat un-embodied stre/tueur/ porteur de cette apparence sur l’écran. En plus de (or only vaguely embodied) and unplaced, killer POV alerts garder la menace non-incarnée (ou seulement vaguement in- the viewer to the film’s withholding of crucial diegetic informa- carnée) et physiquement absente, killer POV alerte le specta- tion, both of which are essential to understanding the unique teur sur le fait que le film retient des information diégéniques mode of spectatorship provoked by modern horror films. cruciales, ces deux fonctions sont essentielles à la compréhen- sion du mode unique de regard provoqué par les films d’hor- reur modernes. KILLER POV

Introduction reaction to the genre’s turn away from tradition- al monstrosity. When the fearsome spectacle of n the 1970s, horror was a genre in flux. monsters was no longer the defining trait of hor- Whereas in traditional Western horror nar- ror, the genre found other ways to distinguish it- ratives monsters such as Dracula came from self. Without the otherworldly terrors of ghosts IOld Europe (often preying on New Europe), and goblins, what separates a killer with a knife the descendants of Norman Bates and Romero’s or a chainsaw from, say, a killer with a gun in a ghouls came from next door or from the out- gangster movie? The answer was largely formal. skirts of town, happening upon victims thanks If traditional monsters are monstrous because to inopportune stops along the highway or more they exist physically at the edges of our realms intimate, familiar reasons. Though ghosts and of understanding, then modern horror sought vampires never went away, the genre made room to make its physiologically human killers suf- for—and was increasingly identified with— ficiently fearsome and unfathomable through more human monsters.1 In the horror films of stylistic innovations. Cinematography became the 1970s monstrosity shifted to psychological crucial to horror’s aesthetic and to its creation and behavioral categories: you are a monster for of threatening, dangerous monsters. Monsters what you do, not what you are, for your brain and killers moved offscreen, and lurking, roving rather than your physiology, supernatural or cameras signaled to the audience that something otherwise. This new wave distinguished itself in was out there watching and waiting to attack. part through an emphasis on violence, as horror films became bloody in a way that had mostly This transformation becomes formalized and existed at the margins of the exploitation circuit focused through what I call “killer POV.” An before Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The unattributed subjective camera, killer POV Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). This was an is unique to horror. It places a threat within a era of raw, visceral horror that spawned the first scene without visualizing it. The technique was sustained serious critical and academic consid- quickly adopted as a method for attributing a erations, most influentially in the writings of sort of unfathomable fearsomeness to the phys- Robin Wood, who identified an emerging revo- iologically unexceptional killers of 1970s horror. lutionary energy in the genre.2 Killer POV located its threats offscreen, in the unseen spaces surrounding us, just beyond what As the influence of Psycho (1960) and Night of was visible. It viscerally communicated (and en- the Living Dead took hold with films such as acted) the paranoid tinge of 1970s horror: we Massacre, Last House on the Left (1972), The Ex- know the danger is out there, somewhere. orcist (1973), Sisters (1973), Carrie (1976), Shivers (1976), God Told Me To (1976), and Halloween By the early 1980s, the roving, unattributed (1977), horror shifted stylistically alongside nar- point-of-view shot was emblematic of horror, rative and thematic changes, typically in favor of but it also became a symbolic punching-bag for more immediate, visceral aims. Most obviously, much that critics hated about the always disrep- this change came through spectacles of violence, utable genre. For many critics, killer POV was but also through documentary-inflected cam- evidence of a turn away from the rebellious, an- erawork and an increased reliance on offscreen ti-authoritarian energy that Wood celebrated space. These stylistic shifts were, in part, a in 1970s horror. Whereas the films of the early

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1970s focused on identifying the humanity with- the women inside the house. One stationary in- in their dispossessed monsters and villains, the sert shot shows the partial silhouette of a man’s masked killers of the 1980s offered no such op- head as he peers through the window from ap- portunities. To the genre’s detractors, killer POV proximately the same position as the previous seemed to invite a sadistic celebration of the vio- handheld shot. This is the closest the film gets to lence it depicted without humanizing its perpe- a reverse-shot revealing the bearer of the look. trators. The resulting critical consensus on this As the camera approaches the side of the house, era of the genre has been largely reliant on mod- two arms appear at the edges of the frame and els of sympathetic identification that assume a climb, along with the camera, up to a second conventional, narratively absorptive viewing story window. position. Such analyses, often founded on assumptions taken from the apparatus theorists of the 1970s, suggest that sympa- thetic identification is decided primarily (or even exclusively) by camera position.3 The aim of this essay is to disengage our understanding of horror spec- tatorship from such models of sympathetic identification in favor of a more flexible under- standing based on horror’s sen- sational modes of address. I also The killer sneaks into a second-story window in Black Christmas. (Warner Bros.) aim to show how sympathetic dis- tance can be created between the spectator and This sequence from the beginning of 1974’s Black the camera, a separation of the camera’s look Christmas is an early instance of killer POV, a from the gaze.4 Moreover, this essay will work shot that represents the position and perspec- through the meaning of a POV camera within tive of a character but is distinguished from oth- narrative cinema more generally, to dissect pre- er POV shots in its refusal of reverse shots and cisely what is communicated by an image that its nearly universal characterization as menac- represents the vision of a diegetic character. ing (or at least suspicious). Black Christmas re- turns to killer POV repeatedly: the POV cam- The Devil’s Eyes era moves stealthily through the sorority house, sneaking up on its unsuspecting inhabitants for onsider this example: A POV camera a first-person view of each subsequent attack. approaches a large sorority house from For many of the film’s attacks, hands will appear the outside, noticeably freer and slightly at either side of the frame to strangle or stab Cshakier in its movement than it was in the pre- some unfortunate co-ed. We read the camera ceding exterior shot. The image cuts between as a literal presentation of the killer’s perspec- this handheld camerawork and more tradition- tive: it presents not a general approximation of ally (tripod-stabilized) shot and edited scenes of his position within the scene but, supposedly,

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precisely what he is seeing. First and foremost, it complex, virtuosic network of moving camera- indicates presence. work and subjective shots that characterize both directors’ work—one type of moving camera Variations on this device have been incredibly among many. common in horror since the 1970s. Its instant legibility explains its sustained, widespread use: Once the technique spreads through North upon seeing a killer POV shot, the viewer can American cinema, it moves beyond mystery assume that it represents the position and per- narratives. Although Black Christmas, like the spective not just of someone within the scene, Italian films, has obvious mystery elements, it but of a specifically malevolent figure. Indeed, de-emphasizes them—and, in fact, never re- the practice was so ubiquitous that horror films veals the killer’s identity. Further, the systemat- quickly became fond of playfully exploiting this ic, extensive use of killer POV in Black Christ- assumption, with countless killer POV shots mas serves an additional function, one that ending in friendly greetings, practical jokes, or subsequent films will capitalize on even as the leaping cats. remaining mystery-genre trappings fall away. These films recognize that keeping the killer Black Christmas was one of the earliest North offscreen is essential to maintaining the threat- American films to employ killer POV exten- ening character of their killers: being offscreen is sively. The technique comes less from Holly- precisely what makes them fearsome. Although wood’s experiments with the subjective cam- Black Christmas’ killer’s movements are careful- era in films such asLady in the Lake (1946) or ly mapped out within the house (much more Dark Passage (1947) than it does from the pio- so than in many subsequent slasher films), kill- neering Italian gialli of Mario Bava and Dario er POV here creates a sense of near omnipres- Argento. Brief killer POV sequences appear in ence. The killer is vaguely located “offscreen” Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969) rather than being concretely placed, and there and Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve (Reazione is little sense that he could actually be detected a catena) (1971). The technique would go on to by any of his unsuspecting victims. His identity play a major role in Argento’s filmography es- remains a mystery, but the power of killer POV pecially, becoming a major component of later lies rather in its capacity to create a vague yet films such as the influentialDeep Red (Profondo urgent sense of threat, one that exists within the rosso, 1976) and Opera (1987). In Argento’s and scene but that cannot be precisely placed. Kill- Bava’s films, killer POV plays a crucial narra- er POV appears alongside the rise of the slasher tive purpose: in many ways, these films follow and its all-too-human villains precisely because the narrative structure of mysteries, and killer it allows films to characterize its threats as being POV allows attacks (and other scenes in which unembodied, non-human, and perhaps even su- the murderer plays a role) to be shown on screen pernatural.5 That is, the narrative tells us that an without revealing the murderer’s identity to the escaped lunatic with a knife is perpetrating the viewer. In that sense, it is a stylistic equivalent murders, but what we see onscreen is an un-vi- of the black gloves and mask of Bava’s Blood sualized (perhaps even un-visuablizable) force, and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino) (1964) not limited to a body, human or otherwise. The and similarly concealing costuming in Argen- camera’s perspective places it within the scene, to’s early films. Killer POV also fits in with the but in a way that avoids precise location: the

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threat exists, in essence, offscreen, either behind camera reaches its target, the shot cuts above the camera or otherwise outside the frame. the water to show the swimmer being painfully tugged from below. Like all of the above exam- In Halloween (1978), the bravura opening killer ples, this sequence allows for the depiction of an POV sequence grants credibility to the opening attack without showing the attacker. However, attack, in which a young boy attacks his older even more so than the later examples, this could teenage sister. The delay of this revelation cre- hardly be characterized as a mystery: the killer ates a suspenseful curiosity, and there is a fris- POV belongs, of course, to a shark. Not until the son of surprise when the young Michael Myers film cuts to the first shot above the water does (Will Sandin) is revealed to be the killer. Yet this the viewer get any concrete, visual evidence of sequence has little to do with the epistemolog- the threat that was connected to that moving ical tasks of the mystery genre. Shown from a camera. Yet the shot, which did not have any ex- more traditional perspective, the sight of a six- act predecessors in mainstream Hollywood (and year-old with a knife presumably becomes much so is not referring to a recognized convention), less menacing, perhaps even ridiculous, and the is readily legible: a presence is creeping towards confrontation between brother and sister much the object of some kind of imminent assault, and less believable.6 we quickly associate the camera with not just a

The camera creeps towards a swimmer in Jaws. (Universal being, but with a malevolent one. As viewers, we Pictures) realize that when the moving camera reaches Perhaps the most famous, most iconic, and most its object, something unpleasant will happen to influential killer POV shots, however, came the poor young woman skinny-dipping alone at from outside of the slasher tradition in Steven night. The two killer POV sequences in the film Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Capping off its celebrat- are key to characterizing the villain not simply ed opening scene (and revived again for the as a shark, but as an unstoppable killing force— film’s second attack), a camera moves under- one that is not effectively stopped until the he- water, angling upwards towards an unsuspect- roes bring it above the water and killer POV is ing young woman swimming alone. When the left behind.

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Although its popularity and legibility have led the audience is being directed to adopt the same to it being discussed frequently in both aca- point of view,” claiming that the films therefore demic and popular criticism, writing on horror “displaced the villain from his traditional place is marred by an unexamined assumption that within the film and moved him into the audi- killer POV implicates the spectator in the sadis- ence” (55-56). Ebert goes further than Clover, tic voyeurism of the monster or killer through asserting that killer POV implicates the audi- whose eyes we are supposedly seeing. According ence and provokes a kind of sadistic voyeur- to the standard critical perspective, killer POV ism on the part of the spectator, eliding possi- constructs—some would even say demands—a ble distinctions between a narratorial position position of sympathetic identification with that and spectatorial sympathies. As perhaps the killer. In his influential essay “Through a Pump- most influential critic in the United States at the kin’s Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror,” J.P time, Ebert successfully used his national plat- Telotte describes the opening shot of Halloween forms on television and in print to draw signifi- as having “forced” the viewer to identify with the cant popular and academic attention to horror’s young murderer (117). However, killer POV can problematic gender politics. Clover, on the oth- also be understood as working against the kind er hand, makes room for more nuanced spec- of sympathetic identification implied there. By tatorial positions. In her germinal text, Men, sending direct signals to the viewer indicating Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Mod- imminent attack to an onscreen character, it also ern Horror Film, Clover argues that the view- produces fear for the character’s safety. Further, er’s sympathies lie with the monster/killer in the by withholding crucial narrative information in first half (a sadistic perspective), and then, as a rather ostentatious manner, killer POV gener- the “Final Girl” grows more assertive and active, ates a distanciation effect by indicating that we with the heroine in the second (a masochistic are not privy to some of the scene’s most rele- one). Both writers’ influential accounts assume vant information. Rather than simply aligning that visual POV is tantamount to sympathet- the sympathies of the viewer with the killer in ic identification. Clover examines the flexibili- the act of looking, I want to argue that killer ty and instability of that position within a sin- POV provides a sustained image of that look, a gle film, and in her discussion of the Final Girl viewing situation that introduces a more com- recognizes that there are factors beyond camera plicated series of effects. position deciding spectatorial sympathies. She privileges and prioritizes identification with the Killer POV and Sympathetic Identification Final Girl, with whom the spectators have de- veloped a more extensive relationship, over the “Point of view = identification,” Carol Clover earlier, briefer moments of identification with asserts, arguing that the viewer of the typical the pathologized killer. Yet in her account that slasher is “linked, in this way, with the killer in earlier sympathetic relationship with the killer is the early part of the film” (45). Roger Ebert fa- based entirely on killer POV (42-64). Through- mously railed against what he called the “vio- out the 1980s and early 1990s, critics would con- lence against women” film, and killer POV was tinue to account for killer POV’s popularity in a key part of his objection. Ebert argued that “it the genre largely through ideological readings. is a truism in film strategy that, all else being The most influential accounts of killer POV equal, when the camera takes a point of view, have understood it to be inviting—again, even

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demanding—identification with the killer, using they appear are often dominated more by imag- it as evidence that horror viewers sympathize es of the open, abject bodies of victims than they with monsters and killers. The implication, of are by intimidating views of their iconic killers. course, is that horror films are sadistic, misog- ynist, and inciting. These feminist critiques are crucial not just for the history of horror scholarship, but for the his- Linda Williams, citing and building on Ebert’s tory of the genre’s productions, as later gener- argument, similarly attributes malignancy (and ations of filmmakers would more fully engage an invitation to sadistic sympathies) to kill- with their substance.8 Yet within those critiques, er POV, but re-orients the argument. Williams these critics still assume that killer POV causes points out that, in older horror, monsters would spectators to identify with the killer rather than often be seen from the heroine’s point of view: the victims. But why would we assume that, in we see the monster as the victim/heroine sees these cases, “point of view = identification”? it, allowing for a “recognition and affinity -be To be sure, critics have made room for nuance tween the woman and monster” that she claims within such accounts. Vera Dika, for example, is an essential element of horror’s appeal for fe- argues that, because the killer is unseen, the male viewers (“When the Woman Looks” 31). viewer may “identify with the killer’s look, but Williams examines horror films such asNos - not with his character” (88). However, even Di- feratu (1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), ka’s account starts from the familiar presump- and King Kong (1933), in which the shots of fe- tion of identification. This suggestive assertion male characters’ looking at the monster mani- of identification with a camera angle has persist- fest a sympathetic recognition of otherness.7 In ed, carrying over into writings on found-foot- modern slasher and slasher-influenced horror age horror, in which writers such as Barry Keith films, however, she identifies the monster as a Grant assert that viewers identify with the di- “non-specific male killing force” that “displac- egetic camera (154).9 es what was once the subjective point of view of the female victim onto an audience that is now The crucial interventions in the 1970s of the ap- asked to view the body of the woman victim as paratus theorists, particularly Laura Mulvey, the only visible monster in the film. . . . Sheis provide a useful and durable theoretical model the monster, her mutilated body is the only vis- for understanding the inherent ideological con- ible horror” (31, original emphasis). While still tent of narrative cinema. Analyzing narrative agreeing with Ebert’s basic assumptions, Wil- perspective was of central importance to their liams shifts the terms from direct sympathetic project. Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative identification with the monster to an absence Cinema” claims that classical Hollywood cine- of identification with the victim (still based on ma was built on an assumed heterosexual male camera perspective), and she points out the perspective: men were the active drivers of the implications of the victim’s body replacing the narrative, while women functioned primarily to monster as spectacle. Indeed, in the 1970s and be attained and to be looked at. The look of the after, horror’s primary spectacles begin to shift camera at female characters/actresses frequent- from terrifying monsters to wounded victims. ly aligned with the look of the male protago- For all of the nightmares inspired by images of nist. Mulvey’s critique of Alfred Hitchcock, in Freddy, Jason, and Michael, the films in which particular, depends on the “subjective camera”

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of films such as Vertigo.10 Although, as Mulvey attention to itself as a subjective shot. Classi- notes, most of the shots in Vertigo have at least cal Hollywood—from Hitchcock onwards— some relation to the protagonist’s POV, we are tends to rely on shot/reverse-shot constructions also shown numerous images of Scottie, the pro- to indicate perspective. It is through shot/re- tagonist, looking. We especially see him looking verse-shot that both literal ownership of the look at Madeleine/Judy, the object of his obsessive af- and, typically, broader sympathies are commu- fections. Thus, while Kim Novak as Madeleine nicated: the reactions of the looker help to form is clearly presented as erotic spectacle to the au- the sympathetic perspectives of the film itself dience, this perspective is just as clearly marked and, to some degree, the viewer’s. By dispensing as belonging to a character within the narrative. with the reverse shot, the process of suture that In Mulvey’s reading, this construction is partic- Sobchack describes remains incomplete, and, ularly insidious, illustrating the conflation of the so too the viewer becomes decoupled from one perspectives of male character, male spectator, of the primary mechanisms of identification. If and camera that characterizes classical cinema. the shot does cut to another angle during a kill- er POV sequence, that new angle does not re- Writing a little more than a decade later about veal the identity, or even the exact placement, of Mulvey and the Screen school of film criticism, the looker. The film gives no view of the killer’s Vivian Sobchack points out that the function of face to cue anything like sympathetic reactions suture—the process of identification with an on- or have a connection of any kind with them as screen character that relies on such classical de- a character. vices as the shot/reverse-shot construction—is to “disguise the film’s perceptual presentation of Further, in many cases the villain, even once a representation. . . . To appropriate the presen- revealed, is not exactly a subject; they are, var- tational function of the film’s perceptive body iously, a shark (Jaws), a babbling psychopath for the narrative and thus to deny the narra- (Black Christmas), a blank-faced killer with dis- tive its dependent status as the expression of a tinctly robotic movements (Halloween), and so perception by a perceptual authority embodied on.. Even though the shark is heavily anthro- outside the narrative” (228). What is problemat- pomorphized—vindictive, even—it is not char- ic about this system of representation, Sobchack acterized as a full, coherent subject with whom argues, is that it is not questioned or problema- one might be able to identify. This is not to say tized within the film: the film, in effect, hides its that there is no possibility for localized, event- own perspective, naturalizing it as the perspec- based (as opposed to character-based) identifi- tive of characters within a film. Not only does cation.11 Undoubtedly, the horror film challeng- the cinema adopt a voyeuristic position towards es its viewers in part by soliciting our own, per- eroticized female bodies, it naturalizes that haps subconscious, bloodlust. This is, however, voyeurism. not dependent on identification with the person perpetrating violence, and does not preclude Killer POV stands out from nearly all other sub- any of the other reactions discussed in this essay. jective shots in narrative cinema in its insistent That is, that bloodlust can be accessed whether refusal to cut to the reverse-shot that tradition- an attack is filmed with killer POV or in a more al suture requires. Rather, it insistently draws classical manner.

