The essay examines Stanwyck’s dedication to her craft, which often led her to endure injuries and physical demands, reflecting the invisible labor behind her iconic roles. By compiling decades of her performances, the analysis traces patterns in her star image and her nuanced relationship with horses as both a narrative device and a personal passion.
Catherine Russell picks up a thread from her groundbreaking Experimental Ethnography to return to her favorite avant-garde mode of filmmaking to learn how to navigate Amazonia in sounds and images by offering a reading of Lothar Baumgartner’s film Origin of the Night (Amazon Cosmos) (1978) and Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Russell investigates how Amazon cinema is not only a primal scene of first contact narratives but also a visual spectacle, a physical and technical challenge, and a spatially disorienting experience for filmmakers and spectators alike.
Originally published in Cineaste Magazine,
“Whose Violence Is It?” is
Edited Books and Journals Journal
Walter Benjamin was a prolific writer, whose corpus spans a wide range of genres, from philosophy, to criticism, to autobiography. A small cottage industry has developed around Benjamin’s extensive writing, producing an ongoing stream of interpretations, applications, and contextualizations. A host of different “Benjamins” have arisen, depending on the great variety of analytical frameworks and disciplinary concerns. Benjamin’s difficult life in interwar Europe as a nomadic character on the fringes of so many cultural circles is very much part of his philosophy, and cannot be entirely separated from his critical theory. Benjamin worked on the edge of a political precipice, and adapted methodologies from a wide range of cultural currents, expressing himself eloquently in French and German, providing a significant challenge to his English translators. He challenges the film critic and media analyst to craft new avenues of interpretation in order to recognize the utopian within the ideological, and to illuminate the lost promises of technological modernity.
Filmmakers have been raiding the archive for decades, making new work out of old. The aesthetics of this practice are extremely varied, and have undergone several phases of revision with new technologies and new artistic practices, not to mention different archival sources. In this class we will survey the history of this practice as it has evolved since the 1950s, and into the digital era.
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