Cold Storage a Media History of the Glacier by Alexandra H. Bush A
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Cold Storage A Media History of the Glacier By Alexandra H. Bush A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Anton Kaes, Chair Professor Jacob Gaboury Professor Deniz Göktürk Professor Kristen Whissel Spring 2019 Abstract Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier by Alexandra H. Bush Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Anton Kaes, Chair This dissertation consists of five chapters in two parts. In the first part, I argue that in the early 20th century (1910-32), moving images and communications technologies like the radio and telegraph functioned to bring glacial environments into historical thought, breaking with a popular understanding of nature as eternal or cyclical. In order to do so, I draw on four case studies: two documentaries of early Antarctic exploration in Chapter One (The Great White Silence (1924) and With Byrd at the South Pole (1930)), and two exemplars of the interwar German Bergfilm in Chapter Two (Avalanche (1930) and SOS Iceberg (1933)). In each chapter, the films are read in conversation with archival sources found through original research. Taking up theories of modernity from cinema studies, I contend that like film itself, glacial temporality is characterized by radical contingency, as well as a tension between stillness and motion, the animate and the inanimate. Even as media technologies helped to reframe notions of cryospheric time, they were also encouraging an important shift in the spatial terms in which glacial regions were understood. Rather than geographically isolated, icebergs and ice caps appear in films & journalism of this period as part of an interconnected global environment. They must thus be understood not as distinct from, but as part of, broader developments in notions of space and time in the early twentieth century. In the dissertation’s second part, which focuses on twenty-first century cinema and digital media, I analyze the glacier itself as an archive of climate history. I begin my discussions of the archive with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which I read as a media archive that poses important questions about the methodological distinctions and overlaps between history and science. I then turn to questions of automated vision and temporal manipulation in Chasing Ice (2012), which makes dramatic use of time-lapse videos of glacial recession to provide visual evidence of global warming. Whereas the ice is often seen as a tool for preservation, guaranteeing the long life of that which it encases, Chasing Ice dramatizes its vulnerability to epochal change, thus invoking anxiety over historical loss that informs discourses of environmental crisis. In my last chapter, taking up various modes of data visualization that draw on information extracted from ice cores to access the deep past, I draw out this tension between the preservational and precarious in the nature of ice. I argue that the glacier both resembles other 1 archival media in its capacity to preserve and index records of bygone events, and differs in its status as both a representation and a presentation of climate conditions, one whose loss threatens not only environmental but also informational devastation. The glacier thus operates as a medium in at least two senses: as an archive of the deep climatic past, but also as a visible index of presently changing conditions (and thereby an augury of the future). Ultimately, I argue that the competing logics of glacial temporality and indexicality—its dual status as an accumulation of records and a record of depletion—puts historical thought into an impossible bind, forcing us to contemplate the devastating internal contradictions of a historicist epistemology. 2 for my families i Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6 Introduction: A Clash of Titans: A Ship, an Iceberg, and the Historicity of Nature……………. 7 Part I. Stillness in Motion Chapter One. “All is movement and change.” Cinema, Wireless Technology, and the Reconfiguration of Antarctic Space……………………………………………………………………………….. 22 Chapter 2. Moving Mountains: Glacial Contingency and Modernity in the Bergfilm……......... 69 Part II. A Future Without History Chapter 3. The Antarctic An-Archive: Encountering History at the End of the World........... 