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Rather than being imbricated within the logic of theorists) and towards more direct affective suture, killer POV abstracts the look, removing stimulation, akin to the visual display associated it from reference to a familiar or concrete char- with the cinema of attractions.12 The objects of acter who is doing the looking. Instead, it pres- killer POV’s look are indeed objectified, but that ents the act of looking to the audience, and thus objectification can itself be horrific. The precise should be understood as a depiction of a look. locus of terror in the sequence is associated with That is, the look itself is just as much the object impotent screams and futile attempts at resis- of the camera’s gaze as are the victims-to-be who tance. Even when it does not culminate in an at- appear on camera. The camera’s look may corre- tack, killer POV presents an image of the object spond with that of a character, but there is a rhe- of the look as powerless, unaware of and unable torical distinction. Rather than communicat- to control the threatening look directed at them. ing sympathetic alignment, it shows the viewer The fact that those victims were “most often and that, within the scene, someone is looking. Kill- most conspicuously [girls]” (Clover 33) sup- er POV might align the image of the film with ports the feminist reading that terror in horror the literal perspective of a character, but if we is written on and with female bodies, but does are invited to sympathize with any character in not necessitate a sadistic pleasure taken in the the shot, it is not obvious that camera position images themselves. The assumption that “point alone should be the decisive factor in produc- of view=identification” prevents the genre’s crit- ing fear for the victim. Killer POV, rather than ics from exploring the possibilities for sympa- being primarily an identification-device, is a de- thy– even if it is simply mimetic–with the fig- vice for creating suspense in that it cues us to ex- ures onscreen. pect an attack and to wait for it to arrive. For all of their important critiques, Clover, Ebert, and Moving away for the moment from the thorny, Williams tend to ignore this suspense function much-debated issues of identification, it is possi- because they do not think of horror in terms ble to identify two essential functions served by of its affective communication to the audience: killer POV. The first is practical: it allows for an killer POV directly signals the possibility of an (inexact) insertion of the killer/monster into the attack. As a device, killer POV is only effectively scenographic space without putting their body frightening if viewers recognize the danger for onscreen. This is directly connected to the spec- characters onscreen. What is disturbing about tator’s estrangement from the look of the cam- these sequences is the disparity between the era. What is being communicated most urgent- screaming victim and the unseen, emotionally ly is not a sympathetic closeness to the unseen, unresponsive wielder of the look: the only emo- often unknown figure that is doing the looking, tional cues we are offered come from the object but, rather, the presence of a threat and the in- of the look, with a radical separation between evitability of attack. Secondly, killer POV helps the viewer and the person through whose eyes to set up a relationship between space inside and we are looking. outside of the frame that is crucial for under- standing the formal and affective workings of Indeed, killer POV is indicative of horror’s shift- modern horror. Offscreen space in horror of the ing priorities, away from sympathetic identifica- 1970s and after is often a space of possibility that tion in general (associated with the “absorptive” can be dangerously unpredictable. This is most viewing practices described by the apparatus visibly evident in the jump scares that punctuate

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modern horror, moments in which something species of POV camera lurks. It peers voyeuristi- suddenly appears on screen, unexpectedly cally through leaves and windows, an inherently breaching the edges of the image.13 Killer POV suspect activity that the device calls attention to: is an important element of this, as the killer is we are seeing an image of this voyeuristic look. characterized as an entity that is not constrained Further, the slasher cycle was so famously for- by the limits of the frame. mulaic and recycled elements from previous films in the genre that any subsequent film is to It is through killer POV and an insistent refusal some extent relying on the association built by to offer more than a glimpse of the villain on- Halloween and Friday the 13th between the POV screen that otherwise vulnerable human charac- camera and a killer. Crucially, that killer POV is ters become something more intimidating. The employed in this way because there is something physiologically unexceptional villains of Friday that makes it instantly understood to be malevo- the 13th (1980), Prom Night (1980), The Burning lent even when it is not directly connected to an (1981) and any number of sequels and imitators actually threatening character (i.e. the joke that violate the logic of time and space in a manner ends with a leaping cat). A reverse-shot would that approaches a sort of spectral omnipresence reveal the bearer of the look and the space be- (while also seeming to attain omniscience and hind the camera, and this unique absence con- omnipotence), as long as they remain offscreen. tinually reminds audiences that there are large, Modern horror’s sensational address means that narratively significant areas in the diegesis that the worlds of modern horror often seem to be are being withheld from them. built backwards, with the audience’s perspective dictating the diegetic realm. With killer POV David Bordwell characterizes the space of clas- and other techniques to keep the killer out of the sical narrative cinema as being governed by pre- frame, there is no onscreen body for the view- dictability; a coherent world is built through er to see, and so, in a very literal sense, it does predictable revelation of offscreen space (161). not exist to be defended against or defeated by The shot/reverse-shot construction is essential characters within the film. As such, the frame to building this coherent, predictable space, re- around the image seems to have some bearing vealing those areas that were previously unseen. on the narrative world of the film. Indeed, the In other words, shot/reverse shot configurations modern horror film blurs the distinctions be- give the viewer a sense of visual mastery over tween diegetic and non-diegetic, with the limits the film’s space by assuring that any and all im- of the frame in particular necessitating consid- portant elements of the scene will be revealed. eration as a diegetic or quasi-diegetic category. In contrast, horror films from the 1970s onward tend to thrive on unpredictability: the modern Unreliable Spaces horror film forces its audience to realize that they do not know what lies around the corner, iller POV does not just communicate the or outside the frame, and killer POV, maybe presence of a threat; there is something more than any other technique, exposes, even inherently threatening about it, some- flaunts, just how little the viewer knows about Kthing fundamentally disconcerting, regardless that world. Killer POV starts without indication of context. There are straightforward expla- of who or what may be wielding it (though we nations for this. Perhaps most obviously, this are invited to guess) and denies or delays the

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reverse-shot that would communicate that very reverse shot, but through a surplus of close-ups important information. The reverse shot may of the Final Girl. come at any second, or it may never come, or it may come too late, but the viewer has no con- For the viewer, killer POV works against a spec- trol over this and, as such, is made to realize that tatorial sense of mastery over the diegesis that inadequacy. The affective response to a killer is typical of a more classical narrative construc- POV shot arises not just through the anticipat- tion (or of these final climactic sequences). It ed violent end to the shot, but from anxiety over refers to and activates vast areas of the sceno- what we might be missing on the other side of graphic space to which viewers are not privy. the camera. The only onscreen figures with whom we might sympathize in killer POV sequences are in dis- Killer POV allows the owner of the look the free- tress and often about to be attacked. Some films, dom of movement and apparent mastery over and some viewers, can of course see this as an space that comes from remaining unseen. At the opportunity for straightforwardly sadistic view- end of a film, when the tables are turned on the ing, but the marginalized position of the specta- killer, the combined looks of camera and protag- tor in these scenes, the withholding of import- onist stabilize them within a more-or-less con- ant information, and the shocks that come with sistent physicality that can be defended against sudden eruptions into the frame, complicate the and even defeated. This marriage of viewer/ ease of taking such a position. The jump scare, protagonist perspective comes in the form of a a specialty of modern horror, disturbs the safe return to classical shot/reverse-shot construc- distance necessary for voyeurism. The shocks tions, with the protagonist as the bearer of the and screams and sudden loud noises prompt a look at the killer. The diegetic space finally -be different type of viewing, one that is not only comes much more predictable at this point, and self-conscious but unsettled. If sadism implies viewers are subject to more traditional suspense mastery, then horror’s shocks works against it. rather than the shocks (and paranoid anticipa- The film, as Carol Clover reminds us, attacks not tion) that punctuate the rest of the film. Where just the onscreen victims, but the viewer in these the victims had been the objects of the gaze in moments, and these attacks can blur the cus- previous attacks, here the killer has become the tomary distance between spectator and screen object of the gaze of the heroine and the camera while exposing the lack of knowledge they have working together. The heroic Final Girl of slash- about the world of the film (202-203). In Clo- er films overcomes the objectification of victims ver’s terms, we might consider masochism to in earlier scenes to assert her own subjecthood, be more central to the experience of the entire victimizing the killer who once sadistically ob- film, from the killer POV-heavy early sequences jectified her. And rather than relying on camera onward. position, that subjecthood is based on tradition- al cinematic methods of characterization: she Reverse-Shot: Looking at the Monster is a fully-fledged, psychologically complex, and often heroic, character. Further, we are aligned hen offscreen, slasher villains are stylistically with her in much more traditional rarely limited to the constraints of forms – not simply through a reliance on shot/ a physical body. Jason, in the first Wseveral Friday the 13th sequels, is able to appear

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from the unseen space behind a tree at just the (Adrienne King), the film’s Final Girl. Once Mrs. right time to garrote a victim, or to wield his ma- Voorhees is shown onscreen and, shortly there- chete, undetected, from just outside the frame.14 after, reveals herself to be the killer, Alice is able He is nearly omnipresent, except for the space to fight back, to run away and, eventually, to kill within the frame. Killer POV keeps him loose- her attacker. This is in stark contrast to the se- ly tethered to scenographic space, but only for ries of killings in which Mrs. Voorhees had eas- the duration of that shot. His sudden intrusion ily dispatched Alice’s fellow camp counselors. into the frame, the source of the films’ most suc- Equally, once Mrs. Voorhees appears onscreen, cessful shock effects, often punctuated by shrill her attack is not as instantly effective as it had violins on the soundtrack, is an iteration of the been in previous instances when a single blow sort of penetration of place with which modern from a weapon was all that was needed to kill a horror seems to be obsessed: the killer is always victim. Being onscreen makes her human and on the outside of the house, the room, the closet, vulnerable. trying to get in, and of course the villain seeks to pierce the body, the ultimate measure of place, with knives, claws, teeth.15 Here I want to suggest that a similar penetra- tion is occurring in films such as those in the Friday the 13th series when the threat sudden- ly and violently enters into the place of the frame. Whereas in diegetic space protagonists seek to fortify their boundar- ies, locking doors and putting boards over the doors and win- dows when possible, here the The killer—Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer)—reveals herself in Friday the 13th. protagonist’s primary protective (Paramount Pictures) measure is visual: keeping the monster in one’s Horror films in the 1970s and after are very sights seems to be a necessary condition for sur- much concerned with instilling paranoia in the vival. In the final scenes of the film, the look of viewer about offscreen space—that which can- the camera and the look of the protagonist align not be seen is unpredictable and threatening to stabilize the monster within the frame, to lim- and defending against those unseen threats re- it the threat to a single, physically stable body. quires a hypervigilant attentiveness to the cor- ner of the screen. As noted above, it is frequently At the end of the firstFriday the 13th, the killer a break in the coherence of the camerawork—an has not been onscreen except for brief glimps- obstruction, a hesitation in movement, a shaky es of hands and shoes (and hazy views in long frame—that signals the presence of a subject shot). No victims have been able to muster any- whose look is identified with the camera. As thing resembling a defense until Mrs. Voor- such, the POV camera emphasizes the pres- hees (Betsy Palmer) introduces herself to Alice ence of the frame, and the viewer is made fully

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aware of the presence of a conscious choosing of perspective aligned with it, horror viewers re- the framing. Clover notes that the shakiness of ceive consistent reminders of how little they POV camera indicates a weakness in its bear- know of the diegesis, how inadequate their per- er and prefigures their ultimate defeat (186-87). spective on the scene truly is. Horror viewers do She questions how anyone could take the threat not know with certainty what lies outside the invoked by the POV camera seriously as, she as- frame, and the films insist on that uncertainty serts, it always carries with it these connotations. and exploit it to shock their viewers. In other words, these viewers are not the transcendent However, Clover overlooks the structure of kill- voyeuristic subjects hypothesized in the first er POV within individual scenes. During the wave of theoretical writings on spectatorship.16 course of a killer POV shot, the bearer of the Viewers of a modern horror film are better un- look is more or less invincible. In a material derstood as being at the mercy of the film itself: sense the owner of that look is not fully present they are insistently made aware of not being in within the diegesis to be defended against (and a privileged position of knowledge about the di- certainly not to be surprised by another charac- egetic world. Killer POV shows us that horror ter). That is, killer POV suggests a placement in movies tend to act on viewers. the scene, but it is not until the moment of the attack that they fully and unequivocally enter This effect is essential to a genre that is so em- the diegesis. Again, modern horror films tend to phatically obsessed with looking and being blur the line between formal and diegetic prop- looked at. Clover lays out the centrality of the- erties in service of sensational effects. Even with matized looking for modern horror, but the im- its occasional shakiness—Clover makes no dis- portance of the look for horror is even more tinction between the shakiness of handheld and structurally fundamental, going beyond close- smoother Steadicam/Panaglide camerawork ups of eyes or instances of voyeurism (see 166- that would dominate all but the lowest budget 168).17 The separation between looking and films in the 1980s—and the lurking and hiding being looked at structures the modern horror that it often undertakes, killer POV represents film—which, as Clover and Williams remind us, a position of power over the object of the look. is a deeply gendered divide. Killer POV in par- This is precisely why the climactic reversal—the ticular puts the act of looking on display while alignment of the look of the camera and the look rendering the experience of being looked at ter- of the protagonist towards the killer—becomes rifying and dangerous. so important in the final act: it limits the killer to a material body and a specific place within the WWhen a film such as Halloween or Friday the diegesis. Even then, if the killer moves offscreen, 13th reaches its climax and the killer is, at least those constraints often disappear, as we see, for temporarily, defeated while fixed within the example, in the final shots ofHalloween . look of both camera and protagonist, it does so with a return to classical shot/reverse-shot con- Indeed, killer POV has a specific affective func- structions and more traditionally predictable tion, unsettling viewers through its insistent characterizations of space. After the many vic- withholding of crucial diegetic information. tims being subjected to the killer’s look, impo- Thus, even when this is a feint or a joke, and even tent to protest, the heroine stands in for all of when there is no possible anthropomorphic the killer POV’s objects by asserting her own

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subjectivity and, crucially, bringing the cam- killer POV this unpredictability comes not from era and the viewer along with her. This asser- who and what is behind the camera but from tion, along with the subsequent return to order the limits of the diegetic camera’s view onto the within the narrative, is marked by a reinstate- world. Whereas killer POV indicates something ment of classical formal principles. It is in the fi- approaching invulnerability and omniscience, nal sequence that horror most closely resembles the diegetic camera signifies utter vulnerabili- the films of any other genre: even as the excite- ty because neither the viewer nor the camera- ment and suspense builds in a final showdown, person—whose views are here aligned—know horror’s shock-oriented unpredictability is sup- what exists beyond the edges of the frame: we do pressed. Thus, at the moment that the heroine not know who else might be looking or where asserts her subjectivity, viewers find themselves they might be looking from. If Killer POV pres- in a more traditionally privileged spectatorial ents a mediated perspective on the diegesis position. that is only partially placed within that diege- sis (and therefore only partially restricted by its Horror’s lack of reverse-shots, however, have physical rules), the handheld camera images of taken new forms in the past decade with the rise found-footage films, reliant on technologically of diegetic cameras in the so-called “found-foot- mediated vision, show characters fully placed age” films. This sub-genre is built around a dif- within the world of the film. ferent kind of POV camera, with a gaze associ- ated with protagonists and victims rather than This upends the logic of killer POV. Here, the villains. Each film’s images are supposedly those bearer of the look is vulnerable precisely be- captured by a camera within the world of the cause they (however, notably almost exclusively film. The style goes back to the notorious pseu- masculine19) are looking. The spectatorial posi- do-documentary Cannibal Holocaust (1980), tion coincides with that of the cameraperson— but grows more prominent with 1999’s The Blair at least in scenes in which the camera is being Witch Project and then, nearly a decade later, wielded—in that both are searching unfamil- Paranormal Activity (2007), Cloverfield(2007), iar, unseen territory for potential threats, and and a proliferation of films in the subsequent both are reliant on a mediated view that is al- years. This is a sub-genre predicated on tragic ways inadequate. The task of the cameraperson endings: someone within the narrative uses a both within the film and as the spectator’s avatar camera to record something strange or threat- is to do their best to compensate for that inad- ening and, eventually, that threatening some- equacy, to attempt to achieve the sort of mas- thing attacks and kills the cameraperson. tery over filmic space typical of the owner of the look in killer POV, or of the camera in classi- The distinction between killer POV and the di- cal Hollywood cinema20. However, this is not to egetic camera of found-footage films is imme- say that there is a strong sympathetic identifi- diately apparent. Although they sometimes look cation with the cameraperson, who is rarely the similar onscreen, the former signifies an un- protagonist of the film. By primarily remaining placed, vaguely defined malevolent presence, behind the camera, the cameraperson tends to while the latter very specifically places the cam- be a cipher; the people the cameraperson films eraperson, usually a protagonist.18 There is still are more fully developed characters and tend unpredictability in these images, but unlike to be the ones driving the action. The onscreen

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characters are usually in the same dire situation Found-footage, however, rarely leaves its struc- as the cameraperson: vulnerable and impotent turing principle of the diegetic camera, and or- to defend against an unseen entity potentially der is never restored, with film after film end- lurking just off frame, with the spectator being ing tragically as the killers/monsters emerge tri- left similarly vulnerable to sudden intrusions umphant from their confrontations with cam- from the corner of the frame.21 This, however, era-wielding protagonists for whom the act inspires a different order of identification than of looking is both their only hope for survival the one being discussed by Clover, Williams, and, at some level, what makes them vulnera- or Mulvey. Rather, this is situational and sen- ble. Whereas films reliant on killer POV ulti- sational, coming less from close acquaintance mately, eventually adopt more traditional cin- with a character than from the spectator being ematic forms to reassure their viewers that the placed in a similarly exposed situation: by look- vulnerability of their own look can be overcome, ing at the movie, the spectator is subjecting him that their subjectivity might indeed be asserted or herself to the kinds of attacks that result in against the dehumanizing violence of a mon- jumps and screams. Thus, although the meaning ster’s gaze, found-footage horror’s diegetic cam- of the POV shot has been completely reversed, era thoroughly reinforces our feelings of vulner- found-footage’s diegetic cameras arise from the ability. In doing so, it deflates any expectations same approach to offscreen space. of–-or aspirations towards—mastery or control that we as viewers may yet harbor. What is lost Found-footage brings to the forefront the genre’s in this transition to a new mode is a sense of anxieties about the look and looking. The shaky contrast: the wielder of killer POV asserts pre- camera of found-footage makes the vulnerabili- cisely that sort of mastery over the objects of the ties of the viewer, subjected to the genre’s shock- look, but also draws a clear distinction with our ing, horrifying images, the explicit text of the own lack of power. In the end, killer POV sug- film. It aligns the viewer with the owner of the gests precisely the opposite of what its detrac- look, the cameraperson’s onscreen compatri- tors claim: it shows the inadequacy of our own ots cueing our emotional reactions along with looks in comparison with those of the monsters whatever commentary the cameraperson might and killers controlling the camera’s perspective. offer. But the anxieties that found-footage the- It is not that we have no choice but to identify matizes are already present in killer POV, which with these figures, but rather that our helpless- always implicitly contrasts the omnipotent look ness to combat their control of the image is itself of the killer with the partial, vulnerable looks of a source of horror. both viewer and victim.

In horror, the look is a hotly contested arena, Works Cited for characters as well as for viewers, and spec- tators have no assurance of control over or safe- Benson-Allott, Caetlin. Killer Tapes and Shattered ty from the images in front of them. When the Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. slasher film and its descendants reinstate classi- University of California Press, 2013. cal formal norms in their climactic scenes, the image becomes more reassuringly predictable. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

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Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representations: Histori- Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, cal Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror 1999. Film. Columbia University Press, 2005.

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gen------“Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture der in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Porn’ Does Not Exist.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. Press, 1992. 1, 2011, pp. 42-60.

Diffrient, David Scott. “A Film Is Being Beaten: Notes Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanal- on the Shock Cut and the Material Violence of Hor- ysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl ror.” Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, edit- Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Indiana ed by Steffan Hantke. University Press of Mississippi, University Press, 1982. 2004, pp. 52-81.

Dika, Vera. “The Stalker Film, 1978-81.”American Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cine- Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ma.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1976, pp. 6-18. ed. Gregory Waller. University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 86-101. Paul, William. Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hol- lywood Horror and Comedy. Columbia University Ebert, Roger. “Why Movie Audiences Aren’t Safe Press, 1994. A ny m ore ,” American Film, March 1981, pp. 54-56 Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. University of Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Minnesota Press, 1993. Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Grant, Barry Keith. “Digital Anxiety and the Sobchack, Vivian. Address of the Eye: A Phenomenol- New Verité Horror and SF Film.” Science Fiction ogy of Film Experience. Princeton University Press, and Television, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153-174. 1992.

Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Hart, Adam Charles. “The Searching Camera: Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Uni- First-Person Shooters, Found-Footage Horror, and versity of California Press, 2007. the Documentary Tradition.” The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Forthcoming 2019. Telotte, J.P. “Through a Pumpkin’s Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror.” American Horrors: Essays on the Hills, Matt. “An Event-Based Definition of Art-Hor- Modern American Horror Film, edited by Gregory ror,” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Waller. University of Illinois Press, pp. 114-128. Cinematic Horror, eds. Steven Jay Schneider & Dan- iel Shaw. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2003, pp. 138-157. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Ex- cess.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Brau- Hodge, James Joseph. “Gifts of Ubiquity.” Film Criti- dy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, cism, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014-15, pp. 53-78 2002, pp. 727-741.

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---. “When the Woman Looks.” Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Image Notes Grant. University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 15-34. Figure 1 The killer sneaks into a second-story window Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American in Black Christmas. (Warner Bros.) Horror Film,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Hor- ror Film, eds. Barry Keith Grant & Christopher Shar- Figure 2: The camera creeps towards a swimmer in rett. Scarecrow Press, 2004, pp. 107-141. Jaws. (Universal Pictures)

Zinoman, Jason. Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Figure 3: The killer—Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer)— Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, reveals herself in Friday the 13th. (Paramount Pictures) and Invented Modern Horror. Penguin Books, 2012.

