Abstract

Due to recent developments in digital video technologies, film scholars can now “write” using the very materials that consitute their object of study — moving images and sounds. But using these new technologies to present scholarship demands a rethinking of the forms of criticism that have dominated film studies to this point. This joint submission — by Christian Keathley (Middlebury College) and Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida) — proposes a site, La Camera-stylo, facilitated by Media Commons, for cinema scholars to present work that experiments with these new technolgoies and with a revised rhetoric for the presentation of film scholarship.

Full Proposal

This proposal is a joint submission by Christian Keathley (Middlebury College) and Craig Cieslikowski (Univeristy of Florida).

In his seminal 1948 manifesto, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo,” film critic Alexandre Astruc wrote, “The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, … a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary novel or essay. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo (camera-pen).”

This declaration stimulated a new generation of filmmakers – notably, those of the French New Wave – to an unprecedented level of creative work. But to the extent that filmmakers responded to Astruc’s manifesto, they expanded on cinema’s already established analogy with the novel, and (with a few exceptions) largely ignored Astruc’s other possibility — the essay. As a result, the essay has remained the province of writers.

Now, over 50 years later, due to developments in digital video technology, film scholars find themselves in a position to respond to Astruc’s call. For scholars can now “write” using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds. To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, film scholars can now answer images not only with words, but with other images. It is time to respond to Astruc’s call, (re)imagining film scholarship as an audio-visual rather than a literary medium.

In The DVD Revolution, Aaron Barlow wrote recently, “It is in the presentation of scholarship … that [digital video] technology may have the most to offer, for here it can resolve one of the greatest frustrations that has faced film scholars: how does one write about film without using film?” Many traditional film scholars, however, are wary of the new technologies, and their reticence risks having negative effects on our discipline.

In a recent Cinema Journal symposium, “The Crisis in Publishing,” one university press editor wrote “The real problem with film studies and some other fields is that they have gone stale – like a certain filmmaker [Woody Allen]. When was the last time you or I ran off to a theater to see one of his latest ventures?” Similarly, when was the last time we ran to the book store flushed with excitement to buy a new book of film scholarship? But the problem is less with the quality of much contemporary scholarship than with its presentation – both rhetorically and technologically.

The great challenge is not simply in learning how to use these new technologies, but imagining how to use them in new (rather than old) ways. These new technologies challenge us to invent new forms of criticism. Despite the extraordinary multi-media possibilities offered by digital technologies, the results of scholarly engagement with computers, the internet, and video has been, for the most part, quite conservative. For example, on-line journals, whose numbers have increased exponentially in the past decade, too often simply reproduce the print journal’s form and content. How can we invent new possibilities?

The theoretical tradition known as grammatology maintains that a culture’s means of recording, storing, and retrieving information change as new technologies for those purposes are developed. More specifically, certain conceptual practices – what we might loosely but accurately call “thinking” – derive from, and depend on, a culture’s dominant modes of storing and expressing knowledge. For example, as theorists Jack Goody and Walter Ong have argued, the transition from an oral culture to an alphabetic or “literate” culture gave rise to critical/analytical thinking, and to the essay form as the appropriate means for the transmission of knowledge arrived at through this process. As we make the transition into an electronic culture, the literate mode of thinking and its attendant forms will be supplemented by new modes, developed as extensions of the digital electronic apparatus. How will “knowledge” and “understanding” change in this new era? Gregory Ulmer, a leading theorist on electronic culture, has summoned humanities scholars to engage with these new technologies and to invent the new discursive forms demanded by technological change.

For the film scholar, this form – the video essay – would use not only the traditional essay’s literate modes of argumentation and analysis, but would also engage with those elements that make the cinema itself so powerful: evocative, mysterious images and sounds that are not easily reducible to language, and stories that enchant even when they do not necessarily instruct. In addition to employing images and sounds, the video essay will employ a discourse that is poetic as well as explanatory. The video essay will demonstrate that scholarship can itself adopt cinema’s alluring poetics, without abandoning the traditional essay form’s knowledge effect.

We propose a site — La Camera-stylo — facilitated by Media Commons, that will be a venue for film scholars to present research produced in a video format. The emphasis will be on short form videos that explore some element of the cinematic experience that lends itself particularly well to the combined hermeneutic and poetic possibilities of audio-visual presentation. We will begin by posting 4-6 such videos ourselves, and we will invite other scholars to submit work for review and possible posting in a video gallery.

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