106 Chapter 4. Scaling Sight: Time-Lapse, Glacial Death, and Historical Loss in Chasing Ice……… 144 Chapter 5. A Future Without History: The Glacier as Archive, Weathervane, and Catastrophic Oracle…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 179 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 211 ii Acknowledgements The myth that research and writing are solitary endeavors has been pretty well debunked by now, but the truth bears re-emphasizing. As a deeply social thinker, I have benefitted over the course of this project from exchanges with more people than I could possibly name in any acknowledgements section, so I will start by apologizing to, and thanking, those I have left out. With that said, there are a number of people without whom this dissertation, and its author, simply would not exist in their current form. To begin at my beginning: every person should be so lucky as to have the kind of unfailing support that I have received from my parents, brother and sister-in-law, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Bush, Hudgins, Sterling, Moore: you are exemplary, and I love you. Thank you for never doubting for a second whether I could do this. I am fortunate to count myself part of several families alongside this originary biological one. My intellectual family, at Berkeley and beyond, has been a dream. Hannah Airriess, your mind is a shooting star that illuminates wondrous surprises in everything it races by. Lisa Jacobson, you are a rock, your curiosity as inspiring as your generous spirit. Diana Ruíz, your strength is matched only by the originality of your questioning, the depth of your kindness. Jennifer Blaylock, your rigor and integrity are a source of constant admiration. Dolores McElroy, no one should have to go through graduate school without experiencing your incisive wit and sparkling charm. Maggie Hennefeld, Nicholas Baer, Patrick Ellis, Robert Alford, I’d never have found my way through this process without your peer mentorship. Thank you for helping to make this field my home. This dissertation was shepherded along by a committee of unparalleled generosity. Anton Kaes, Kristen Whissel, Deniz Göktürk and Jacob Gaboury: thank you for treating me like your colleague as much as your student, for knowing when to push and when to encourage, and for consistently making me feel both that I am doing good work, and that it can always be better. Beyond my committee, I owe thanks to Weihong Bao, Mary Ann Doane, Anikó Imre, Anne Nesbet, Dan O’Neill, Mark Sandberg, and Linda Williams, all of whom have played a crucial role in my development as a scholar. Thank you for setting such a high standard; I will look up to you always. To my writing family: Joe Albernaz, Emily Laskin, Isobel Palmer, my fellow travelers, this dissertation is yours as much as it is mine. You are on every page, and I am honored to carry with me the lessons I learned from you. This section would never be complete without acknowledging my union family: Emily Breuninger, Caroline Lemak Brickman, Alli Carlisle, Maggie Downey, Tom Hintze, Kavitha Iyengar, Marissa Ochsner, Eric Peterson, Garrett Shishido Strain. It is a difficult moment for public higher education in the United States. I still believe this is a career worth pursuing, if not by me, but only because you have convinced me that we can change this world into the one we know it should be. Thank you for keeping the public dream alive. Finally, my family at home: thank you, Benjamin Adams, for everything you did for me. It would have been much harder without you. This dissertation was completed with funding from the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, to whom I extend gratitude for their continued support of humanistic inquiry, without which we would all be very much the worse for wear. iii Introduction A Clash of Titans: A Ship, an Iceberg, and the Historicity of Nature Shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, the largest ocean liner ever constructed was sliced open like a can of sardines by a massive iceberg and sent, along with over 1500 passengers, to a watery grave. The event’s symbolic import was immediately apparent: already in the weeks following the disaster, the sinking of the Titanic became emblematic of human hubris and nature’s power, the tremendous risks of speed, and the material vulnerabilities of modern technology to natural forces. In a thorough account that covered several full pages two weeks after the ship’s demise, a writer for The New York Times mused, “those who would moralize over the great ship’s loss can see in such a meeting [between ship and iceberg] the hand of Fate, which required the greatest example of man’s handiwork afloat on the sea to point its protest against his ambition.”1 For all the investigatory work done in the aftermath of the catastrophe to determine who bore responsibility and how such a calamity might be prevented in the future, the popular interpretation of events evidenced a remarkable note of fatality. The sense of the disaster’s inevitability arose in part from a conceptualization of nature as a vengeful deity, troubled by human overreach, which must intervene to demonstrate its dominance in an eternal contest of wills. This tragic narrative could hardly help but inspire dramatic re-enactments in what was rapidly becoming the preeminent entertainment form of the urbanized West that was rocked by the Titanic’s loss.