Notes For Chion, the offscreen voice of a not-yet-visualized 1 As chronicled in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value: How character achieves properties of “ubiquity, panopti- a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Con- cism, omniscience, and omnipotence” (23). Theacous - quered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, the mêtre’s “powers” come from having one foot in the di- shift to more human monsters was a willful decision egesis, while the other remains in the areas of possi- on the part of the filmmakers, who loved the horror bility offscreen. Killer POV similarly places its wielder movies they grew up on but wanted to avoid the chees- partially in the diegesis while keeping them unvisual- iness of their monsters. ized—and it is no coincidence that it is not uncom- mon for Killer POV to be augmented with the wield- 2 Wood wrote several articles throughout the 1970s, er’s breath on the soundtrack, turning them into literal culminating in his foundational “An Introduction to acousmêtres. the American Horror Film,” originally published in 1979. 6 William Paul makes a similar observation of the 3 Most prominently, Carol Clover (1992) and Linda film The Bad Seed (1956), in which the crimes perpe- Williams (1996, 2002), discussed below. trated by a young girl are kept off camera (275).

4 Horror has been a fertile forum for such explora- 7 Williams sees the monsters of classical horror films tions, with scholars such as Linda Williams (2002), as representatives not of excessive or monstrous mas- Adam Lowenstein (2005), Robert Spadoni (2007), and culine sexuality (a common reading of horror), but, Steven Shaviro (1993) providing accounts of horror rather, the “feared power and potency of a different spectatorship that have proven influential outside of kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the wom- the genre as well. en)” (“When the Woman Looks” 20).

5 The effect is not unlike that of the acousmêtre as 8 Most directly, Scream [1996] references Clover’s described by Michel Chion in The Voice in Cinema. ideas, but films such asThe Descent[2005], You’re Next

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[2011], A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night [2014], and “transcendent subject.” Whereas the received version The Love Witch [2016] are equally built on feminist of Metz tends to assume he is describing a literal tran- responses to the genre. scendence of bodily awareness, Hodge argues that Metz instead asserts the impossibility of this aspira- 9 For a more thorough discussion of POV and tion. Per Hodge, Metz’s arguments are founded on the found-footage, see Hart. spectator’s awareness of their body.

10 Mulvey writes, “In Vertigo, the subjective camera 17 Perhaps the most intriguing response to Clover predominates. Apart from one flash-back from Ju- has come from Caetlin Benson-Allott, who refigures dy’s point of view, the narrative is woven around what Clover’s focus on looking into an analysis of what she Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the reads as horror’s anxieties about movie piracy. growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view” (16). Note the elision 18 Alternatively, the found-footage places the cam- of subjective camera and “point of view.” era itself. Although the Paranormal Activity films rely heavily on handheld camerawork, they all extensive- 11 See Hills for a related discussion of what he calls ly use static, surveillance-style cameras on tripods or an “event-based definition” of the horror genre. mounted to ceilings (or, in a particularly ingenious sequence in PA 3, to the motor of a jerry-rigged ro- 12 Adam Lowenstein (2011) has discussed certain tating fan). These surveillance cameras generally in- modes of horror as inheritors of the cinema of attrac- dicate an impotent viewing: always seen after the fact, tions in his essay on “spectacle horror.” Lowenstein if at all, and there is no human agent associated with is there concerned with displays presented directly to that look to intervene. Many of these surveillance the viewer, while I am arguing for a more totalizing scenes occur when the central characters are asleep, understanding of horror’s direct address. so no active looking or alignment between character and camera is even possible. 13 For more on “shock cuts,” see Diffrient. 19 The most notable exception is Patrick Brice’sCreep 14 Jason was played by a different actor in eachFri - 2 (2017), in which the cameraperson is played by film- day the 13th film untilFriday the 13th Part VII: The maker Desiree Akhavan. New Blood (1988), the first of four films in which Kane Hodder plays the role. 20 In this sense, found-footage horror is similar to the screen of the First-Person Shooter (FPS) video 15 The soundtrack’s debt to Bernard Herrmann’s Psy- game. Alexander Galloway’s writings on the FPS and cho score is apparent throughout both this film and its resonances with uses of the subjective camera in its predecessor in the series, but never more so than film unfortunately predates the recent blossoming of during attack scenes that mimic the famous violin diegetic cameras in horror and elsewhere, and these shrieks of the Psycho shower scene. films do not fit within his taxonomy (39-69).

16 See Hodge for a nuanced re-reading of Christian 21 As Caetlin Benson-Allott suggests, in found-foot- Metz’s original essays disputing the conventional age horror films, the act of looking is not only danger- reading of his account of the cinematic spectator as ous, but is often punished. (167-202).

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DEEP BACKGROUNDS: LANDSCAPES OF LABOR IN ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

NATHAN HOLMES

Abstract | Although commonly understood as journalistic One saw them run around, shout at thriller tied to the historical realities of the Watergate investi- one another, and typewrite side by side gation, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men is deeply imbri- in tremendous, noisy rooms where no cated in contemporaneous ideas about office design and white one could possibly be concentrated; collar labor. Drawing on the film’s production history, as well yet despite this chaos the newspaper as discourses around knowledge work, office furnishings, and never failed to appear and to pros- the changing role of paper in office work, this essay places All per. The breathless confusion of the the President’s Men along a different historical trajectory, one editor’s offices seemed to mirror that in which Hollywood cinema elaborates, expressively re-stages, of American business life in general. and fantasizes the white-collar workspace. —Siegfried Kracauer, “Why Résumé | Bien que communément interprété comme un polar France Liked Our Films” (37) basé sur les réalités historiques de l’enquête du Watergate, All the President’s Men (Les Hommes du président) d’Alan Pakula or film audiences of the mid-1970s, the est profondément imprégné des idées contemporaines sur l’or- immediate force of All the President’s Men ganisation des bureaux et le travail des cols-blancs. S’inspirant (1976) was its naturalistic exposition of de l’histoire de la production de ce film, ainsi que du discours Fthe investigative work that led to the congres- sur le travail de connaissance, l’ameublement des bureaux et sional investigation of the Nixon administra- le changement dans le rôle du papier dans le bureau, cet essai tion. The proximity of the film’s release to the replace All the President’s Men dans une trajectoire historique, events depicted ensured topicality but also pre- dans laquelle le cinéma hollywoodien développe, remet en sented the problem of, as director Alan J. Pakula scène et rêve le lieu de travail des cols-blancs. put it, “drums rolling in the background” (774). As Pakula understood, histrionic monumental- ity threatened a sober recounting of the facts: “I was very concerned that the actors might hear a symphonic orchestra playing John Phillip Sousa every time they walked on set thinking: ‘Here is our great contribution to American history!’”

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(774) To dampen this patriotic aura, Pakula and The deeply encoded, office work-related appeals producer Robert Redford developed the film ac- of All the President’s Men become clearer when cording to a documentary aesthetic (Redford the film’s setting and staging is examined in re- even wanted to film in black-and-white verité lation to the constellation of discourses, designs, style). Together with cinematographer Gordon and spatio-temporal experiences that gathered Willis and set designer George Jenkins, Pakula around contemporary forms of white-collar la- created settings that would underscore the ba- bour between the 1950s and 1980s. Produced nality of journalistic labour. Iconic D.C. loca- during an era when the configurations of this tions were mixed with a preponderance of ar- work were being rethought by designers, man- chitectural sites at once modern and mundane: agement theorists, and information society the back entrance of the Watergate Hotel, a con- thinkers in order to center “knowledge workers” crete parking garage, the condos and suburban within information-dense spaces, the film welds homes of CREEP collaborators and witnesses, a a realist adherence to the material atmosphere McDonald’s, and, most prominently, the open- of office life with the fantasy of journalism as an plan newsroom floor of the Washington Post. exemplary form of white-collar labour. Through the aim of accurately depicting the contempo- All the President’s Men’s nose-to-the-ground rary workspaces of The Washington Post by me- procedural detail is widely appreciated, but with ticulously reproducing its furnishings and lay- increasing historical distance it is the film’s illu- outs, the production of the film also embedded, mination of the everyday workplaces of journal- both incidentally and unconsciously, the physi- ism as much as the political moment it chroni- cal discourses and choreographies of the mod- cles that shifts into the foreground. The milieu ern office, which it vivified through a narrative from which Woodward and Bernstein stalk the of investigative journalism. The result is the White House, dense with paper and paperwork, dramatic staging of a workplace characterized hums with pre-digital, eve-of-computing con- by flattened hierarchies, knowledge-based and temporaneity. In shying away from a history purpose-driven professionalism, free communi- with a capital-H aesthetic, the film pulls clos- cation, and an unencumbered latitude of bodi- er to the everyday life of the newsroom, track- ly movement. While these same attributes will ing away from conventional icons of American eventually coalesce around the rhetoric of the power and downward toward a microscopic neoliberal workplace, in this iteration they com- view of the quotidian materials, interior surfac- bine to generate a sense of the way non-alienat- es, and social rhythms of a modern office. As ed labour might look and feel. Looking closely at Siegfried Kracauer observed, Hollywood used the coordination of production design, cinema- journalism as an allegorical frame to explore tography, and staging in All the President’s Men the more generalized space of business life. In reveals a popular work that strives not just to be All the President’s Men, this allegorical frame is a realist document of journalistic procedure—a sustained and filtered through New Hollywood filmed report on reportage—nor simply a reflec- cinematography and production design in order tion of the shifting surfaces of business life, but to manifest the most up-to-date contours of of- an expressive elaboration of the utopian prom- fice life. ise of the American workplace.

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At stake in analyzing this staging is an under- developed across various cycles of American standing of how American cinema’s civic en- cinema. In pre-code films such asSkyscraper gagements—its topical liberal projects, from Souls (1932) and Babyface (1933), the office tower Pakula to Spielberg—rest on attunements to the was the stage for dramas of gender politics, class generic spatio-temporal experience and phys- mobility, and exploitation (Schleier 59-118). Lat- ical supports that characterize a shared world; er, in films such asDesk Set (1957) and The Apart- in this case, the shared world of office life. This ment (1960), these same spaces become settings physical imbrication challenges the conception for romance and dark comedy.1 Although the of white-collar labor, emergent in discourses of office has only occasionally figured as a cen- knowledge work, as primarily abstract, men- tralizing narrative site during the Classical era tal, or immaterial. It also broaches the problem writ large (exceptions, in addition to the above, confronted by Kracauer in his early study of include Executive Suite [1954], Patterns [1956], white-collar workers in Germany, Die Angestell- The Best of Everything[1959]), the open-plan ten (The Salaried Masses, 1930): the manner in offices glimpsed inThe Apartment, The Crowd which the commonplace nature of white-collar (1928), and the opening of Disney’s Goofy short work “protects it from discovery.” “[J]ust like Two Weeks Vacation (1952), with their undiffer- the ‘Letter to Her Majesty’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s entiated rectilinear rows of steel desks, became tale,” Kracauer writes, “nobody notices the let- a recognizable shorthand for conveying mid- ter because it is out on display” (29). This invis- dle-class alienation—a shorthand rising to de- ibly present existence meant that an image of lirious heights of distortion and surrealism in class identity for the white-collar worker was The Trial(1962), 1984 (1984), and Brazil (1985). impeded. Neither proletarian nor bourgeois, the emergent class of office worker lacked the Following Kracauer’s lead, we can map a more cohesion that cultural imagery might provide. consistent cinematic genealogy of the types of Yet, writing later in “Why France Loved Our office activity represented inAll the President’s Films” [1942], Kracauer found that the Ameri- Men not by way of office films but via the jour- can journalism film helped provide a glimpse of nalism film. From the Warner Bros. films of the this imagery, offering dense visual constructions 1930s and 1940s such as Five Star Final (1931) of an office life-world that had been so elusive and His Girl Friday (1940, a remake of The in the Weimar era. All the President’s Men sus- Front Page), through to Henry Hathaway’s Call tains this tendency, drawing on the topical ur- Northside 777 (1948), Joseph Losey’s The Law- gency of a historical journalistic investigation to less (1950), Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice display white-collar labour, converting a space (1982), Ron Howard’s The Paper (1994), Da- otherwise pervaded by the static triviality of vid Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), Tom McCarthy’s corporate culture into an expressive landscape Spotlight (2015), and Steven Spielberg’s The Post of action. (2018), films based around the practices of re- porting have been a reliable and enduring form Office Cinema & Paperwork in American cinema. Uniting narratives of in- vestigation and procedure with themes of public An ecosystem of white-collar locales—the office, good and the ethical boundaries between infor- the elevator, the lobby, the commuter train— mation and sensation, genres of reportage enter- has, however intermittently, been imaginatively tain under civic cover. Although the newsroom

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resembles the generic open-plan office, the jour- In the same way that the TV series “The Office” nalistic labour that is fictionalized into genre (2001-2003, remade 2005-2013) underlines the (oftentimes by screenwriters who began their vacuity of office work by portraying the labour careers as reporters, such as Ben Hecht, Sam- of a sales team that actually sells paper, the news- uel Fuller, and Richard Brooks) offers the pos- room film magnifies the experience of the office sibility of plots more dynamic than the stories by transmuting its material contents into an ob- spun from white-collar routine. Segmented into jective and often transcendent common cause. various departments—the city desk, sports, the All of the different genres and formats of paper social column—the spatial organization of the that comprise office life become a single entity newsroom becomes a microcosm of the city it- and democratic instrument: the paper. While self, from which it receives and translates vari- physically similar to the office film in many- re ous messages. Furthermore, just as the distribu- spects, the newsroom film plots the means of tion and seriality of the news defines and shapes production itself, animating rather than dead- the rhythms of urban life, so too does the tem- ening the physical plant of the office. Instead porality of the newsroom alternate between pe- of the stock setting of middle-class anomie, the riods of idle waiting and intense, deadline-fo- cinematic newsroom becomes a locale associat- cused activity. ed with professionalized problem-solving and goal-oriented action. Rather than the numbing In his brief history of the genre, journalism his- abstractions of white-collar work, news produc- torian Thomas Zynda observes that whereas in tion deals in concrete knowledge for the public the 1930s and 1940s, journalism films tended to good. As a cinematic chronotope (time-space), focus on editors and journalists as individual the newsroom presents a utopian version of of- figures—for example, as crusading investigators fice life, a place for paper to mean something. in Losey’s The Lawless or sensationalist oppor- tunists in Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951)—begin- Office Landscapes & Knowledge Workers ning in the 1950s films such as Richard Brooks’ Deadline U.S.A. (1952), Fritz Lang’s While the The kinetic nature of the newsroom in Holly- City Sleeps (1956), or Jack Webb’s -30- (1959) wood cinema parallels transformations in con- shifted focus to news organizations themselves, ceptions of office work and design that were per- giving greater prominence to the techniques, colating in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the materials, and coordination of newspaper pro- 1950s, offices were laid out in grid-like designs duction (19). As newsroom films became more with identical desks facing forward, as in a embedded in a single setting, they also began school classroom. Around the mid-century, the to invoke the spatio-temporal experience of ge- German management group Quickborner ad- neric office work phenomenologically in a more vanced the idea of “bürolandschaft” or “office sustained way. As Kracauer intuits, journal- landscape,” which introduced organic, non-or- ists on film were office workers: they inhabited thogonal variation into office layouts (figure 1). open-plan workplaces, answered to managers, Featuring a mixture of plants and desk group- rode elevators, made and consumed coffee, and, ings, this design favored non-linear pathways in the most literal sense, pushed paper.2 and multiple meeting sites to encourage em- ployee interaction. In the 1960s, research and development carried out by Robert Probst for

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the Michigan-based furniture manufacturer impact of diverse and competitive tech- Herman Miller continued in the same vein, re- nology on the user. It provides a combi- sulting in the production of a new office system nation of discipline and permissiveness in named “Action Office.” Like the concept ofbür - appropriate measure. . .disciplined in that landoschaft, the Action Office advanced ideals of it limits and protects from chaotic, unreg- an open-plan workplace that could organically ulated complexity. . .permissive in that it facilitate informal communication, worker au- allows wide expression and re-expression tonomy, and organizational flexibility through for both the individual and the organiza- low-partitions, cellular groupings of desks, and tion. (33) modular parts that could be adapted to meet worker’s needs. Probst’s sequel to the Action Of- As Probst suggests, a cardinal problem facing fice, Action Office 2, refined his design concepts the modern workplace was an issue that would and was accompanied by a lavishly designed become more popularly known, following book, The Office: A Facility Based on Change the publication of Alvin Toffler’sFuture Shock (1968), that outlined the issues surrounding the (1970), as “information overload.” Probst’s name modern workplace and the concepts behind the for this phenomenon was “the big communica- Action Office system. tion accident,” and Action Office 2 addressed -it self specifically to streamlining, bracketing, and diverting the multitudinous flows of informa- tion that modern workers were tasked to navi- gate (14).

Occupying these new workspaces was a new fig- ure: the knowledge worker. Like the German salaried classes chronicled by Kracauer in the 1930s, postwar America saw the emergence of a new class of worker, one who likewise seemed caught between proletarian and bourgeois iden- tity. One issue afflicting this new class had to do Figure 1 with the indeterminate nature of the skills that were required of them. Writing of the “comput- Probst’s historical survey of office design and his er programmers, accounts receivable flow ana- diagnosis of its many problems is followed in the lysts, the lower levels of control and stock pro- book by a series of often abstruse principles be- cessing in brokerage houses” that comprised hind the user- (worker)-friendly design of the the new work stratum within the white-collar Action Office: sphere, Richard Sennett observed that they were “neither in control of the use of their own skills, [The Action Office 2] is an implementing nor performing tasks which are so routine any- tool-concept reconciling new software one of the street could immediately do them, the planning with the hardware of coordinated members of this special category… have as yet behavior. Its aim is to be responsive to the not group identity, no class culture in which to goals of the user. It aims at moderating the picture themselves” (404). The invention of the

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knowledge worker sought to resolve this quan- The abstraction and intellectuality imputed to dary, if only on the level of self-image In his il- knowledge work also combined with a rhetoric luminating cultural history of the office,Cubed: of dematerialization that began to occlude the A Secret History of the Workplace (2014), Nikil physical experience of office life, particularly as Saval chronicles how the management theories networked desktop computers became the pri- of Peter Drucker and Fritz Machlup construct- mary medium of information and calculation (a ed the knowledge worker as someone capable rhetoric sustained within the discourse of wire- of applying specialized and cross-disciplinary less and cloud computing). Just as the labour of knowledge to the complex problems of their knowledge work was now identified with dis- field. The autonomy of knowledge work, they -ar embodied mental operations, so too was data gued, had the power to flatten workplace hierar- now invisibly flowing between the impenetra- chies, shrinking the necessity for an overbearing ble array of beige and gray machines taking up managerial class. For his part, Probst seems to significant office real estate.3 Yet for all these balance the tension between management and popular forecasts, white-collar work remained labour in his writings with a consistent appeal tethered to generic open-plan interiors consti- to both workers as self-determined individuals tuted by desks, typewriters, rolling chairs, water and the overarching necessity of discipline. As coolers, fluorescence, and an ever-diversifying Saval points out, however, the foggy discourse multitude of paper products and technologies. of the knowledge worker that developed with- The description of knowledge work by econo- in management tracts was largely an anxious mist Fritz Machlup in fact alludes to the perva- response to a historically overeducated and un- sive materiality of the office; he describes knowl- derstimulated labour force. It was developed, in edge workers as “all the people whose work con- other words, not according to demand but sup- sists of conferring, negotiating, planning, di- ply: “The jobs had not gotten more complex,” recting, reading note-taking, writing, drawing, Saval points out, but “the individuals working in blue-printing, calculating, dictating, telephon- them had.” Knowledge work “seemed to answer ing, card-punching, typing, multigraphing, re- to a felt need, a spirit of anxiety in the workforce cording, checking, and many others” (41). Like itself rather than a change in the kinds of work Probst, Machlup understood the obstinately being done” (198). physical universe of practices and materials that defined work within an office. The rise of com- The anticipatory descriptions of the knowledge puters notwithstanding, knowledge work, like worker were particularly apposite to the con- the office work of most of the th20 century, still tours of the post-industrial information soci- meant paper work, even if paper was now circu- ety outlined by Daniel Bell, Alan Touraine, and lating and aggregating in new ways. Knowledge other social theorists in the 1970s. As post-in- workers, just like all white-collar workers, exist- dustrial America pivoted from manufactur- ed within a contemporary object-world that was ing towards goods and services, the knowledge invisibly present. Lacking an image of them- worker would deal primarily in information, selves and their place in the world, the actuality conducting mental rather than physical work of the knowledge worker, such as it was, faced a in an economy that was now shifting toward fate much like Poe’s purloined letter, protected the production of intangible or symbolic goods. from discovery by mundaneness.

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Wide-Screen Corporate Modernism in the cavernous, recently completed Los Ange- les Convention Center, designed by West Coast hrough the 1970s, Alan Pakula’s films ex- modernist Charles Luckman. hibit a keen eye for the neglected recesses of the built environment. In an interview In conjoining modern architectural space to Tin Film Comment published shortly after the re- an anxious vision of contemporary society, Pa- lease of All the President’s Men, Pakula declared kula was upholding a tradition within Amer- that he “loved to use architecture to dramatize ican filmmaking that had been most heavily society” (qtd. in Thompson 16). This statement pronounced within film noir. As Edward Di- gains concreteness in the mise-en-scène of his mendberg and Vivian Sobchack have brilliantly “paranoia trilogy,” which in addition to All the shown, mid-century noir was a singular venue President’s Men includes Klute (1971) and The for the popular expression of spatial estrange- Parallax View (1974) (Pakula’s lesser-known fi- ment in American culture. Noir had only re- nancial thriller Rollover [1981] also fits stylisti- cently entered the American vernacular in the cally and thematically with the series). Work- early 1970s, but Pakula was a devotee of 1940s ing with Gordon Willis on camera and George thrillers, and his films with Willis as cinema- Jenkins as production designer on all three of tographer (famously nicknamed the “Prince of these films, Pakula evinces a particular preoc- Darkness” for his work on The Godfather) graft cupation with the landscapes of corporate mod- noir sensibility onto emergent New Hollywood ernism. In Klute, the villain (Charles Cioffi) is aesthetics. The spaces Pakula created with Willis an executive of the blandly named Tole-Amer- for Klute and The Parallax View are excessively ican Corporation who resides in a panoptic deep, and the 2.35:1 Panavision frame allows a Manhattan skyscraper suite providing eye-lev- play with architectural volumes that frequently el views of the World Trade Center towers crowd and confine actors. These graphic struc- (still under construction at the time). Interiors tural elements are flat and opaque—geometri- and exteriors for these scenes were shot a few cally blocking out both long shots and close-ups. blocks from the WTC construction site at the Pakula and Willis’s cinematographic aesthetic is black curtain-walled Marine Midland Building, expressive, but not expressionistic in the con- a descendant of the Midtown vogue for Sea- ventional sense. As Dana Polan has remarked, gram-like skyscrapers and designed by Gordon “[noir’s] expressionism is most often not the tri- Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. The umph of a subjectivity in which environment Parallax View also centers on banal corporate somehow reflects back to a character his/her evil, this time in the form of the Parallax Cor- own internal nature but quite the contrary, an poration, a shadowy organization that orches- expressionism that demonstrates the radical ex- trates political assassinations. Large-scale civ- ternality and alterity of environment to person- ic landmarks of the Pacific Northwest such as ality” (qtd. in Sobchack 144). Willis’s images ply the Space Needle and the Gorge Dam are key similar territory, presenting a modernist land- settings in the film, and so too are the austere scape both familiar and claustrophobic. headquarters of the titular corporation, partially sited in the undulating concrete tile plaza of the The D.C. setting ofAll the President’s Men allows Central Civil West Court House in Los Ange- Pakula to further develop the architectural vi- les. The downbeat ending for the film takes place sion established by Klute and The Parallax View.

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Yet while the third film in the paranoia trilogy Studios of Warner Brothers. The reproduction continues to amplify the anxious nature of cor- of the Post offices was 32,000 square feet and -ne porate modernism, it also departs from a per- cessitated removing a wall in the soundstage to vasive sense of noir-inflected doom. Instead, he gain extra space. The replica of the Post’s light- builds a space that rewires figure-ground rela- ing also necessarily became a practical lighting tionships of depth, scale, and movement along source for the set since the ceiling construction the lines of both the journalism genre and dis- ruled out conventional overhead lights. Around courses of office work, emphasizing the possi- 700 fluorescent lighting units were installed— bility of individuals gaining footholds of agency although the ballasts that powered the lights within modernist environments. had to be wired remotely to the tubes because of the hum they emitted (Willis 520). The finished Deep Spaces, Purloined Papers construction was furnished with custom-made desks that reproduced the new color-coded desk erhaps more than any journalism or of- groupings at the Post, outfitted with an array of fice film that preceded it,All the Presi- operational teletype machines and telephones dent’s Men committed itself to amplify- and, finally, dressed with a mammoth assort- Ping the materiality of contemporary office life. ment of paper clutter. Six months before the actual Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began to report on Water- Paper of all kinds fills every frame of All the gate, the Washington Post had moved into a new, President’s Men that is set in the newsroom (fig- fully updated newsroom (Pakula 774). With its ure 2), the result of extensive creative work with exposed ceilings, the older Post newsroom was paper products and office furnishings by art -di darker than the updated space, which featured rector George Jenkins (who had also worked on fluorescent lighting suspended within drop-ceil- Klute and The Parallax View) and set decorator ings. The new design offered not only a bright- George Gaines (jointly winning the Academy er space, but also a series of straight lines van- Award for Art Direction that year). Just as Paku- ishing into the distance, creating the sense of a la and the film’s cast spent months in the news- vast interior space—perspectival grids that res- room observing the daily routines of the report- onated with the modernism that Pakula had ex- ers, so too was Jenkins invited to see the actu- plored in his previous films. Since Robert Red- al newsroom he was tasked to recreate. Having ford, whose Wildwood Enterprises was produc- researched and put together a set depicting the ing the film, was keenly interested in an exact- interior of a small-town newspaper for The Par- ing documentary aesthetic, this updated space allax View, Jenkins was somewhat familiar with would of course need to be depicted as closely this routine. However, when he finally got to see as possible in his film’s version of the reporter’s the newsroom of the Post, he recalled that his investigation. “heart sank”: “I realized that it was virtually an impossible job,” Jenkins stated, “It was so enor- Redford and Pakula had originally hoped to mous—I saw a thousand details in just a glance” shoot interiors on location at the Post, but it (qtd. in Corliss and Clarens 48). Unlike The Par- soon became clear this would be impracti- allax View, for All the President’s Men Jenkins cal. Instead, it was decided that a replica of the and Gaines were responsible for an entire acre newsroom would be constructed at the Burbank of set. Jenkins’ desk plan for the Post set almost

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identically matches the desk groupings of the ac- normally throw out.” Three months later, tual 7th floor newsroom. Per the plan of the Post we had seventy-five boxes of flat paper floor in Jenkins’ file, the plan for the set features and books, etc. We then photographed the clusters of 2-6 desks 8 rows deep and 4 rows top of every desk as well as made a list of across (George Jenkins Papers, folder 37).4 The what was there. Then in Hollywood, when it position of Woodward and Bernstein’s desks rel- came to dress the Post set, we were able to ative to each other in the film also corresponds put this material on the appropriate desks. to the actual position of the reporter’s desks in Howard Simon said to me, “George, you the D.C. newsroom. While some of the desks know that you’re going to get terrible pub- and furnishings were reproductions built for the licity on this. People are going to say you’re film, other furnishings (such as automated filing bringing our trash to Hollywood. And I systems) and machines (such as teletypes) were said, “I don’t care.” (qtd. in Corliss and Clar- acquired directly through office supply compa- ens 48, original emphasis) nies. Jenkins’ files contain brochures for prod- ucts offered by Herman Miller, Bell Telephone, That this apocryphal story has managed to stay and Simplex Time Recorder Co., some covered in circulation for so long perhaps has to do with with notes on prices (indicating that imple- its binding of realist commitment and Holly- ments were both reconstructed and purchased wood extravagance to undercurrents of popular directly). cynicism that regard American mass culture as detritus—the inescapable irony that garbage is One of the most oft-repeated stories about the in fact the primary export of both Washington film’s production is that Jenkins went so far as to and the American film industry. Jenkins’ sense request the contents of wastebaskets at The Post is much more pragmatic, and in its own way in- so that the wastebaskets on set could be filled sightful. Garbage is a matter of placement: put- with authentic garbage. Jenkins, however, tells a ting paper into a wastebasket is what reclassi- slightly different story: fies that which is useful into waste. Prior to that placement, such paper comprises the ambient Now I want to set the record straight here: décor of the Post’s work environment. I did not bring any garbage or contents of scrap baskets from Washington to Hol- Indeed it is the material that Jenkins collected, lywood. What I did was go to Howard Si- combined with Pakula’s penchant for deep space mons, The Post’s managing editor, and say: composition, that supports the highly resonant “I need stuff to put on the desks, and I don’t phenomenological experience of the newsroom want it to be old scripts topped off with a on screen. Unlike Klute and The Parallax View, letter from somebody who’s been working Pakula opted to shoot All the President’s Men in Warner Brothers for the last twenty years. in the more condensed format of 1:85:1, a ges- I want all the reporters to have material on ture toward the verité feel to which Redford as- their desks that they would normally have. pired. The reduction in the breadth of the frame We have three months before we shoot. If was compensated by the depth of the set. Long- you’ll allow me to put a cardboard box by shots of the newsroom floor are recurring im- every desk, then your reporters will put in ages, with both the receding ceiling lights and the boxes the letters and magazines they’d cylindrical columns providing perspectival cues

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shots repeatedly place Woodward and Bern- stein at their desks so deep within the back- ground that their pres- ence is barely percep- tible. This persistent motif is reflexively un- derscored late in the film in a scene where Ben Bradlee (Jason Ro- bards) angrily calls the reporters into his office. A close-up of Bradlee shouting “Woodstein!” is followed by a re- verse angle view of the newsroom floor. After Figure 2 a beat, Woodward and Bernstein become visible drawing our gaze across a variegated landscape in the right corner of the frame moving toward of desks overflowing with folders, binders, files, the camera. The camera holds its position as the reference books, loose leaf sheets of various col- men make an anxious trek from background to ors, and all the different apparatuses designed to foreground, re-emerging, as it were, into the sto- hold and organize paper clutter. The space is fur- ry itself. In this scene and others, staging and set ther extended by evenly sharp, no-contrast flu- design threaten to subsume narrative, eclipsing orescent lighting. When Pakula visited the Post narrative movement with the undifferentiated he became entranced by the “ruthless” light- display of office activity. ing of the space, which he felt created a “world without shadows.” The director has made his ap- In his comments on the visual style of the film, proach to light and dark clear in a number of Pakula refers to this alternating current as interviews, commenting about the newsroom: “counterpoint.” The effect is at its most visual- “This room with its glaring light was the hub of ly emphatic in shots that exploit deep-set space the film and from there we could go out to the through the use of split-field diopter lenses. In- dark places with their dark secrets” (Pakula 775). creasingly popular within New Hollywood film- making but now only rarely used, the diopter is As Willis relates, the application of depth was a supplemental lens that is placed over a cam- what made the film both cinematographical- era lens to create two separate focal planes, one ly difficult and interesting: “There were times near and one far away. The signature trace of the when the backgrounds were just as important as device within the image is a blurred line where the foregrounds. That is to say, the environment the two focal planes meet, usually concealed could not be lost behind the actors but had to be by positioning the camera so that the distract- an integral part of the scene” (Willis 521). Long ing blur is hidden by the edges of an object or

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a neutral color. As applied in All the President’s the finished puzzle so well that Pakula is able to Men, the diopter is primarily used to introduce dwell within the details—the story of the film is two distinct visual fields within the newsroom, not Watergate itself, but rather how the story of one focused on Woodward’s desk-bound ac- Watergate came to be told. The overstuffed, -en tivity (the device is primarily associated with gulfing space of the newsroom photographically Woodward rather than Bernstein) and the oth- literalizes the overwhelming fabula confronted er encompassing the indifferent bustle of the of- by the reporters as they labour to acquire and fice. In his analysis of the diopter aesthetic in identify the correct pieces to the puzzle in order New Hollywood filmmaking, Paul Ramaeker to find the story. What Pakula calls the “needle remarks on the ironic effect produced by these in the haystack” theme is most often conveyed divergent planes of action, noting that the fa- in terms of scale, with individual pieces of pa- cility with which the telltale trace of the diop- per comprising the story’s molecular level (821). ter is obscured in the film makes it “easier to Panoramic views of the office are matched by read these images as documentaristic depictions close-ups of the various notebooks, slips, and of the process of reporting, moments captured printouts through which Woodward and Bern- from the constant flux of the newsroom (which stein construct their story, an oscillation that is itself becomes a character)” (Ramaeker 188). For mirrored in the dual-focal planes of the diopter. Ramaeker, the use of the diopter in All the Presi- At a crucial moment when the story’s veracity dent’s Men is significant because it “goes well be- is questioned, Bradlee’s decision to back Wood- yond the largely straightforward functionalism ward and Bernstein rather than remove them typically imputed to Hollywood narration, and from the story is conveyed in a note that he stands as indexical of far reaching tendencies in passes to the Post editors that reads: “We stand 1970s American cinema, its ambitions to docu- by our boys.” The priority given to this written mentary realism, art film expressivity, and au- statement extra-diegetically underscores the thorial commentary” (188). broader logic of note-taking and documenta- tion in the filmed newsroom—the only way to Woodward and Bernstein’s thoroughly embed- move a story about paper forward is more paper. ded journalism, however, does have a thematic function that is narratively relevant. Like all de- It should be apparent at this point that the me- tective stories, All the President’s Men is about dia-historical dimensions of All the President’s the storytelling process: the raw information Men lie as much in the film’s detailing of jour- thrown up by a crime scene is organized into nalistic process as in its documentation of the a meaningful sequence that identifies, after the zenith of paper’s domination of the workplace. fact, a series of causes and effects and the agen- As much as we are watching a movie about jour- cy behind them. For most of the film, Wood- nalism, we are also following the paper trail of ward and Bernstein struggle to understand the American business life. Technologies of paper syuzhet—the frame that will organize the infor- reproduction were also politically topical: just a mation they have gathered. As Woodward com- few years earlier, the New York Times had pub- plains to Deep Throat (Hal Halbrook): “All that lished the classified documents that came to be we’ve got are pieces, we can’t seem to figure out known as the Pentagon Papers, which had been what the puzzle is supposed to look like.” Yet it covertly Xeroxed by Daniel Ellsberg (also a vic- is precisely because the 1976 audience knows tim of harassment by Nixon’s plumbers).5 Over

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others predicted; the entrance of computers did not immediately result in paper’s downsizing (see Sellen and Harper). Fittingly, films of the 1980s, particularly those set within the burgeon- ing world of finance such asWall Street (1987), The Secret of My Success (1987), Working Girl (1988), and Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), would portray desktop computers as partners in open- plan clutter. I would argue, however, that what All the President’s Men offers is less the before picture against which to contrast the paperless office of the future than a proleptic view of the hidden electronic conduits that would come to define office life. That is, what the film makes visible are not only the paper data that would Figure 3 become stored in computer memory, but also the communication flows between people now the course of the following decades the desk- hidden in cables and wireless transmissions. top computer and the ascendance of electron- ically transmitted information would gradually The depth of the film’s office set not only engulfs reduce the need for paper-based messaging and its protagonists in visual detail, but also creates data storage, laying the basis for the vision, if a stage for specularity and movement. In addi- not the actuality, of the paperless office. Around tion to its verisimilitude, the office set defines the time that All the President’s Men was being both visual and physical possibilities, as can be made, in fact, the concept of an office with- seen in what we might call Woodward and Ber- out paper had its first stirrings. In 1975, George nstein’s “meet cute.” In a series of point-of-view Pake, head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, shots, Woodward observes Bernstein noncha- spoke to Business Week about the rise of the pa- lantly absconding with his recently submitted perless office: paper drafts back to his own desk. Woodward must alternately lean forward and backward in Pake says that in 1995 his office will be com- his chair to see around the large column that pletely different; there will be a TV-dis- stands between his desk and Bernstein’s. Even- play terminal with a keyboard sitting on tually, Woodward rises and walks over to con- his desk. “I’ll be able to call up documents front him. After a testy exchange Woodward from my files on the screen, or by pressing returns and drops further draft pages on Bern- a button,” he says. “I can get my mail or any stein’s desk—he agrees that Bernstein’s revisions messages. I don’t know how much hard are an improvement but questions his tendency copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.” to “hype the facts.” As Woodward returns to his (“Office of the Future” 48) desk once again, City Editor Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) passes on a bisecting path be- However, this transition occurred in a much tween the reporters, barking without stopping slower and more uneven fashion than Pake and “Woodward, Bernstein, you’re both on the story,

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now don’t fuck it up.” Enveloped within a visual become more urgent and extensive: “As they and sonic landscape of telephones and typewrit- [Woodward and Bernstein] get more manic,” ers, Woodward and Bernstein’s short back-and- Pakula recounted, “the camera gets more man- forth, up-and-down ambulation establishes the ic, so that near the end of the film there is a shot emergent relation between the two reporters, of Dustin when he thinks he’s gotten confirma- one that transitions from an adversarial shot-re- tion of Haldeman being named as one of the verse-shot into a two-shot framing (this framing heads of the secret fund. We started at one end to become sustained as the trademark image of of the newsroom and we flew (figure 3). One of the film).6 the best Disneyland rides we’ve ever had was on that dolly” (Pakula 822). In this shot (figure 4), Indeed, the unfolding of the reporter’s inves- the speed of the dollying camera blurs the land- tigation is filmically conceived in terms of an scape of paper clutter, expressing the possibility increasing latitude of movement, with the sed- of transcending the material weight of accumu-

Figure 4 entary labour of phone calls and typing in sta- lated information and uniting the fantasy of the tionary shots giving way to a more and more knowledge worker with the incipient dreams of exuberant mobile camera. As the scope of the digital transmission and data storage. story grows, so too do the reporter’s movements

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The multiple ways in which Woodward and office environment. One week into the film’s Bernstein inhabit and physically negotiate the production, producer Walter Coblenz sent out newsroom in order to build their investigation a message to Jenkins, Gaines, and production resonates with the aspirations of mid-centu- manager Darrell Hallenbeck suggesting that ry office design. The layouts bürolandschaftof the production design and set departments be- and Robert Probst’s Action Office system were gin to exercise restraint in their efforts at veri- devised to encourage informational exchange similitude: “I urge you and all the departments and collaboration. These flows, visualized in the to carefully review the monies we are spending conceptual drawings, were partially conceived both on research and the recreation of what hap- anthropomorphically, in the pathways between pened three years ago. Even though our attempt desks and workstations. According to Probst, is to be as authentic as possible, make certain the problem with the modern workplace had that the monies we are spending show up on the to do with managing “the big communication screen” (George Jenkins Papers, folder 4). Since accident”, the symptoms of which included too the set itself had already been built, Coblenz was much information, redundant information. out- likely referring to the furnishings and practical of-date information. overspecialized informa- objects to which Jenkins and Gaines were devot- tion, and low-grade information (14). Paper was ing tireless and exacting energy. Several scenes, a significant part of this problem: “A hard look for example, feature dramatic business using el- at communication patterns tells us that we need evator doors. Either laboriously engineered or restraint, discipline and limitation in the rate in purchased (elevator-company brochures and which we are ‘papering’ each other. We already drawings can be found in the production files), have paper pyramiding at a crisis level in many the Post elevator in the film smoothly opens and organizations” (28). Probst declared that the of- closes in the manner of an actual elevator, rather fice was “an essential part of a new élan required than the clunkily affected manner of a mock-el- in information use” (16). One way of address- evator—a detail that would have been distract- ing this problem was through improvement to ingly noticeable only in its absence. Another sig- corridors of movement within the open plan. nificantly large machine purchased for the pro- “Recognizing traffic action as a communication duction—perhaps even the target of Coblenz’s event gives the facility manager opportunities caution—was a 44-foot Orda-Flow Document for planning its occurrence to achieve desired Conveyor from Acme Visible Records (a com- effects,” Probst writes, “Since motion between pany the production also contracted for a num- areas provides a highly random but interactive ber of its filing systems), a multi-track conveyor communication circumstance, its design should that wends its way through a workplace carrying be carefully worked out” (16). For Probst, as for upright documents (a descendant, perhaps, of Pakula, informational traffic is anthropomor- the pneumatic tube). Though it cost Wildwood phic and social. Enterprises $1,831.23, the machine does not ap- pear in the finished film, nor is it visible in any All the President’s Men’s dramaturgy of bodies of Jenkins drawings. It remains unclear how or and paper illuminates not just the role of human if the Orda-Flow was used,7 but given Pakula’s conveyance, but also the numerous machines of choreography of paper and people it is not dif- paper circulation, including the various teletype ficult to imagine how the machine would have machines that bring important updates into the meshed with his staging (much as a cluster of

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pneumatic tubes was central to the depiction of low angle might for a moment compare the ver- the New York Sentinel in Lang’s While the City tical scales of individual to building. It is difficult Sleeps). Within Pakula’s aesthetic of counter- then, at first, to discern just where Woodward is, point, furnishings such as the Orda-Flow are and what kind of building he’s entering. Cutting never solely background reality effects—they to the interior, Woodward emerges out of dark- determine and heighten the scope of action and ness and walks into the foreground, the sounds demand engagement by human agents to make of the soles of his shoes echoing loudly against the office move. concrete walls and floors as he comes into view and scans his surroundings. A cut to a reverse The Dark Office angle shows even more of the space, capturing the pattern of concrete columns, smattering of he sequence that introduces Deep Throat monochrome cars, and fluorescent lights that in All the President’s Men begins with recede, blacken, and disappear in the distance TWoodward exiting a taxi in an extreme (figure 5). Thus we are introduced to the parking

Figure 5

long shot, in front of a dark and inscrutable garage, the newsroom’s haunting double. Both structure, and then descending an exterior stair- settings are identical in basic shape, deep and way. The composition of the image inverts con- recessive. Yet the garage is filled in by inky dark- ventional approaches to signifying architectural ness rather than paper and office furnishings—a locations, wherein a vehicle is typically exited at noirish blot at the center of Redford’s wished- the front of a building at its base, and where a for verité rendering. Here Pakula lays out a space

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not of excessive clarity, but one organized ac- Research Materials” for All the President’s Men cording to the forward-leaning anxiousness of (Pakula Papers, folder 47). As in the film, Allen the thriller. Yet, even within these singular and emphasizes the garage’s recessive concrete fea- iconic scenes, the underlying appeal is a combi- tures, creating a noir mise-en-scène with a wor- nation of historical authenticity and white-col- ried Woodward at the center. lar familiarity. While building on Allen’s aesthetic, the film’s parking garage scenes are keyed to white collar experience, particularly in the way they build a distinct sense of temporality. Woodward’s initial journey to his destination is captured in an el- liptical montage of discrete scenes—leaving the house, the opera crowd at the Kennedy Center where he changes taxis—that fragment the du- ration of his journey. Once inside the parking garage, time begins to be expressed in more du- rational consecutive moments, each successive moment felt one after the other in longer takes. In essence, Woodward commutes to his meet- Figure 6 ings with Deep Throat. The anxiousness of the noir-thriller aesthetic here magnifies that com- The notoriety of the parking garage within the mon stretch of time within the white-collar canonical Watergate narrative—the culmination workday: the passage from a parking spot to the of which has been the placement of an histori- office. An experience of not quite work and not cal plaque outside the garage in Rosslyn, VA—is quite free time, sensed within the inhospitably owed largely to the scenes in the film version of transitional architecture of a parking structure. All the President’s Men. In Woodward and Ber- nstein’s book, the garage is one of a number of Like the life of the white-collar worker more gen- sites that Woodward meets Deep Throat, and erally, the parking garage has been a consistently it barely receives any description. The idea of suppressed feature of postwar urban life, usually building a visual inventory of Watergate sites— placed underground, on rooftops, or disguised the DNC headquarters, the parking garage— with facades. A 1965 study reported 73.2 per- likely first occurs in the pages ofNew York mag- cent of downtown parking in the United States azine. Throughout June of 1974 the magazine as being used by office buildings, indicating ran a “Secret Illustrated History of Watergate” the influence of automobile commuters on the series, which, with design director Milton Gla- downtown landscape (Sanders McDonald 61). ser at the helm, began to supply visual aids to As Mike Davis and others have shown, reinvest- a narrative that had been mostly comprised of ment in downtown cores frequently involved names, titles, and institutional affiliations. Julian designs that aggressively divided spaces of con- Allen’s two-page painted illustration of Wood- sumption and white-collar labour from city ward waiting for Deep Throat in a parking ga- streets. John Portman’s buildings are emblemat- rage (figure 6) is included in Pakula’s “Visual ic of this moment, with their hidden street-level

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entrances and flyover walkways between build- neatly in two and his bike gone (Woodward ings, as is the 1980s vogue for skywalks, which and Bernstein 76). allowed commuters to pass between parking ar- eas and office towers without touching the street Just as Jenkins understood that paper clutter or moving outdoors. Although many cities fea- was key to establishing the overwhelming visu- ture aesthetically appealing garages designed by al presence of the newsroom, Pakula and Willis top-flight architects (Bertrand Goldberg’s Mari- recognized that it was the generic nature of the na City complex in Chicago, for example), the parking garage that held the key to the unset- generically designed parking garage is typical- tling aspects of Deep Throat’s role. In the tran- ly a form of vernacular Brutalism. Concrete and sient spaces of classical noir there were always seemingly anti-human—or at least anti-social— at least benches, stools, a bare mattress, and a in the most literal sense, the alienating effect of surface from which to pour liquor. The lingering the interior space of parking structures is ampli- spaces of the hypermodern neo-noir, however, fied by the fact that they are environments that provide no such amenities, a premonition of feature few concessions to the pedestrian traffic the neoliberal austerity that would redefine the they functionally produced. spaces of employment in the coming decades.

Even though the geographical distance of the Conclusion parking garage from the offices of the Post is carefully established, the similarity in the shape The spheres of white-collar labour that All the of the spaces points to their much closer con- President’s Men describes and explores contin- nection within the life of the worker., For the ue to be sites of utopian investment circum- white collar worker, the parking garage rep- scribed by countervailing economic forces. resents an ambiguous liminal space—a place Without ever seeking to change the relations of contact with the strange urban outside that of production, the dream of tailoring the office urban design strove to mitigate but in fact dou- to the needs of knowledge workers quickly met bled. Although it is never as fully described as in dead ends, the ping-pong tables and climbing the film, the parking garage as the uncanny lo- walls of Google and the verdant campuses of cale of both petty crime and monumental crim- an ascendant technology sector notwithstand- inal disclosure is ironically hinted at in Bern- ing. The modular flexibility of the office- sys stein’s narration in the book version of All the tems designed by Robert Probst in fact meshed President’s Men: perfectly with the mutability of post-Fordist la- bour. The many knock-offs of Robert Probst’s Bernstein knew something about bike designs emphasized fungibility rather than in- thieves: the night of the Watergate indict- formational flow. Homogeneity instead of varia- ments somebody had stolen his 10-speed tion became the rule of what has become known Raleigh from a parking garage. That was as the “cubicle farm.” Furthermore, because the the difference between him and Wood- types of office furniture Probst pioneered were ward. Woodward went into a parking ga- detachable from the structure of the building it- rage to find a source who could tell him self, they could easily be moved when a compa- what Nixon’s men were up to, Bernstein ny needed to downsize its operations or move walked in to find an eight pound chain cut overseas. Today, cubicle systems are typically

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leased rather than purchased, enabling compa- surplus labour is extended by filling the office nies the ease of installing or striking white-col- with social events and amenities geared to en- lar shops overnight. In this way, the precarious suring that workers never leave (see Crary). The temporality of modern labour is expressed in office in this sense fulfills not just a substitute the very material surfaces in and through which for home, but the distractive role once played this labour is performed. by spaces of urban entertainment—spaces, ironically, that in The Salaried Masses Kracau- Like many of the designers who first attempted er determined as conjoined to the emergence of to build dedicated spaces for knowledge work, white-collar work. However, as the offices of the however, Pakula’s engagement with the work- present become more dispersed, so too does a place was imaginative and phenomenological, a delimited terrain on which a particular form of labour of representation intended to give visu- labour was both interpellated and contested re- al presence to a work experience that remained cede from perception and representation.8 unseen. In the gleaming offices of thePost , Pa- kula saw a form of white-collar work that both Excavating the exuberant representation of of- embedded itself within and transformed its ma- fice space inAll the President’s Men may appear terials. To render and contain this energy on to be a lapsarian exercise rooted in nostalgia for film Pakula assembled a team of office design- the reassuring solidity of a middle-class work- ers (Willis, Jenkins, Gaines) and office workers week—but not if one considers the fact that the (Hoffman, Robards, Warden) to build a space film’s appeal was, from the start, based in a re- to express the production of knowledge: a ro- alistically detailed utopian description of what mance of crusading journalism to be sure, but office life could be, not what it was. Describing also, more globally, a romance of paper work his research for the film, Pakula recalled, “I went and office life. to the Washington Post and spent months at Bob Woodward’s desk. He was upstairs doing The Fi- It is perhaps not difficult to trace the fate of the nal Days with Carl Bernstein. I had Bob Wood- knowledge worker in the years that followed. As ward’s desk in the newsroom and I had my own the liberal compact between capital and labour Walter Mitty fantasy. I was a reporter for the unraveled through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Washington Post. I would attend all the meet- so too did employment become more precari- ings. It was marvelous” (Pakula 774). Ironical- ous. In turn, the places that labour is conduct- ly, the space of adventure that Pakula envisioned ed shifted. From the modern company to the from Woodward’s desk is in its basic shape and gig economy, an office today may mean an air- material form not much different from the port lounge, a Starbucks, a leased car, or one’s mundane middle-class setting from which Mit- bedroom. Between outsourced labour contracts ty seeks escape. Pakula and his technicians un- and shared co-working spaces such as WeWork, derstood that using film to recount Woodward even traditional office environments no longer and Bernstein’s efforts meant animating bodies sustain the relative constancy on which em- within the space of the office without ever losing bodied attachments might form. In this sense, it as a determining environment. Folding fanta- the office has become as transitional-seeming sy into the workplace instead of negating it as a as the parking garage. Conversely, in the sleep- space of the imagination, All the President’s Men less 24/7 economy of the tech and startup sector,

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brings into visibility the office that those who Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses: Duty and work still wait for daily. Distraction in Weimar Germany. Translated by Quen- tin Hoare, Verso, 1998.

Works Cited ---.“Why France Loved Our Films.” Siegfried Kracau- er’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Alan J. Pakula Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Culture, edited by Johannes Von Moltke and Kristy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rawson, University of California Press, 2012, pp. 33-40.

Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Machlup, Fritz. The Production and Distribution of Basic Books, 1973. Knowledge in the United States. Princeton University Press, 1962. Corliss, Mary and Carlos Clarens. “Designed for Film: The Hollywood Art Director.”Film Comment, “Office of the Future.” Business Week, 30 June 1975, vol. 14, no. 3, May/June 1978, pp 27-58. 48-53, 56.

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Pakula, Alan. “Making a Film About Two Reporters,” Sleep. Verso, 2013. American Cinematographer, 57,7, July 1976, 774-75, 819-23. . Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, 1990. Probst. Robert. The Office: A Facility Based on Change. Business Press, 1968. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Harvard University Press, 2004. Press, Alex. “Code Red: Organizing the Tech Sector.” N+1, issue 31, Spring 2018, pp. 14-22. Drucker, Peter. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. Harper & Row, 1969. Ramaeker, Paul. “Notes on the Split Field Diopter.” Film History: An International Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, George Jenkins Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, pp. 179-198. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sanders McDonald, Shannon. The Parking Garage: Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form. Urban History of Documents. Duke University Press, 2014. Land Institute, 2007.

Heller, Steven. The Graphic Design Reader. Allworth Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Press, 2002. Knopf Doubleday, 2014.

---. “Julian Allen’s Five Legacies.” Julian Allen: A Ret- Schleier, Merrill. Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and rospective, Museum of American Illustration at the Gender in American Film. University of Minnesota Society of Illustrators, Maryland Institute College of Press, 2009. Art, 2006, p. 5.

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Sellen, Abigail J. and Richard H.R. Harper. The Myth Zynda, Thomas H. “The Hollywood Version: Movie of the Paperless Office. MIT Press, 2002. Portrayals of the Press.” Journalism History, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1979, pp. 16-25, 32. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. W.W. Nor- ton, 2017. Image Notes

Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and Figure 1. Bürolandschaft floor plan for GEG-Verstand, the Chronotope of Film Noir.” Refiguring American design by Quickborner Film Genres, edited by Nick Browne, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 129-170. Figure 2. ThePost newsroom set for All the President’s Men. Thompson, Richard. “Mr. Pakula Goes to Washing- ton.” Film Comment vol. 12, no. 5, 1976, pp. 12-19. Figure 3. A tracking shot follows Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) across the newsroom floor. Touraine, Alan. The Post-Industrial Society, Tomor- row’s Social History: Classes, Conflicts, and Culture in Figure 4. Dolly track on the newsroom set (from the Programmed Society. Translated by Leonard F.X. American Cinematographer). Mayhew, Random House, 1971.

Figure 5. The meeting place of Deep Throat (Hal- Willis, “Photographing ‘All the President’s Men.’” brook) and Woodward (Redford), filmed near Cen- American Cinematographer, vol. 57, no. 5, May 1976, tury City, California 520-521, 548. Figure 6. Julien Allen painting for New York maga- Woodward, Bob and Carl Bernstein. All the Presi- zine’s “Illustrated Secret History of Watergate,” June dent’s Men. Simon & Schuster, 1974. 24, 1974.

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Notes

1 Despite a proclivity for locating alienation within a fellow reporter, Kay Eddy (Lindsay Crouse), reac- the everyday spaces of modernity, mid-century film quaint herself with a former lover within the Repub- noir rarely visited contemporary workplaces for very lican party to procure information for them isn’t ac- long (a signal exception being The Big Clock [1948]), knowledged as sexist in nature (save Eddy’s disbelief focusing instead on bars and nightclubs where leisure at even being asked). The mere possibility that such a is, as Vivian Sobchack writes, “temporalized negative- request could be made, however, accurately reflects the ly as idle restlessness, as a lack of occupation, as a dis- workplace as a fraught sexual field. Katharine Graham, turbing, ambiguous, and public display of unemploy- the owner of The Post, requested not to be depicted as ment” (158). an onscreen character in the film. As shown in Spiel- berg’s The Post, Graham was an instrumental figure in 2 Kracauer, of course, had already elaborated his the unfolding investigation (as she had been with the ideas on the culture and experience of white-collar release of The Pentagon Papers) and her presence with- middle classes in pre-war Berlin in The Salaried Mass- in the film may have at least undercut the pervasive es, first published in 1930. maleness of the newsroom.

3 The interior scale of mid-century business comput- 7 Jenkins acquired layouts for the Post Communica- ing systems is depicted in Desk Set, as well as in more tions Center, a room separate from the newsroom floor recent popular culture such as the Mad Men episode where many of the teletype machines were housed. “The Monolith” (2014). This is perhaps where this machine would have been featured at the Post itself (letter from Michael F. Parks, 4 Jenkins’ papers contain a layout of the Post news- folder 38). room with names and phone extensions for 161 desks as well as a desk plan for the Post set that contains 162 8 This is not to say that opportunities for organiza- desks. tion and class struggle also recede. A recent report on tech-industry labour organizing details coalitions be- 5 For a media history of the photocopy, including a tween white-collar engineers and coders and blue-col- discussion of Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, see lar custodial and security staff, and the ways that la- Gitelman, particularly Chapter 3: “Xerographers of the bour organizers have mobilized coding knowledge and Mind,” 83-110. electronic platforms (see Press).

6 The film largely ignores the office-based gender pol- itics of the era. Woodward and Bernstein’s request that

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Doubles diptych (Spiral Jetty; Double Negative) 2016

IMAGE AND DISCURSIVE LANDSCAPE: REFLECTIONS ON ICONIC LAND ART OF THE AMERICAN WEST

KAITLIN POMERANTZ

Abstract | The writer, a interdisciplinary visual artist focus- Résumé | L’auteur, artiste visuel interdisciplinaire se concen- ing on landscape and land use, took a trip in the fall of 2016 trant sur le paysage et l’utilisation du terrain, a effectué un through various iconic land art sites with Texas Tech Uni- voyage à travers divers sites artistiques iconiques dans le cadre versity’s Land Arts of the American West program. Immer- du program Texas Tech University’s Land Arts of the Amer- sive engagement with sites such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral ican West. Un travail d’immersion dans des sites tels que la Jetty (1968) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70) Spiral Jetty de Robert Smithson (1968) et le Double Negative offered the opportunity to reflect—critically and experiential- (1969-70) de Michael Heizer lui ont offert la possibilité de ré- ly—on the ways that the land artists’ speculations on natural fléchir—de façon critique et expérimentale—à la façon dont history and humanity’s experience of landscape resonate both les spéculations sur l’histoire naturelle et les exériences hu- with the planned degradation of the sites, and our new, more maines sur le paysage chez les artistes du paysage se font l’écho fraught relationship to environmental change. de la dégradation planifiée des sites et de notre nouvelle rela- tion tendue avec le changement environnemental. IMAGE AND DISCURSIVE LANDSCAPE

Two Photographs

his writing unpacks two photographs Lippard and expanded ideas of where art can be that I made while traveling through the and who can make it. Images of the works—a American Southwest in fall 2016, just spiral made of rocks, gashes in the earth, and Tprior to the nation’s presidential election. The others—acted as postcards, deliberately com- photographs feature iconic representations of posed pieces of landscapes meant not just to be Robert Smithson’s 1968 Spiral Jetty and Michael seen through the plane of photography but vis- Heizer’s 1969-70 Double Negative—the images ited in the round of sculpture and inhabited as by which I first came to know these artworks— landscape. The origin stories of these works, in projected onto our van, alongside the two sites a different way than sites built by druids or oth- as they currently exist. In these deliberately er bygone communities or civilizations, left me composed images, I sought to juxtapose the stat- with a complicated curiosity. The works were ic view of these documents with the view offered created by individuals: white male modernists by my experience in the moment. I also meant to making monumental marks in the landscape, highlight the physical degradation and transfor- made possible by the funding of a female heir- mation of the works over the decades since their ess of industry. Witnessing the works firsthand making: in the case of Smithson’s, that there was, seemed like a necessary step towards grasping in that moment, no water surrounding the jet- the meaning and effect of these projects. ty; and with Heizer, the complete erosion of the walls of the Negative’s gashes. In considering Over a decade after I first took interest in the these iconic images alongside the real artworks work and went on to become an artist explor- and landscapes that they represent, I wanted to ing issues of land and landscape myself, I final- bridge some kind of gap in the way that we learn ly made the trek. I joined a group of artists, ar- about art and the actual experience of art—the chitects, and students on a program called Land pilgrimage to seek it, the trekking and sweat- Arts of the American West based out of Texas ing within it—and to reflect on the role of the Tech University—a rambling journey to major image as both invitation and possible red her- earthworks, ancient ruins, Indigenous struc- ring to a landscape’s greater complexity. I also tures, uranium mines, missile test sites, and seek to open questions about the relevance and more. Our visits to these sites were multiday legacy of these works today, not only in light of camping excursions within and among them. the physical landscapes around them that have This is how I found myself, at the sites of Spiral shifted, but also the political. Jetty and then Double Negative, waking before dawn to fumble around in the dust and wind Image as Invitation to Artwork with equipment and a rental van to stage the two photographs that would allow me to more I encountered the canonical works of Land Art, pointedly consider the entanglement of image as most do, through images. This was some time and real-life experience, and the ensuing intel- in my early 20s as an art history student at the lectual and experiential negotiations of intersec- University of Chicago, as I discovered Lucy tions of these two modes.

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Spiral Jetty

Arriving at Spiral Jetty, my focus was immedi- writings. This veritable junkyard of abandoned ately drawn to all that surrounds the jetty. Af- dreams and schemes recalls Smithson’s passage ter noting its surprisingly diminutive size and from The Monuments of Passaic, “Passaic seems taking the obligatory walk-run to its end,1 my full of holes compared to New York City, which senses extended outwards. It was the walk itself, seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes directed by the spiral form of the work, that en- in a sense are the monumental vacancies that couraged this extension of the senses—a concen- define, without trying the memory-traces of an tric 360-degree orientation and walking med- abandoned set of futures” (52). itation. After that initial sojourn, I barely paid the spiral itself much mind, focusing instead on At Spiral Jetty, the images through which I had what lay beyond the spiral: entropic forces that come to know this work were mere invitations I had understood as a sort of poetic conceit in to the work itself, which was, in itself, an invita- Smithson’s work, writ large in different elements tion into a complex and unique landscape func- of the landscape. Entropy was visible in every- tioning as a sort of microcosm for Smithson’s thing: the atmospheric conditions (gale-force greater artistic, philosophical, and metaphysi- winds), the bright pink halophytic Great Salt cal concerns. As Francesco Gagliardi articulates lake (undrinkable, barely touchable, terminal), in Performance, Land Art and Photography, “It the wildlife (teeming flies, glimmering salt-en- is the nature of photography to be selective, to crusted pelicans who had touched down in the offer only partial views of a reality that extends, waters of the lake only to be consumed by those both temporally and spatially, beyond the in- waters and rendered flightless), the relics of stant captured by the camera.” Following this, tourism (toilet-paper bits jumping through the Smithson thus made the work—and its docu- sagebrush), and the relics of industry (the loom- ments—into a kind of semiotic. Spiral Jetty, in ing factory buildings of the defunct MagCorps its documents and even more so in the flesh, ex- plant, visible from the end of the jetty across the ists as a drawing and as a sign. As such, it is less lake).2 So entrancing was this moribund whorl a focal point than a starting point, one that ac- of conditions that the spiral itself became a mere cepts the constant flux around it, asking us to sign pointing outwards in all directions, de- monitor and observe. flecting attention from itself to say,look there, and there, and there. The pièce-de-résistance, en- Double Negative tropically speaking, was a second jetty, a dark twin, which lay just a short distance from Spi- If entropy could be said to be the experien- ral Jetty. At this site, oil pilings and derrick piec- tial leitmotif of Spiral Jetty, edge—that limin- es stood erect, each like its own Ozymandias. I al shift in surface—could be said to define my observed in my notebook, “the most alive thing experience at Double Negative. Morman Mesa, we saw was a half-dead sparrow stuck in fresh on which the work is situated, into which it is black tar bubbling up from the earth.” Oil Jet- carved, is a flat expanse of harsh desert terrain, ty, as this second jetty is called, was a former disrupted only where the mesa ends and over- drilling site that never proved financially viable, looks a lush valley, and by the two trenches of and was mentioned, albeit briefly, in Smithson’s the sculpture, which function as ersatz ridges

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into a shallower abyss.3 Upon arriving at Dou- persistent earth. Whether Heizer articulates it or ble Negative, also during gale-force winds, I not, the work directs us toward the land from shoved my way against the air first toward the whence it came, the earth which it displaced and edge of the sculpture, and then towards the edge which is gradually filling it back up, consuming of the mesa. Like a dog ascertaining the layout it. It is this consumption, of the work by the land and limits of a room, I needed to know where which it attempts to mar, that I view as the in- things began and ended. Without these vertical teresting aspect of the work: the kind of wither- drop offs, the space seemed dizzyingly planar ing monumentality of man’s colonial ambitions. and endless. Returning to Ozymandias, it is the toppled and decayed being—and not the once-erect, colossal Photographs I had seen of Double Negative did status—that makes the poem. not give much of a sense of the relationship be- tween Heizer’s trenches and those of the mesa Artwork as an Invitation to Landscape itself, this elegant echo. Unlike Smithson, who employed auxiliary media such as photography, Spiral Jetty and Double Negative are both, due film, and writing to amplify his projects,4 Heizer to respective sets of ecological conditions, in has promoted a view that Double Negative can states of decomposition. Spiral Jetty, which once only be experienced physically, firsthand, and peeked out of the water of the Great Salt Lake has never officially supported any photography and then for several years was completely sub- or other related documents. About this work, merged, is now completely dry and at risk of be- Heizer asserts, “There is nothing there, yet it ing buried in salt particulate. Double Negative is still a sculpture,” emphasizing his interest in is crumbling, and as Heizer explains, will con- locating the merit of this work in its form as a tinue to do so unimpeded. The works have be- sculpture comprised of negative space, created come, and perhaps always were, barometers for through a process of removal. This statement ecological change. In the same way, these works also downplays much of the beauty of the work, have also functioned as measures of what was which is that there is everything there: rocks, considered appropriate or possible regarding earth, plants, scorpions, wind; mesa ridges that the relationship between artist and land. When echo the ridges of his sculpture; and the harsh tracked upon each other—the ecological and the desert forces that bleach bones, which have also social—these works can be seen as shifting, if eroded his massive gashes. The collective Post vanishing, monuments of the anthropocene that Commodity’s conceptual/sound artist Raven point at possibility, power, and loss of control. Chacon’s recent words about the land artists of the 1960s come to mind: “they just continued My photographs pluck a moment from my ex- the destruction of the earth, and continued to go perience of relating image to reality. Like a fly and colonize different places that they thought in a vanitas painting, or Zoe Leonard’s sun pho- were theirs” (Through the Repellent Fence). In- tographs, they hover in a space of bardo—fu- deed, Heizer’s gestures seem to be more about tile testimony to a present that is already past, a marking territory, about claiming of space, than firsthand personal experience that through doc- about inviting a kind of engagement with it. umentation becomes democratic and loric, and Ironically, this creation (or destruction) here has a visual discourse on discourse itself. come to be in a state of total reclamation by the

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Discursive Landscape “MagCorp Magnesium Chloride Plant, Utah.” Center for Land Use Interpretation, http://clui.org/ludb/site/ If the landscape consumes the works, these early magcorp-magnesium-chloride-plant. Accessed 16 July 2018. images become records, the works become im- ages, and the earth continues on, as it were. Smithson, Robert. “Tour of the Monuments of Pas- saic, New Jersey.” Artforum, vol. 6, no. 4, December Works Cited 1967, pp. 52-57.

Gagliardi, Francesco. “Performance, Land Art and Through the Repellent Fence. Directed by Sam Wain- Photography.” MAP Magazine, no. 23, August-Sep- wright Douglass. America Reframed, 2017. tember 2010.

Notes

1 This is the same walk-run that Smithson does in environmental infractions, the company that owned his 1970 film Spiral Jetty (produced by Robert Smith- the plant, MagCorp, filed for bankruptcy protection. son, with the assistance of Virginia Dwan, Dwan Gal- A new company, called U.S. Magnesium, now operates lery, and Douglas Christmas, Ace Gallery director). the plant, and has cleaned up much of its emissions, releasing a few tons of chlorine per day, as opposed to 2 From The Center for Land Use Interpretation, a few hundred tons, as it did in the 1980s.” [http://clui. Land Use Database: “This remote plant employs a org/ludb/site/magcorp-magnesium-chloride-plant] few hundred people in an intensely industrialized site on the edge of the Great Salt Lake. It produces all the 3 This abyss grows ever shallower as the walls of the magnesium metal made in the United States, a mate- pieces crumble inward. rial used mostly in metals. For many years, according to the EPA, this plant was the nation’s worst air pol- 4 Surrounding Spiral Jetty, Smithson produced a luter, releasing hundreds of tons of chlorine per day film Spiral Jetty (1970), published writings (“The Spi- from its stack, which was around 90% of the chlorine ral Jetty”, 1970, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writ- emitted into the atmosphere from all sources nation- ings, edited by Nancy Holt, New York University wide. After a federal lawsuit was filed against the com- Press), and authorized photographs by photographer pany in the late 1990’s, claiming nearly $1 billion for Gianfranco Gorgoni.

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STRANGE VICES: TRANSGRESSION AND THE PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE GIALLO

SEB ROBERTS

Abstract | The giallo, an Italian genre of horror film that he giallo was a particularly fleshy style peaked in the 1970s, is infamous for peddling shock and of horror film from Italy that began in slaughter. Under the graphic sex and violence, however, the the early 1960s and flourished during giallo expresses popular anxiety surrounding the transgres- Tthe 1970s: a blood-soaked spectacle identified sion of social and sexual norms in modern Italy. Superficial- with cheap thrills and frequently low produc- ly, the giallo seems to suggest that social and cultural turmoil tion values. Despite this, the giallo was shrewd- necessarily produces death. Yet the giallo foregrounds the ob- ly perceptive in its projections of social anxi- vious excitement and attraction of transgression, allowing eties during the most violent decade of Italy’s that transgression could in fact be generative of positive, in- postwar history. In transgression, the giallo vigorating difference. saw thrilling possibility and dangerous disor- der, and in hegemony, stability and suffocation. Résumé | Le giallo, un genre de film d’horreur italien qui a These films largely regarded the upheaval of connu son heure de gloire dans les années 70, a la réputation modernity with ambivalence while neverthe- de mélanger choc et massacre. Sous l’aspect pornographique less generating much of its diegetic tensions et violent, toutefois, le giallo exrime l’anxiété populaire qui from the instability of social norms—partic- entoure la transgression des normes sociales et sexuelles dans ularly those surrounding gender. Trafficking l’Italie moderne. En surface, le giallo semble suggérer que in sleaze, shock, and slaughter, the giallo ap- l’agitation sociale et culturelle conduit nécessairement à la peared to argue that the volatility of modern mort. Cependant en mettant en avant l’excitation et l’attrait life necessarily produces death. However, this évidents de la transgression, le giallo permet à cette trans- impression is but a first glance. A more incisive gression d’être porteuse de différences positives et tonifiantes. examination of how the giallo presents trans- Mots-clé: giallo, transgression, mondernité, violence contre gression as a production of difference reveals a les femmes, cinéma d’horreur. different understanding of social turmoil: as a generative force to be embraced. STRANGE VICES

the giallo to cinema’s pre-grammatical roots as a popular attraction (Gunning 738; Wag- staff 48), but they also constitute, according to Pier Paolo Pasolini, “the dominant artistic na- ture of cinema, its expressive violence, its onei- ric physical quality” (172).

Such apparent privileging of spectacle over coherent narrative and characterization has earned the giallo a degree of critical disdain. Anthony Mann claims the outbursts of extreme Fig. 1 sex and violence “reveal the director’s fear that the audiences get bored” (qtd. in Wagstaff 245), The giallo is not simply a horror film that hap- comparing the erratic rhythms of the films to pens to have been made in Italy. It is a cine- the “electrocardiogram for a clinic case” (qtd. matic filone, expressed through a constellation in Wagstaff 245). This mistrust of the specta- of tropes, including (but by no means limited tor’s focus may have been true in certain cas- to): a black-gloved killer, pursued by an ama- es: director Umberto Lenzi once lamented that teur detective; women undressed and in dis- prosaic exposition “distracts the audience’s at- tress; a backdrop of jet-setting bourgeois mo- tention” (68), suggesting that “the spectator bility; skronky free jazz or pulsating prog rock; prefers spectacular events to turgid screen- and ubiquitous bottles of J&B whisky.1,2 Yet the play” (68). However, there is also a historical most recognizable—arguably, the definitive— and economic basis in Italy for films that es- feature of the giallo is the excessively savage chew classical formalism in favour of fitful and sensational murder scene, a scene whose spectacle. Christopher Wagstaff notes that, “[s] bloody sadism is often matched only by its bi- ince the Second World War, the Italian exhi- zarre inventiveness. Thegiallo murder scene is bition sector had grown accustomed to having an irruption of spectacle that forgoes classical too many cinemas and too many films in cir- notions of narrative necessity, characterization, culation at any one time” (249), causing “a rel- and even visual coherency (Totaro 163), giv- atively low level of exploitation of a relatively ing filmmakers a chance to experiment and large number of films” (249). This meant short- indulge their wildest creative urges. Including er initial theatrical runs, and thus a film’s earn- serrated shadows, off-kilter framing, slow mo- ings depended largely upon where—that is, to tion, first-person perspective, extreme zooms, what market—it was exhibited. To ensure that impressionistic editing, cacophonous music, they could “repay their large production costs and ghoulish sound effects, a broad variety of before interest payments [ate] away into rev- available techniques are employed to heighten enue” (Wagstaff 247), films with bigger bud- the shock and awe of a giallo murder. In these gets and financial backing would typically be scenes, when the filmmakers abandon natural- screened in first-run theatres, known asprima ism in pursuit of visceral charge, the giallo ap- visione: urban cinema palaces that drew from a proaches a kind of affective ecstasy. These mo- broader pool of potential spectators and could ments of frenzied sensation not only connect therefore command significantly larger ticket

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prices.3 Less prestigious pictures with smaller rhythm of Italian popular cinema: the film as production, marketing, and distribution bud- a unitary work was less important in gratify- gets were often relegated to terza visione, third- ing the audience (thereby creating repeat cus- run theatres with depressed ticket prices com- tomers) than intermittent eruptions of excess, monly found in peripheral and rural areas.4 shock, surprise, and spectacle.

At every tier of the exhibition sector, the surfeit Thus, the specific attraction of thegiallo lies of screens and high turnover in programmes precisely in its hyper-stylized and grotesque required a steady stream of film product to depictions of sex and death. To bemoan the keep customers coming back. Therefore, Wag- giallo’s lack of fluid pacing, scrupulous plotting, staff argues, “the whole structure [of the Ital- naturalistic acting, and so on, is to miss the ian film industry] depended on repetition. point. Consider Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review The audience had to return to the same cin- of Sergio Martino’s Torso, a.k.a. I corpi presen- ema the next day. It had to be offered some- tano tracce di violenza carnale (1973): thing different but providing the same gratifi- cations. In other words, a repetition with vari- This well-dubbed, lightweight horror ation” (254). For this reason, postwar Italian opus supplies us with everything that it cinema has been characterized by formulaic thinks we need: pretty girls in various cycles, called filone, wherein a single box-office states of dress and undress, a steel gui- smash could unleash a torrent of imitations. tar on the soundtrack to establish men- Targeting prima visione and terza visione au- ace, lectures on Italian sculpture, tasteful- diences alike and churned out at an industrial ly elliptical dismemberments and mutila- pace, the filone typified whatever trend prom- tions of body parts…a gratuitous lesbian ised the easiest money at that moment, wheth- sequence, and enough red herrings to er it was farcical comedies, sword-and-sandal keep a German restaurant in business for epics, spaghetti westerns, or ersatz James Bond a week. (qtd. in Koven 32) capers (Frayling 70-71). Rosenbaum astutely surmises that sex and vio- The “repetition with variation” of filone re- lence are not excesses to distract from the film’s quired that filmmakers rely upon not only ho- technical or intellectual shortcomings—they mologous themes, narratives, and characters, are exactly what the filmthinks we need. Ac- but specific techniques and devices that would cording to conventional critical criteria, Mikel reliably gratify the audience. Wagstaff claims J. Koven reminds us, “the assumption is that that the three most sought-after audience re- visual style (luscious photography, kinky sex, sponses, in the form of “physiological reactions” close-ups, etc.) is a device that covers up the (253), were “laughter, thrill, titillation…pro- holes in the narrative” (31, original emphasis), voked not by whole films, but by items or mo- when in fact “narrative functions as merely the ments in films. Italian formula cinema simply framework on which hang the spectacle se- juggled with plot items to produce the required quences of violence, sex, and graphic gore” (38). recipe that would stimulate the appropriate number and kind of these ‘physiological’ re- As with other filone, the giallo scaffolds its sponses’” (253). Hence the “electrocardiogram” shocks with a familiar stock of character types,

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price embodied. Only the death of the killer themselves at the film’s climax promises to restore hege- monic order.

The threat to social order posed by violence was not an abstract concern for many Italians in the 1970s: it was daily life. The era be- tween 1969 and 1983, known as the anni di piombo or “years of lead,” witnessed over 14,000 acts of do- Fig. 2 mestic terrorism, “resulting in 374 deaths and more than 1,170 injuries” (Glynn 3). antagonisms, and themes. However, there is While left-wing militants were responsible for an ideological conservatism undergirding the numerous targeted assaults, kidnappings, and character types common to the giallo who set murders, the deadliest attacks were committed the plot—and so the succession of death—in by the right, who adopted the practice of “indis- motion: the debased countercultural youth; the criminate bombings of public spaces tactically innately suspicious Other; the psychotic sexu- designed to cause maximum injury and panic” al maladaptive; and the hysteric and/or mon- (Glynn 3). The logic behind the bombings was strous female, among others. That is, in the gial- the strategia della tensione, or “strategy of ten- lo, those characters who embody and perform sion.” “The term,” Alan O’Leary explains, “re- non-traditional moral and social practices not fers to the clandestine attempt to bring about an only threaten hegemony, but their very pres- authoritarian Italy by fomenting a lawlessness ence also initiates a chain of transgression that which could then be blamed on communism inexorably leads to death. Certain gialli could and the weak democratic state, in turn justify- be read as counter-hegemonic because the killer ing a military coup” (85). Accordingly, the right is revealed to be a figure of traditional authori- was assisted covertly by the Italian secret service ty (e.g. a priest, a doctor, or a wealthy business- and armed forces (Glynn 3; O’Leary 85). man), symptomatic of a fundamental sickness or corruption at the core of the social order. Yet Beyond the bloodshed and intrigue of the anni there are far more examples of films that depict di piombo, the 1970s were generally tumultuous bloodthirsty hippies, sexual deviancy, drug-in- for Italy. The country was rapidly transitioning duced psychosis, and the erosion of tradition- from an industrial to a service-oriented econo- al morality as tragedy. The characters play with my, thanks in part to surpassing Germany as Eu- and transgress social norms by experimenting rope’s top recipient of immigrants. These devel- with travel, drugs, and sex, and each transgres- opments accelerated the unprecedented growth sion, no matter how minor at first, releases a se- of Italy’s urban centres and their suburbs. As It- quence of escalating effects that inevitably ends aly’s ethnic and religious makeup was changing, in murder. The lesson is that death is the final so too were its relational structures and their price of transgression, and the giallo killer is this undergirding value systems. The self-sufficient

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family bound by kinship and Catholicism re- with the economic and social disparities be- treated, displaced by the enlightened Carte- tween the increasingly wealthy, industrialized, sian subject qua individual consumer. Paro- and urban(e) Italian North and the poor, ru- chialism gave way to dividuated pluralism, and ral South (known as the Mezzogiorno). The once-concrete hierarchies became fluid. In this Mezzogiorno giallo, Mendik says, plays upon sense, Italy’s social and political turmoil was post-unification discourses wherein the South cause for a certain optimism: as Anna Cento is degraded as the national backwater, “an ‘un- Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio assert, “previously tamed’ landscape…where the environment marginalized social groups raised their voic- and its inhabitants come to signify a mon- es and demanded better representation, in strous mode of expression that must remain the face of a society with politics which were submerged within the civilized Northern con- fundamentally authoritarian and hierarchical” sciousness” (400).5 The violence in Don’t Tor- (qtd. in Glynn 5). Paradoxically, the insecuri- ture a Duckling is the product of the clash be- ty and chaos of life in the Italian city could be tween incompatible modes of existence, coded “celebrated as evidence of interesting times, of as the industrial North versus the rural South. the city’s vitality” (O’Leary 246). Fulci himself affirms this perspective when he describes the film’s opening shot as a pristine This ambiguous limen, between cosmopolitan- concrete highway “split[ing] the countryside ism and chaos, is the space where many gialli like a gaping wound” (Fulci 59). set their stories. The films exploit and ampli- fy the excitement and anxiety produced by the Consequent to the divergent regional fortunes collision of difference. The most conspicuous of Italy’s postwar economic miracle was a com- flint for this friction is travel: some films change plementarily unequal distribution of modern- their geographic setting over the course of the ization. Accordingly, the characters of Don’t movie (Death Walks on High Heels, 1971; The Torture a Duckling embody not only differ- Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, 1971); others follow ent socioeconomic strata but different epochs. Italians abroad (The Man with Icy Eyes, 1971; Most deeply rooted in the archaic and arcane Short Night of the Glass Dolls, 1971); still others is La Maciara (played by Florinda Balkan), a follow foreign travellers in Italy (The Girl Who reclusive Roma woman who performs black Knew Too Much, 1963; The Bird with the Crys- magic. Wary of her claims to occult powers, tal Plumage, 1970). Yet otherness in the giallo the townspeople prefer to avoid La Macia- is not limited to nationality. Even when a film ra, regarding her with a mix of contempt and is set in Italy with Italian characters, relational fear. The local constabulary is only marginal- categories remain nebulous and in flux, as of- ly less superstitious, in contrast to the hard- ten exclusory as overlapping. nosed realism of the regional police commis- sioner (Virgilio Gazzolo), avatar of the modern Such gradations of otherness are grippingly Italian state. Observing and analysing the go- depicted in Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duck- ings-on are the local priest Don Alberto (Marc ling (1972). Set in the fictional southern Italian Porel) and Roman journalist Andrea Martelli hamlet of Accendura, the film is an exemplar (Tomas Milian). Youthful and pragmatic, Don of what Xavier Mendik calls the “Mezzogior- Alberto leverages popular interests (such as no giallo” (391), a subset of gialli preoccupied soccer) to appeal to his parish; nonetheless, he

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laments the corruption of traditional Christian The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) primarily morality by contemporary culture: “People ar- takes place in a single apartment tower block. en’t worried much about their immortal souls. Its occupants are a motley bunch drawn from They watch TV, go to the movies. They read the all walks of life: a beautiful young model; a tall, papers with all those scandalous photographs.” dark, and handsome architect; an aged Jewish Meanwhile, neoteric muckraker Martelli nei- professor and his lesbian daughter; a prattling ther defends nor condemns the modern world, old crone with a cognitively impaired son; and approaching it instead with a distinctly secu- a Black stripper. Such heterogenous neigh- lar skepticism. He also has a roguish disregard bours suggest again that the modern Italian for rules, entering people’s homes through un- city is exciting, vital, and diverse, but that di- locked windows and withholding evidence versity also constitutes a threat. As the neigh- from the police. The most thoroughly mod- bours are bumped off one-by-one, suspicion ern—and therefore transgressive—figure is Pa- falls upon everyone equally—after all, they are each different, ergo inscrutable and untrust- worthy in their own way.

There is even difference within difference; that is, not all differences are equal. As represent- ed in the giallo, some otherness is more or less threatening than other otherness. Tourists and foreigners are grudgingly tolerated: “They’re coming and going all the time,” grumbles jour- nalist Andrea Bild (Franco Nero) in The Fifth Cord (1971), “from all over the world. It’s like a hotel.” Neurodivergent characters (such as Gi- Fig. 3 useppe in Don’t Torture a Duckling) are com- monly used as red herrings, presented as phys- trizia (Barbara Bouchet). Young, fashionable, ically threatening but ultimately incapable of and urbane, Patrizia lives in a chic high-mod- inflicting harm. Lesbians are tacitly approved ernist mansion, drives sports cars, and experi- of, the better to exploit what Laura Mulvey ments with drugs. She is also sexually aggres- calls their “to-be-looked-at-ness” (19); after all, sive and a relentless flirt, and as such poses a “it is a profoundly held tenet of film distributors direct threat to patriarchal order and, in Don that the spectator of a horror movie will almost Alberto’s mind, to the innocence of Accen- invariably be male” (Jenks 154). Gay men ap- dura’s boys. Thedramatis personae of Don’t pear frequently in gialli, but typically in “camp Torture a Duckling thus delineate a spectrum and effeminate roles for comic relief” (Koven whereupon the otherness of one character to 71). Transgendered characters fare the worst of another is an articulation of their differential all: in the rare instance that gialli address gen- modernity. der fluidity or transition, as in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) or A Blade in the Dark (1983), Gialli are not usually so systematic in their rep- it is only to provide a motivation—that of a resentation of difference. Giuliano Carmineo’s “psychotic break”—for the killer.

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Sexual and gender differences are a perenni- may be friends with stalkers and extortion- al source of anxiety in gialli. They are a ready ists (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1971); an ac- source of titillation for the filmmaker to exploit, claimed novelist may be a viciously abusive but more importantly, sexual and gender dif- spouse (Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only ferences initiate the chain of transgression dis- I Have the Key, 1972); and a venerated surgeon cussed above: “transgression of body leads to may turn out to be a high-ranking member of a transgression of behaviour and transgression Satanic sex cult that performs human sacrifice of societal law” (Hallam 98), culminating in (Short Night of the Glass Dolls, 1971). In gialli, murder. This is true even of relatively milque- no closet is without skeletons. toast transgressions such as adultery or voyeur- ism, Koven contends, because they “weaken Of course, it is not literally the case that any the socio-familial structure, and as a result of and every transgression necessitates murder; the weakening of those bonds, other more seri- that would be a “slippery slope” fallacy. Despite ous crimes often follow” (69). Accordingly, the what Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (1972) more severe the initial transgression, the more depicts, having tea with a lesbian does not pre- swiftly it leads to death. A cheating spouse may cipitate joining a demonic coven’s blood orgies. trigger a chain of events that climaxes in mur- But the implication is that it could. There may der, but more socially censured acts such as in- be many intermediary steps, each one a com- cest (In the Folds of the Flesh, 1970) or abortion paratively minor misbehaviour or crime, yet (Strip Nude for Your Killer, 1975) appear to con- each step can be (and, in the giallo, is) taken. jure the killer directly. The horror of thegiallo is in following the chain of transgression, as misbehaviour and crime Because sexual transgression is a corporeal compound until they achieve their ultimate practice, it is among the most concrete and vi- expression in the ultimate transgression: mur- sually appreciable forms of transgression, but der. Unlike in monster movies or slasher films, it is far from the only one. Gialli are fascinat- the giallo killer is never an already-existing em- ed by—and fascinate with—all forms of trans- bodiment of inhuman evil; the giallo killer is gression: from the minor (playing music too an apparently “normal” human who becomes a loudly) to the major (spousal rape), from the killer—not because they are compelled by the abstruse (animal sacrifice) to the abominable devil, or possessed by some amorphous “evil,” (dismemberment). The legal ramifications of but because they choose to commit to murder. any given transgression are scarcely consid- ered; indeed, the police are only sporadically This choice is manifest in the opportunism present and often incompetent.6 Yet transgres- with which everyday objects are converted sion qua crime, as a violent fissure in the social into weapons. It is uncommon that a giallo kill- fabric, is omnipresent and inescapable. Gialli er has a “signature” weapon, with notable ex- present an endless parade of adulterers, black- ceptions such as the spiked gauntlet in Death mailers, embezzlers, pederasts, rapists, thieves, Walks at Midnight (1972). Bladed weapons are and “sex maniacs,” a term favoured in many a by far the most popular in gialli, not the least giallo. Moreover, a respectable upbringing, il- because they are easily found within the mise- lustrious career, or estimable reputation is no en-scène: chef’s knives, meat cleavers, switch- guarantee of innocence. A wealthy debutante blades, straight razors, letter openers, scalpels,

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axes, scissors, and so on. Strangulation is a Italy: “the excesses and violence we see in giallo close second; it can be performed with rope, cinema,” writes Koven, “are an impressionistic a scarf, a shower curtain, a telephone line, or, rendering of modernity” (61). What makes the in the absence of any other implements, by giallo a unique expression of those anxieties is hand. Victims in gialli have been bludgeoned the figure upon whom it centres them: the fe- to death, drowned in bathtubs, thrown out male aggressor. windows, run over, chain-whipped, and worse. This grim inventory emphasizes that the giallo Given that the literary roots of the giallo are killer typically makes use of their environment detective novels (Needham; Sevastakis 1; Wag- and strikes when the opportunity presents it- staff 2), the femme fatale of hard-boiled -fic self, thereby demonstrating the choice to kill. tion and film noir is the obvious precursor of the giallo’s female aggressor. However, there If any everyday object can be transformed into are also two antecedents native to Italian cul- a lethal weapon, by the choice to use it as such, ture: the diva, representing “[t]he woman as “then anyone can be a killer” (Koven 74) and, by predator, as the dominating figure, [with] the extension, “anyone is a potential victim” (Free- man in subjugation” (Shipman qtd. in Jenks land 187). The chain of transgression implies an 151); and the fattucchiera, or sorceress, em- unyielding drive towards murder, which can bodiment and practitioner of “an alternative be committed using any ready-to-hand object; culture and…therefore a menace to a patriar- violence and death are immanent in the every- chal society” (Bini 57). These three figures of a day, rendering the everyday itself as horrific. threatening femininity—the femme fatale, the The effect, Koven submits, is feeling “that we diva, and the witch—were first synthesized in are living in a veritable horror film ourselves” the character of Asa (played by Barbara Steele), (74). The eruption of political violence that villainess of Mario Bava’s gothic horror film, La claimed hundreds of lives during the anni di maschera del demonio (1960). Bava would re- piombo would thus seem like the logical—even turn to the entanglement of death and the fem- necessary—extension of the moral fluctuations inine in two subsequent films:The Girl Who and eroding traditions of the 1960s and 1970s. Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), widely regarded as the prototyp- ical gialli (Needham; Sevastakis 2; Koven 3-4) wherein, significantly, the killers are revealed to be women.

Throughout thefilone , the female killer has been a prevalent feature of the giallo. So com- mon are female killers that it rapidly became a “twist” ending to set up the expectation of a Fig. 4 murderous woman, only to reveal that it was actually a man. Indeed, the audience can never Gialli rarely explicitly articulate the anxieties be sure of the killer’s gender before the climac- surrounding the social turmoil, economic in- tic exposure of their identity. Female killers’ stability, or political violence that convulsed motives are often the same as the males’ (e.g.

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jealousy, greed, the aforementioned “psychotic ordained roles, self-expression and social au- break”) and their methods no less brutal. Giv- tonomy serve neither—indeed, work against— en that the giallo is predicated upon shock and capitalism and patriarchy, and as Silvia Federi- horror, the filone’s recurrent portrayals of fe- ci notes, “in bourgeois morality, anything that male killers indicate that there was something is unproductive is obscene, unnatural, per- disturbing about them beyond their motives verted” (24). The Italian women’s movement and methods: the very fact that it was women flaunted this supposed unnaturalness and oth- committing these acts. er-worldliness, as expressed in their most icon- ic slogan: “le streghe son tornate,” or “the witch- Among the assumptions and values that under- es are back” (Bini 66). gird patriarchy, Ruth Glynn calls particular at- tention to women’s culturally assigned role as The women’s movement achieved two import- caregivers, homemakers, and custodians—that ant legislative victories with the legalization of is, as defenders and guardians of society (11). divorce in 1970 and abortion in 1978. Perhaps Should a woman contradict this assumption in the best illustration of how radically women’s any way—by refusing to subordinate her needs place in society was changing is that, in the to those of others, by pursuing her own plea- same decade, the percentage of female mem- sure, by exercising her authority in experimen- bership in left-wing militant groups was high- tal, as opposed to conservative, ways—then her er than in the Chamber of Deputies—by more behaviour would be understood as fundamen- than double (Glynn 6). Women were not only tally unnatural, a direct threat to social order. fighting for their rights—they were killing for them. Glynn describes the trauma of fe- During the 1970s, patriarchal values in Italy male-perpetrated violence in Italy as a “double were facing unprecedented challenge. Along- wound” (11): the first is the physical wound it- side the student protests and labour unrest self, and the second is a psychic trauma rooted that exploded in the late 1960s, the women’s in the fact of having been attacked by someone movement presented a dramatic rift in the considered beyond, or exclusory to, perpetrat- social bedrock. At its most radical, the move- ing violence. The phrase “double wound” de- ment was a response to an “extra-parliamenta- rives from Glynn’s reading of Sergio Lenci’s au- ry left [that] has not integrated women into its tobiography, wherein he recalls being shot in political perspective as an autonomous force, the neck by a female militant. “A woman,” Len- and is dominated by a male arrogance which ci writes, “wounds you twice with respect to a Catholicism has promoted” (James 15). More man” (qtd. in Glynn 31). Glynn remarks: broadly, the movement was an outgrowth of Italian women enjoying “unprecedented pros- Lenci’s account yields three key premises: perity, industrialization, and modernization… that female perpetration has the traumat- . In short, there was a significant shift, even ic valency of a double wound; that there within the role of housewife, from submission is a long-established cultural correlation and sacrifice to self-gratification, which, in between masculinity and perpetration turn, reflects a growing urge for self-expres- and between femininity and victimization; sion” (Burke 211). Of course, if decoupled from and, finally, that that correlation—that cul- consumption and in defiance of traditionally tural resistance to an equation or even an

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association of women and violence—im- Beyond the giallo’s female aggressor, horror plicitly works to defeminize the violent cinema in general disorders the tidy assign- woman. (136) ment of the role of victim or aggressor to a giv- en gender. Carol J. Clover describes cinematic Therein lies the horror of the giallo’s female ag- convention: “[t]o the extent that the possibili- gressor: she refuses her role as social conser- ty of cross-gender identification has been en- vator; she refuses her role as victim; and she tertained, it has been that of the female with insists upon victimizing someone else.7 In the male” (43) via the camera’s capture of the these refusals and actions, she becomes some- male gaze. Yet in Clover’s study of American thing neither female nor male, in Lenci’s own horror cinema, the figure of the “final girl” en- words, “incomprehensible” (qtd. in Glynn 31). ables the opposite cross-gender identification: Within the giallo, the detective’s task is “one of that of the male audience with a female pro- uncovering, naming and containing otherness tagonist (Clover 43-46). In gialli, the female as something socially and morally threatening” killer further extends and blurs the opportu- (Needham), and that otherness, that social and nities for cross-gender identification. Identify- moral threat is more often than not embodied ing with the sadistic pleasure of a female killer by the female aggressor. offers the male audience “a cathartic working through of the impossible contradictions be- Granted, the audience will only perceive the tween desire and the social dictates appropri- female aggressor as inherently monstrous in ate to gender” (Jenks 154). Simultaneously, the accordance with patriarchal representations female audience is offered a violence of their of gender: “screen males represent the Male own, identifying the female killer “not just and screen females the Female; … this identi- as male projected horror but also as a conse- fication along gender lines authorizes impulses quence of women’s rage, grounded in and justi- toward violence in males and encourages im- fied by women’s experience of violence and op- pulses towards victimization in females” (Clo- pression” (Burke 198) under patriarchy. ver 43). The presumption of the woman as victim, Federici argues, extends from the pre- The camerawork and editing in giallo murder sumption of female sexual passivity: “Since we scenes further destabilize identification with are expected to provide a release, we inevitably the characters onscreen. The camera typical- become the object onto which men discharge ly adopts the first-person perspective of the their repressed violence” (24). Conversely, the approaching killer as the suspense crescen- woman who demonstrates sexual agency and/ dos. During the murder itself, the screen ex- or physical dominance is abnormal, perverse, a plodes in a flurry of edits: the screaming vic- violation of the natural order, unrepresented— tim, the plunging blade, cloven skin, flailing ergo unrepresentable—within the psychology hands, gushing blood, gaping eyes, and repeat. of patriarchy. The sexually active (as opposed The cuts of the film mimic cuts into the vic- to passive) female logically precedes the female tim’s flesh, captured in the quasi-abstract de- killer because the sexually active female imbri- tail of the extreme close-up. Identifiable per- cates that other thing unrepresentable with- spectives disintegrate in an ecstasy of thrash- in the patriarchal psyche: death (Cixous 885; ing bodies. The audience experiences partial Jenks 159).

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but simultaneous identification with killer and When bodily volition exceeds the limits im- victim alike. For this reason, Patricia Pitsers posed upon it by society, the result is invariably argues: violent sex and even more violent death. In this, the giallo exhibits the opinion that it is the nat- [B]ody horror allows for cross-gender ural will of the human body to rape and kill.8 identifications and can be seen as an im- If, as Freud says, “civilization is built upon a re- portant tool for rezoning the borders of nunciation of instinct” (44), then the urge for the subject. Both men and women have freedom is actually the desire to act upon in- tender bodies; ultimately, they are made stinct unfettered: “The urge for freedom, there- out of soft flesh, and their subject - posi fore, is directed against particular forms and tions are related not only to sexual differ- demands of civilization or against civilization ence but also to multiple other aspects, altogether” (43). such as social background and religion— and they are open to change and becom- It is no coincidence that the masculine heroes ing. (54) of gialli—symbolic bodyguards of the status

As the onscreen bodies transgress and are transgressed, and clear opposing perspec- tives dissolve, the film becomes less objective and more mimetic, giving rise to what Gilles Deleuze called the “free indirect discourse” (148) of subjectivity between the audience and the film and between individuals in the audi- ence via the film: “[T]he individual conscious- Fig. 5 ness and the character are captured together and deported into a region where singular life quo—are so often executives, journalists, ar- and collective life are confused” (Agamben 22). chitects, and doctors: they are men who live The limits of film as mediated experience are the life of the mind, whose prowess is intellec- transcended by the screening of transgressive tual, not physical. This too echoes Freud: “No and transgressed bodies precisely because the feature…seems better to characterize civili- body is so visually potent and, thus, affectively zation than its esteem and encouragement of powerful. As Lindsay Anne Hallam writes, “ev- man’s higher mental activities” (41). Contrarily, erything returns to the body, for all ideas are characters considered suspect and perverse are expressed through and upon it” (217). those in hot pursuit of earthly delights: pimps, junkies, dope fiends, peeping toms, tramps, In privileging the body as the locus of trans- hippies, and the like. gressive potential, the giallo inserts itself into a cultural lineage that includes Christianity and Yet the giallo is not blind to the pleasures of the Marquis de Sade. Unfortunately, from this transgression. An early scene in Fulci’s A Liz- lineage, the giallo inherits the notion that trans- ard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) oscillates between gression that originates in the body will nec- two neighbouring townhouses in London. In essarily lead to carnality or, at worst, carnage. one, an upper-class family, surrounded by

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Edwardian regalia, sits in joyless silence as they “forces, nothing but forces” (139). The interplay peck at their dinner. Through the wall from the of forces does not necessarily imply diamet- house next door rumble the sounds of a raging ric opposition, nor that they orbit a “natural” bacchanal: drums pound and guitars squeal as point of balance. As Deleuze claims, “Force no revelers drink, dance, and disrobe. The con- longer has a centre precisely because it is insep- trast between grey-faced, chain-smoking bour- arable from its relation to other forces” (142), as geoisie and the vivacious, cavorting libertines in a body exercising its force within a sprawl- is underscored by the cinematography. The ing network of interactions. wealthy family is primarily captured in static, claustrophobic close-ups, whereas the cam- As a dramatization of the interplay of bod- era careens handheld through the party, with ies-as-forces, the giallo is horrific because this supple torsos and flailing limbs swimming in interplay irresistibly produces death. Upon and out of focus. When the greying patriarch the Sadean premise that human nature tends of the family jokes lamely that the noise next towards excess, exploitation, and dominance, door “sounds like a football match,” the cam- transgression leads to a cycle of ever-escalat- era rushes in to reveal the foot of his teenaged ing violence. Yet hegemony does the same: step-granddaughter tapping defiantly along to anything that exists in excess to or defiance of the hippies’ music. Neither wealth, good man- the system must be eliminated. In the giallo, ners, nor elegant decor can immunize a family order is only ever provisionally and apparent- from the contagions of Dionysian decadence— ly restored once the killer has themselves been or a good beat. Indeed, the giallo does not de- killed. The final satisfaction of either trans- fend the hegemonic order. In Don’t Torture a gression or hegemony is the destruction of the Duckling (1972), Patrizia represents modernity other. and its supposed moral contamination, but she is also smart, charismatic, adventuresome, and In spite of this, gialli failed to inspire lethal empathetic. Meanwhile, the supposedly hum- street fights between libertines and reactionar- ble and earthy townsfolk engage in prostitu- ies among its audience. Further, in contrast to tion, blackmail, and vigilantism. the pious pearl-clutching that commonly meets exploitation cinema, the commercial success of The giallo’s stubborn ambivalence towards its gialli did not inspire moral panic in its native characters and their actions deprives the audi- Italy. The anticipation of such outcomes rests ence of moral clarity. Transgression is sexy and upon two distinct false assumptions: in the exciting but brings with it disorder and death. case of the former, that the audience identifies Hegemony is intolerant and authoritarian, but literally with the characters onscreen and will also reliable and trustworthy. Rather than at- reproduce their ethics and actions in the real tempt to reconcile such contradictions, the world; in the case of the latter, that the films giallo stages the clash between transgression express pre-existing desires and needs on the and hegemony: whichever triumphs is not a part of the audience. Against these assump- question of materials, ethics, or aesthetics but tions, Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto con- an issue of pure force. Thegiallo screens a Ni- tend that film is neither “an answer to a partic- etzschean interplay of bodies—and, accord- ular pre-defined need nor as possessing a life ing to Gilles Deleuze, bodies are themselves of its own, pushing or binding the spectator.

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Film is instead the mid-point in a dynamic in- which transgression produces: difference. Dif- teraction between spectator and social context, ference can be regarded as positive or negative. one which helps construct new needs through Recall, for example, the heterogenous assem- the creative invention of emotional experienc- bly of tower-block occupants in The Case of the es that do not pre-exist the viewing of a film” Bloody Iris (1972): is social diversity an oppor- (20). Moreover, so much in gialli is theatrical tunity to broaden communal empathy or does and anti-naturalistic—from the campy fash- dissimilarity weaken security? In other words, ions and unlikely mobility of the characters, is social difference additive or subtractive? to the vertiginous zooms and hypersaturated colours—that the films draw attention to their There is no correct answer to that question in distance from reality, extended by the stylized the gialli themselves, insofar as the films are and often surreal murders (Koven 125). Koven open to a choice in interpretation. Yet there are elaborates: ethical consequences to this choice. To regard difference as bad is to want it subtracted, an- These shocking sequences call attention nulled, exhausted. As depicted in the giallo, it to themselves…we are jolted out of our is this drive to annihilate and erase difference cinematic complacency to think not only that ultimately produces death. However, the about “how” such a sequence is made, opposite choice is also available: to regard dif- but “why”… . These sequences, in giallo, ference as good, generative, invigorating—a are interesting not just because of their productive force with which to affiliate, cor- shock value, but because they demand relate, and integrate. This additive interplay we think about the very ontology of the of forces, claims Deleuze, is “the kind which cinema and our pleasures of watching knows how to transform itself, to metamor- such images. (157) phose itself according to the forces it encoun- ters, and which forms a constantly larger force with them, always increasing the power to live, always opening new ‘possibilities’” (141).

This is why the giallo—a category that could so easily be written off as crypto-reactionary pab- lum—consistently presents modernization and transgression as seductive and exciting: mod- ernization and transgression are wellsprings of the new; new people, new places, new sen- Fig. 6 sations, new experiences. Death may be in- evitable, but it comes much quicker by (and More specifically, because the giallo focus- to) those who wish to extinguish the excesses es upon the violent interplay of transgression and messy heterogeneity of life. Far better, as and hegemony, it poses a fundamental ques- Deleuze advises, “to be exhausted by life rath- tion: with which do you identify more close- er than exhausting it, always…at the service of ly, transgression or hegemony, and why? The what is reborn from life, what metamorphoses answer to this resides in our relation to that and creates” (142).

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Bergonzelli, Sergio, director. Nelle pieghe della carne Works Cited [In the Folds of the Flesh]. MGB Cinematografica, Talía Films, 1970. Agamben, Giorgio. “For an Ethics of the Cinema.” Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Bianchi, Andrea, director. Nude per l’assassino [Strip Moving Image. Edited by Henrik Gustafsson and As- Nude for Your Killer]. Fral Spa, Blue Underground, bjorn Gronstad, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 19-24. 1975.

Argento, Dario, director. L’uccello dalle piume di cris- Bini, Andrea. “Horror Cinema: The Emancipation tallo [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage]. Central of Women and Urban Anxiety.” Popular Italian Cin- Cinema Company Film, Glazier, Seda Spettacoli, ema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society. Edit- 1970. ed by Flavia Brizio-Skov, I.B. Tauris & Co., 2011, pp. 53-82.

---. 4 mosche di velluto grigio [Four Flies on Grey Vel- Burke, Frank. “Dario Argento’s The Bird with the vet]. Marianne Productions, Seda Spetaccoli, Uni- Crystal Plumage: Caging Women’s Rage.” Killing versal Productions France, 1971. Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence. Edited by Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006, pp. 197-217. Bava, Lamberto, director. La casa con la scala nel buio [A Blade in the Dark]. National Cinematografi- Carmineo, Giuliano, director. Perché quelle strane ca, Nuova Dania Cinematografica, 1983. gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? [The Case of the Bloody Iris]. Galassia Cinematografica, Lea Film, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1972. Bava, Mario, director. La maschera del demonio [The Mask of Satan; Black Sunday]. Galatea Film, Jolly Film, 1960. Cixous, Helène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans- lated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, vol. 1, ---. La ragazza che sapeva troppo [The Girl Who Knew no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893. Too Much]. Galatea Film, Coronet S.r.l., 1963. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gen- ---. 6 donne per l’assassino [Blood and Black Lace]. der in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Emmepi Cinematografica, Les Productions Georges Press, 2015. de Beauregard, Monachia Film, Arrow Film & Vid- eo, 1964. De Martino, Alberto, director. L’uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio [The Man with Icy Eyes]. Cinegai S.p.A., Bayman, Louis and Sergio Rigoletto. “The Fair and 1971. the Museum: Framing the Popular.” Popular Italian Cinema. Edited by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigo- Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans- letto, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1-28. lated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, The Bazzoni, Luigi, director. Giornata nera per l’ar- University of Minnesota Press, 1989. iete [The Fifth Cord]. B.R.C. Produzione S.r.l., 1971. Ercoli, Luciano, director. La morte cammina con i tacchi alti [Death Walks on High Heels]. Atlántida Films, Cinecompany, 1971.

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---. La morte accarezza a mezzanotte [Death Walks “GialloScore.com—Criteria.” GialloScore, http://gial- at Midnight]. Cinecompany, C.B. Films S.A., Mondo loscore.com/criteria.aspx. Accessed 30 April, 2017. Macabro, 1972. Glynn, Ruth. Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Farina, Corrado, director. Hanno cambiato faccia Italian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. [They Have Changed Their Face]. Film 70, 1971. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Ear- Federici, Silvia. “Why Sexuality Is Work.” Revolution ly Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Film Theo- at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Femi- ry and Criticism, 7th Edition. Edited by Leo Braudy nist Struggle. Autonomedia, 2012, pp. 23-27. and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 736-750.

Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” Aes- Hallam, Lindsay Anne. Screening the Marquis de thetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, The New Film. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012. Press, 1998, pp. 69-87.

James, Selma. “Introduction.” The Power of Women Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and the Subversion of the Community, by Mariaro- and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. Rout- sa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Falling Wall Press ledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Ltd., 1975, pp. 5-20.

Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Jenks, Carol. “The other face of death: Barbara Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Westview Press, 2000. Steele and La maschera del demonio.” Popular Euro- Freud, Sigmund. Reflections on War and Death. pean Cinema. Edited by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, Routledge, 1992, pp. 149-162. Translated by A.A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner, Moffatt, Yard and Company, 1918. Lado, Aldo, director. La corta notte delle bambole di vetro [Short Night of the Glass Dolls]. Dieter Geissler ---. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by Filmproduktion, Doria G. Film, Dunhill Cine- James Strachey, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1962. matografia, Jadran Film, Rewind Film, Surf Film, 1971.

Fulci, Lucio, director. Una lucertola con la pelle di ---. Chi l’ha visto morire? [Who Saw Her Die?]. Dieter donna [A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin]. Atlántida Films, Geissler Filmproduktion, Doria G. Film, Roas Pro- Les Films Corona, International Apollo Films, Mon- duzioni, 1972. do Macabro, 1971.

Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cine- ---. Non si sevizia un paperino [Don’t Torture a Duck- ma and the Italian Giallo Film. The Scarecrow Press, ling]. Medusa Distribuzione, Blue Underground, 2006. 1972. Lenzi, Umberto. “Umberto Lenzi.” Spaghetti Night- ---. “Lucio Fulci.” Spaghetti Nightmares, by Luca M. mares, by Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta, Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta, Fantasma Books, Fantasma Books, 1996, pp. 67-72. 1996, pp. 58-66.

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Martino, Sergio, director. Lo strano vizio della Signo- Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema 1896-1996. ra Wardh [The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh]. Coper- Routledge, 2001. cines, Devon Film, Laurie International, MLR, 1971. Totaro, Donato. “The Italian zombie film: from der- ---. Tutti i colori del buio [All the Colors of the Dark]. ivation to invention.” Fear Without Frontiers: Hor- Lea Cinematografica, National Cinematografica, ror Cinema Across the Globe. Edited by Steven Jay Astro C.C., Shriek Show, 1972. Schneider, FAB Press, 2003, pp. 161-173.

---. Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la Wagstaff, Christopher. “A forkful of Westerns: In- chiave [Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have dustry, audiences and the Italian Western.” Popu- the Key]. Lea Film, Arrow Films, 1972. lar European Cinema. Edited by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, Routledge, 1992, pp.245-261.

---. I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale [Tor- so]. Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, 1973. ---. “Italian Cinema, Popular?” Popular Italian Cin- ema. Edited by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto, Mendik, Xavier. “The Return of the Rural Repressed: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp.29-51. Italian Horror and the Mezzogiorno Giallo.” A Com- panion to the Horror Film. Edited by Harry M. Ben- shoff, Wiley Blackwell, 2014, pp. 390-405. Image Notes

Fig. 1. Bianchi, Andrea, director. Nude per l’assassino Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cine- [Strip Nude for Your Killer]. Fral Spa, Blue Under- ma.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave, 1989. ground, 1975.

Needham, Gary. “Playing with genre: An introduc- Fig. 2. Bava, Mario, director. 5 bambole per la luna tion to the Italian giallo.” Kinoeye, vol. 2, no. 11, 10 d’agosto [5 Dolls for an August Moon]. Produzioni June 2002, http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/need- Atlas Consorziate (P.A.C.), Arrow Films, 1970. ham11.php. Accessed 23 March 2018.

Fig. 3. Fulci, Lucio, director. Non si sevizia un pape- O’Leary, Alan. Tragedia all’italiana: Italian Cinema rino [Don’t Torture a Duckling]. Medusa Distribuzi- and Italian Terrorisms, 1970-2010. Peter Lang, 2011. one, Blue Underground, 1972.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Heretical Empiricism. Translat- Fig. 4. Fulci, Lucio, director. Una lucertola con la ed by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, New Aca- pelle di donna [A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin]. Atlán- demia Publishing, 2005. tida Films, Les Films Corona, International Apollo Films, Mondo Macabro, 1971.

Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Work- ing with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford University Fig. 5. Petri, Elio, director. Indagine su un cittadino Press, 2003. al di sopra di ogni sospetto [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion]. Vera Films S.p.a., The Criterion Collection, 1970. Sevastakis, Michael. Giallo Cinema and its Folktale Roots: A Critical Study of 10 Films, 1962–1987. McFar- land & Company, 2016.

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Fig. 6. Carmineo, Giuliano, director. Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? [The Case of the Bloody Iris]. Galassia Cinematografica, Lea Film, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1972.

Notes

1 “Genre,” as conventionally understood in popular 6 This provides an interesting contrast to anoth- Anglophone film criticism, implies a fixity of charac- er 1970s filone, the poliziottesco or crime-thriller. In teristics that is difficult to maintain in discussions of those films, the protagonist is unvaryingly an iron- Italian popular cinema. Better suited here is the Ital- willed and brutally effective police officer who refus- ian critical term is filone (literally “vein” or “current”), es to let the law stand in the way of justice. O’Leary suggestive of concurrent streams or threads which understands the poliziottesco as both a screening of mingle or separate arbitrarily. and salve for the tensions produced by the political and economic violence of the anni di piombo: “they 2 Giallo tropes are so consistent that an online film depict situations pushed to the ne plus ultra which ar- directory, GialloScore.com, ranks films according ticulate not the reality of contemporary Italian society points awarded for the presence of various tropes in a so much as a fantasy projection of that reality which given film (black gloves = 5 points, mistaken identity is part anxiety and (I propose) part wish-fulfilment” = 2 points, bathtub murder = 1 point). (95).

3 “In 1975, first-run cinemas, which made up only 7 Thegiallo ’s female killer is something like the ob- one eighth of the total, received half of the total scene symptom of American horror’s “final girl”: both box-office takings” (Sorlin 120). claim for themselves and perform so-called “mascu- line” violence, but the giallo’s female killer does so 4 Because of the sheer number of terza visione and pre-emptively and voluntarily, rather than reactively the lower cost of distributing films to them, they of- and defensively. fered a distinct financial advantage to lower-budget productions that did not need to recoup their costs in 8 This is a gross simplification of Freud, not to men- a hurry. Such films could tour the tertiary market in- tion a conflation of Freud and de Sade. Nonetheless, it definitely, earning “exceptionally large receipts from is a simplification and conflation made purposefully terza visione and the provinces over longish periods and explicitly by the giallo. For example, the opening (four or five years)” (Wagstaff 247). credits of Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (1971) end with a title-card featuring the following quote 5 Despite its forced contrast between upwardly-mo- from Freud: “The very emphasis of the command- bile, cosmopolitan Northerners and Southerners ment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are trapped in “archaic and feudal modes of existence” descended from an endlessly long chain of genera- (Mendik 395), the Mezzogiorno giallo rarely makes tions of murderers, whose love of murder was in their any “serious examination of the social or econom- blood as it is perhaps also in ours” (60–61). ic factors that underpin [the Southerners’] malaise” (Mendik 397).

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CONTRIBUTORS

K.R. Cornett is a lecturer and academic advi- Nathan Holmes is a Visiting Assistant Professor sor in the department of Radio, Film and Tele- of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College. vision at Northwestern. She is interested in the His research and writing focuses on urban visual politics of everyday life and its representation in culture and history, the political imagination of American cinema and visual culture. Her dis- mass culture, and film/media and the environ- sertation, Out of the Blur of the Background, is ment. He is the author of Welcome to Fear City: an examination of landscape and spatiality in Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination independent American Cinema between 1969 (SUNY Press, 2018) and has essays published or and 1984. forthcoming in New Review of Film and Televi- sion Studies, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, The- K.R. Cornett est maître de conférence et con- ory Practice (Rutgers 2016), and Race, Ethnici- seillère académique dans le département de ty, and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Radio, Film, et Télévision à Northwestern. Elle Press). He is currently an editor at Mediapolis: s’intéresse à la politique de tous les jours et à sa Journal of Cities and Culture. représentation dans le cinéma et la culture vi- suelle américains. Sa thèse, Out of the Blur of the Nathan Holmes est professeur adjoint attaché Background, examine le paysage et la spatialité au département d’études du cinéma au Purchase dans le cinéma américain indépendent entre College de SUNY. Ses recherches et ses publi- 1969 et 1984. cations se concentrent sur la culture et l’histoire visuelles urbaines , l’imagination politique de Adam Charles Hart is a Visiting Assistant Pro- la culture de masse et la relation entre le film, fessor in Film Studies at the University of Pitts- les média et l’environnement. Il est l’auteur de burgh. His book, Monstrous Forms: Moving-Im- Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and age Horror Across Media is forthcoming from the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018). Il a Oxford University Press. His work has appeared également des essais publiés ou sur le point de in The New Review of Film and Television and paraître dans la New Review of Film and Tele- A Companion to the Horror Film (Wiley, 2014), vision Studies, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, with articles forthcoming in The Journal of Cine- Theory Practice (Rutgers, 2016) et Race, Ethnic- ma and Media Studies and Discourse. ity, and the Suburbs in American Films (SUNY Press). Il est à présent éditeur à Mediapolis: Jour- Adam Charles Hart est professeur adjoint at- nal of Cities and Culture. taché au département d’études du film à l’univer- sité de Pittsburgh. Son livre Monstrous Forms: Fraser McCallum is an interdisciplinary artist Moving-Image Horror Across Media va être pub- living and working in Toronto, on the tradition- lié à Oxford University Press. Ses recherches ont al territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit paru dans The New Review of Film and Televi- River, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Mé- sion et A Companion to Horror Films (Wiley, tis peoples. He holds a Master of Visual Studies 2014), d’autres articles vont paraître dans le Jour- from the University of Toronto and was a recent nal of Cinema and Media Stories et Discourse. participant in Demos: Life in Common at the Banff Centre (2015) and the Curatorial Incubator CONTRIBUTORS

at Vtape (2013). His work has been exhibited at Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, et du Johns The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Hopkins Guide to Theory. Modern Fuel, Xpace Cultural Centre, and wide- ly in Toronto. Fraser’s work has been supported Kaitlin Pomerantz is a visual artist, writer and by the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts educator based in Philadelphia. Her interdisci- Council. plinary work explores transitional landscape, land use, and the relationship between humans Fraser McCallum est un artiste interdisciplin- and nature. Pomerantz has recently participated aire qui vit et travaille à Toronto, sur les terri- in place-based residencies including Land Arts toires traditionnels des peuples Mississaugas de of the American West (Texas and South West la Credit River, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee USA), Cabin Time (Sierra Nevadas) and Lugo et Métis. Il détient un diplôme de maîtrise en Land (Lugo, Italy). She has most recently shown arts visuels de l’Université de Toronto et a réce- work at Sierra Nevada College, Nevada; Texas mment participé à Demos: Life in Common au Tech Museum, Lubbock, Texas; Fjord Gallery Banff Centre (2015) et au Curatorial Incubator and Little Berlin, Philadelphia. Pomerantz was à Vtape (2013). Ses oeuvres ont été exposées au part of Philadelphia’s public art festival, Mon- Musée d’Art de l’Université de Toronto, au cen- ument Lab, for which she did a project about tres culturels Modern Fuel, Xpace, et dans de stoops. Pomerantz is co-facilitator of the botan- nombreux autres endroits à Toronto. Le travail ical arts project, WE THE WEEDS and an edi- de Faser est financé par le Conseil des Arts de tor at Title Magazine. She received her BA in art l’Ontario et le Conseil des Arts de Toronto. history from University of Chicago, a post-bac- calaureate certificate in painting from Pafa, and Andrew Pendakis is an Associate Professor of her MFA in interdisciplinary visual art from Theory and Rhetoric at Brock University and a University of Pennsylvania. She has taught and Research Fellow at the Shanghai University of lectured at Pafa, Moore College of Art, Universi- Finance and Economics. His essays on topics ty of Pennsylvania and Haverford College. ranging from dialectics to plastics have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Jacobin, Third Text, Kaitlin Pomerantz est artiste visuelle, auteure, et E-Flux, Critical Inquiry, and other journals. He éducatrice basée à Philapdelphie. Son travail in- is also a co-editor of Contemporary Marxist The- terdisciplinaire explore le paysage traditionnel, ory: A Reader, The Bloomsbury Companion to l’utilisation du terrain et la relation entre les hu- Marx, and the John Hopkins Guide to Theory. mains et la nature. Pomerantz a récemment par- ticipé à des résidences sur site tels que Land Arts Andrew Pendakis est professeur agrégé de of the American West (au Texas et dans le sud- Théorie et de Réthorique à Brock University ouest des Etats-Unis), Cabin Time (Sierra Neva- ainsi que membre de l’Université de finances da), et Lugo Land (à Lugo en Italie). Plus récem- et d’économie de Shangaï. Ses essais sur des su- ment elle a exposé des oeuvres au Sierra Nevada jets allant de la dialectique au plastique ont paru College dans le Nevada, au Texas Tech Museum dans South Atlantic Quarterly, Jacobin, Third de Lubbock au Texas, à la Fjord Gallery et à Lit- Text, E-Flux, Critical Inquiry et autres jour- tle Berlin à Philadelphie. Pomerantz a fait part- naux académiques. Il est également co-éditeur ie du Monument Lab au festival d’art public de de Contemporary Marxist Theory: A reader, The Philadelphie pour lequel elle a réalisé un projet

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sur les vérandas. Pomerantz est co-animatrice Colin Williamson is an Assistant Professor du projet d’art botanique, WE THE WEED et of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University éditrice à Title Magazine. Elle a reçu sa license (NYC). His research focuses on animation and en histoire de l’art à l’Université de Chicago, un special effects, early cinema, media archaeolo- certificat post-baccalauréat en peinture de Pafa gy, film theory, and nonfiction film. He is the et son MFA en art visuel interdisciplinaire de author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeolo- l’Université de Pennsylvanie. Elle a enseigné et gy of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University donné des conférences à Pafa, au Moore College Press, 2015), and has published articles and es- of Art, à l’Université de Pennsylvanie et à Haver- says in such edited collections and journals as ford College. Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (Rutgers University Press, 2016), animation: an Seb Roberts is a composer and sound engineer interdisciplinary journal, Leonardo, Journal of based in Toronto, Canada. He is currently com- Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and The Moving pleting his MA studies at York University’s Hu- Image. manities Department. In November of 2018, his improvisation duo with Juliana Pivato, Pri- Colin Williamson est professeur adjoint d’études vate Robots, will release their debut album, Po- du film et de l’écran à Pace University (NYC). Sa ets Barrio TV, on Montréal’s Squint ______recherche se concentre sur l’animation, les effets Press. spéciaux, les débuts du cinéma, l’archéologie des média, la théorie du film, et le film de non-fic- Seb Roberts est un compositeur et ingénieur du tion. Il est l’auteur de Hidden in Plain Sight: An son basé à Toronto au Canada. Il termine actu- Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers ellement ses études de maîtrise au départment University Press, 2015) et il a publié des articles des humanités à York University. En novembre et des essais dans des collections et journaux 2018, son duo d’improvisation avec Juliana Piva- académiques tels que Thinking in the Dark: Cin- to, “Private Robots”, sortira son premier album, ema, Theory, Practice (Rutgers University Press, Poet Barrio TV, chez Squiint ______Press de 2016), Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Montréal. Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Tech- nology et The Moving Image.

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